Ross presents three more reasons to prove that the belief that the USA and Canada are becoming a Third World country is a societal myth.
1. Prosperity Index is high
Legatum, an organization that has a prosperity index. And they ranked by categories of economy, entrepreneurship, and opportunity, governance (where New Zealand is 2nd), education (Australia was 1st), health (the USA was 1st) despite all the changes in the last eight years that have been so commented on.
They have Safety and Security and the USA is an anomaly there, which we look at in a minute, at 33rd; Personal Freedom, Canada is 1st; Social capital, New Zealand is 1st in that ranking.
And so, the rank of countries there, Norway, Switzerland again at the top; New Zealand-4; Canada-6; Australia-7; US-11 and that’s primarily because of the Safety and Security number; UK-15.
And if we look at that, the green is at the top of the indexes across all the indexes there and of course, the USA showing up of that anomaly are in Safety and Security.
And of course, anybody in the US can turn on their news any night and hear about that as can us in the rest of the world. And that’s really for the US, the only anomaly in terms of all those factors. All the rest are pretty high and pretty good.
2. High Global Middle-Class income
If we look at Global Middle Class, annual disposable income per household (this is from the Economist) and so we have Canada-1st, USA-2nd, this is big economies; Australia-3rd; UK a bit further down.
Russia, China, India lot further down and New Zealand would be just a little bit around about Australia and the UK where we’re too small for this particular graphic.
And so, again whilst you hear lots of information on the internet and the news about how terrible things are for the Canadian and American, middle class in global terms are doing pretty well in terms of GDP, purchasing power per capita information.
3. Satisfactory Social Progress Index
Social progress index. In this particular index, I think it was designed particularly to make the US look bad. And so if you look at the slide, there are three dots there:
- The blue dot is around basic human needs.
- The brown dot, foundations of wellbeing.
- The green dot is about the opportunity.
I put the link in there if you want to dig in a little bit more. New Zealand is 5 on that, Canada 6, Australia 10, UK 11, USA 16 and that’s with the USA has some income disparities across the spectrum.
Even with an index probably stacked against the US, they are still number 16.
I could pull out stuff like that all day. That’s just a small sampling. And essentially, Australia, New Zealand, UK, US, Canada, all in the top 15, often in the top 10 in any sort of these indexes.
And then your Nordic countries, your North European and Swiss make up the bulk of them. If you’re paying attention there obviously, Germany and the Netherlands also are doing pretty well as some of those indexes as well.
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