I doubt that most Americans comprehend what is living in a well managed citizens-first country were people are represented and many laws are passed just because the working class wants them.
If you compare the USA with the worst places on earth, then it is a good place. I hope that Americans aim higher and want to compare themselves with the best places to live in the world.
That is true. I hope that people sees my comment as a push to do better, not a reason to give up. Things are never perfect, anywhere. And that's why we should continue pushing for more equality, defending the environment and making better the live of working class people.
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.
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)
https://data.worldhappiness.report/table
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.