All these lists are great but as someone who comes from a place that has no respect for free thinking and the right to free expression, the only indicator that matters to me personally is a "freedom of speech index".
Peace doesn't mean much if it's enforced by the collective to silence the individual through the threat of violence.
Let's not forget that Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi led their Nations with greater "peace" than their successors.
It would be great to have the composing variables available, i.e. uncompressed into a single number.
I wanted to play around with multidimensional data about global trends like these for a while now, but looking up all that data can be a drag, if possible at all.
Of course those are still just single numbers aggregated from many different factors. However, the sources for those factors are named and are in many cases available online (although sometimes paywalled, or offering no convenient download functionality).
I am a liberal-minded man that live in a Russian provincial city and witness low crime rates and non-existent internal conflicts yet we seat below Pakistan. I think this rating can be safely considered trash
It's not useful for anything other than macroscopic consideration.
We rank order countries by a single aggregate metric all the time. It seems clear that one number is going to tell you very little about a given country's individual cities.
The index is not about how safe or peaceful it is to live inside the country. It is about "the extent to which countries are involved in ongoing domestic and international conflicts"
Your country has attacked Georgia in 2008, invaded Ukraine in 2014, participated in the Syrian civil war in 2015. You could get drafted and sent to war.
For a decade or so I've had this semi-joke of curating "The League of Reasonable Nations." I add and remove countries over time. It's a subjective categorization of countries that I find to be "reasonable".
It's interesting that these countries repeatedly show up in lists together, like GPI. I think it has to do with my own biases + liberalism + development + peacefulness.
That’s really interesting! I’ve been also noticing a similar pattern myself, in which such a list seems to be comprised of pretty much most of Western Europe, AUS+NZ and some other northern, semi-European (as a way of speaking) countries e.g. Canada and Iceland.
Another, half-joking way of looking at it would be ‘countries that do not present a significant immigration towards the US’
