I usually compare the US to Switzerland. I live in Boston, but was born in Lugano (southern tip of Switzerland).
Switzerland has an excellent quality of life, far better education system, remarkable stability, and amazingly good healthcare. The companies pay people well, give them adequate time off, and has 16+ weeks of maternity leave.
There are some pretty significant downsides in Switzerland, too. It's highly conservative, hard to make friends with the Swiss, and fairly expensive, depending on where you live.
We live in Boston because of family. It's a decent enough place to live, and from my perspective, just about the closest that the US gets to Europe.
Denmark's been in the top 3 of the "World Happiness Report" since the report started, the rest of the Nordic countries are always near the top of the list, too. Finland has been ranked the happiest country in the world 9 years running.
That seems like a good place to start looking.
(commissioned by the UN, polls are run by Gallup, report is put out by Oxford, and the editorial board is multinational and doesn't have any Nordic nationals; seems reasonably unbiased to me)
It wasn't easy for me to interpret these rankings though, or how they came up with the life evaluation score. More explanation around that would have been helpful. The column headers have hover-descriptions, but they don't really say how the values were calculated.
Anyway - it does seem that Scandinavian countries are well represented at the top. That's not too surprising. Costa Rica at #4 is very unintuitive to me. Viet Nam at #1 for freedom is REALLY surprising to me, having visited there a number of times and having many Vietnamese friends. Likewise, The United States at 104 on freedom seems very weird.
