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Comment by seizethecheese | Hacker News Reader

This is a silly metric, it weights every country the same. Any other weight would work better (population, GDP, etc)

I wanted to do an analysis (but lacked a quality dataset or time/willingness to prepare one) that coded mobility differently.

First off, I'd weight countries that grant visa-free access to relatively few other countries (e.g., China, USA, ECOWAS) more than countries that are comparatively more lenient (e.g. countries like Samoa, Tuvalu that grant visa-free access to everyone).

Secondly, I'd additionally weight for residency mobility - the ability to work and live in another country with few conditions (e.g. Schengen area, Common Travel Area, Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement, MERCOSUR, ECOWAS, CARICOM, Freedom of movement in the Gulf States). Countries like Canada, Japan and Singapore may score well on paper for travel mobility, but are definitely weaker than EU passports that allow you to migrate to where jobs are and improve your own economic outcomes.

Really you want to weight by tourism desirability. The Maldives, Jamaica, Croatia, Iceland, Fiji should rate more highly than India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria despite having a tiny fraction of the population.

At the risk of making it more complicated than it's worth, you really need multiple indexes. Population and GDP are possible metrics, but they still don't capture everything. If we take universities as an example there's an absolute rank, but then there's also a rank within sub-colleges to tell us that while Harvard is a high ranking university, it's comparatively much more renowned for law than for computer science.

Doesn’t really matter as it is in relation to what it used to good for.

> Doesn’t really matter as it is in relation to what it used to good for.

If you read the actual article, it seems a US passport is about as good as it always was. It seems like much of the change is various countries expanding visa free travel, just not to Americans. Before when I went to China or Vietnam, I had to get a visa. Now with this change in ranking...I still have to get a visa.

The top list would be all EU countries since not only they can travel almost anywhere, but they have the right to live and work in 20+ other rich countries.

Why is he being downvoted??? He’s right. Do you care more about China or Barbados? Clearly some countries are much more important than others, and it is fairly easy to make a decent ranking of importance (even if the exact ranking will vary from person to person)

> Do you care more about China or Barbados?

What if I do? Is this index only for US citizens to make use of?

> Clearly some countries are much more important than others, and it is fairly easy to make a decent ranking of importance

"Important" in this way? At least by the current methodology, it's fairly bias-free, which if you add "Countries that are more important than others weight more" to the mix you cannot call it bias-free anymore.

Counting each country equally is itself a bias -- it slides the weighting 100% towards international recognition of a country. As a result, Somalia and Morocco are weighted equally, which is obviously incorrect; nobody is upset if they can't go to Somalia. A common-sense weighting would be imperfect, but almost certainly better than an equal weighting on each county. "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good".

edit: it _SHOULD NOT MATTER_, but I grew up in Turkey, am half Persian, and am very liberal. If that matters to you, please think good and hard about what kind of person you have become.

It's close, but the existence or not of some countries is sometimes disputed.

China absolutely is interesting to a lot of people. Both from a business perspective and for tourism. It's a country with several thousand years of history, after all.

It's funny you took it that way, I took it as dismissive at Barbados for being smaller, and it's not clear which one was actually intended.

Lol ya, I meant that easy access to China is much more important than easy access to Barbados. No shade at Barbados, I just think there are 100x more people that would go to China than Barbados

edit: here's the number of US visitors to each country in 2018 (the easiest year for me to find data on). This isn't a perfect comparison, because the amount of visitors will of course depend on the visa situation for each country, but it does give some feeling for how useful increased access would be

Barbados in 2018 had 204,830 US visitors -- https://www.caribjournal.com/2019/03/11/american-travelers-a...

China in 2018 had 2,485,000 US visitors (but this may be padded by the state media) -- https://gowithguide.com/blog/exploring-china-s-tourism-lands...

So China attracted approx 10x more US visitors, even though in 2018 it was much easier for Americans to go to Barbados than China. And I bet that gap has only grown in the last 7 years.

Do you usually take those into account when planing trips?

yes?

"I'll go to India for my vacation! Sure, the beaches aren't anything like the Caribbeans, but you gotta realize: it's got WAY more people."

The beaches in the Andamans (near Thailand) and Lakshadweep (geologically part of the Maldives) can hold their own against any Caribbean beach.

https://www.eternalandamans.com/havelock-island/radhanagar-b...

https://www.gokitetours.com/top-beaches-in-lakshadweep-you-m...

India is a great place for a vacation, if you want to visit the historical sites and not just vegetate on a beach.

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