<<<mumble>>> The World's Best Countries... <<<grumble>>>

Wonder if that place in S.F even knows what smörgåsbord should look like.
This is just one side of the table
http://www.kssb.org/bilder/Ralings%C3%A5s/julbord5-web.jpg

Yes, they call it a buffet, as do we, more often than not.

We Swedes have buffets too, but that is not the same as a smörgåsbord.
Smörgåsbord you see very seldom now a days - mostly in December and that is called Julbord.

A telling comment:

They Avoid War.


Something we may never learn.

I was not surprised that the Scandinavian countries were at the top of the list.

In 1968, I took Butrflynet and her brother to visit Sweden and Denmark. I fell in love with these two countries and their people. I was a popular with the young men because, while there, I bought a Saab Sonett, which was built in Sweden for export and was not available in Sweden. I drove the Saab throughout Sweden and every time I stopped at a gas station or a store, the young men would crowd around my car. I would let them look under the hood, etc. They would blow me kisses as I left them.

Photo:
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.seriouswheels.com/pics-1960-1969/1968-Saab-Sonett-V4-red-fa-lr.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.seriouswheels.com/1960-1969/1968-Saab-Sonett-V4-Red-FA.htm&h=619&w=1000&sz=267&tbnid=qVy5gRE1kkiSoM:&tbnh=92&tbnw=149&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dsaab%2Bsonette&zoom=1&hl=en&usg=__TObSPkjpnbnIemdGgLpqOCsqwMk=&sa=X&ei=eGRtTKaTGY-isQPZz5SqCw&sqi=2&ved=0CBoQ9QEwAQ

Sweden has the most beautiful forests and farmlands and they are maintained perfectly as if they were your front yard.

The food was great. but we arrived during unusually hot August weather. The heat and the salty food caused my body to swell up like a balloon. The waiters couldn't understand why I was constantly asking for water instead of the local beers. I was taken to a clinic for treatment. I paid ten dollars for the treatment, and was astonished at the low cost and fast treatment everyone receives.

At the time, I was on the board of directors of one of the largest consumer operatives in the U.S. I visited with the staffs in several stores and marveled at the large numbers of them in Sweden and their share of the economics.

We were invited into several private homes for dinner. It was fun trying to communicate when we didn't speak the same language, but we managed to have a great time.

We took a ferry across the channel to Denmark and had a great time, including visiting Hamlet's Elsinore Castle and Fredericksborg castle. My children loved Tivoli park in Copenhagen. The Danes are a jolly bunch.

My favorite food discovery in Sweden was cloudberries, which is very hard to get in the U.S. but can be ordered on the Internet.

http://www.swedensbest.com/cloudberries.html?gclid=CNWyh6-KxqMCFQ4EiQodxEXJZw

BBB

Swedish Food
Mar 26, 1999 - © James Dixon

The flavours of Swedish food are set apart from other cuisines by its use of berries - blackberries, cloudberries (orange coloured sweet berries from the marshes of Lapland) and lingonberries (similar to cranberries) - dill, juniper, parsley, mustard, and a lot of sugar. In the north you will find reindeer, elk and venison on the menu, but salt water fish is more common on the Baltic coast and in the Gulf of Bothain.

Smörgåsbord, meaning "open sandwich," is the centrepiece of Swedish cuisine. During the eighteenth century it was served as a hors d'oeuvres, but it has gradually become a meal in itself. It can start with marinated herrings, salmon, eel (jellied, marinated, or smoked over hay - halmad), turkey, grouse, duck, pigeon or quail, stuffed with truffles or morels; and cold meats - smoked reindeer, elk and beef. Then hot dishes can be served such as meatballs, belly pork, poached pigs' trotters, ling, a dried fish which is rehydrated, then cooked and served with a mustard sauce, and Jansson's temptation, sliced herring, potatoes and onions baked in cream. Salads and pickles, bread and knackerbrod (crispbread) are served as accompaniments.

A typical Swedish meal may start with sill tallrik, marinated herrings, gravadlax, salmon cured in salt, sugar, crushed white peppercorns and dill and served with hovmästarås, a dill mustard sauce, kjälknöl, slow cooked venison steak marinated in water, salt, sugar and crushed juniper berries, sliced very finely, or Nässelsoppa, nettle soup; traditionally served with hard-boiled eggs.

This might be followed by köttbullar, meatballs, ren stek, fillet of reindeer (akin to beef but with virtually no fat), or laxpudding, layers of gravadlax, dill, onion and sliced potatoes baked in a peppery white sauce.

For desert you might be lucky enough to sample saffrans pannkaka, a thick pancake made with flaked rice and cream, flavoured with saffron, honey, almonds, raisins, cinnamon, cardamom and vanilla. Or perhaps Lingon kokta päron, pears poached in lingonberry preserve, red wine, cinnamon, and cloves.

The Swedish prefer to drink beer, and clear apple and pear ciders rather than wine with their food. Chilled schnapps is served with fatty food such as herrings, and aquavits are come ice-cold with starters. Vodkas are flavoured with blackberries, lemon, lime and coriander; and Swedish punsch (a mix of rum and arrack - a rum like liqueur) is served warm with pea and ham soup, or chilled as a digestive.

To find out more about Swedish food visit The Santesson Recipe Collection.

Read more at Suite101: Swedish Food http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/european_food/17521#ixzz0x4UutgYJ

Wonderfully told and absolutely correct. Made me hungry just to read it and it is 21.22 pm

bbb

You're making me hungry for the food of Sweden again. I love reindeer. Can't get it here, for some reason! Have to make do with kangaroo - kind of similar - but not the same

I really had to see which country was considered to be no 1.

And the winner is ...

Finland!

(& why not? )


<clap, clap, clap!>

Norway is number 1 on quality of life, which I take to mean we think we are the best

33rd place on education. We are dumber than 1 third of the included peoples, and still we rank in the top ten overall... Ignorance is bliss....

How Newsweek Ranked the World
Forget the world cup, the Olympics, even the miss universe pageant. These are the globe’s true national champions.

NEWSWEEK's list of the world's best countries.
Infographic of the World's Best Countries

Warren Buffett likes to say that anything good that’s ever happened to him can be traced back to the fact that he was born in the right country—America—at the right time. And it’s true: while remarkable individuals can be found in any nation on earth, certain countries give their citizens much greater opportunity to succeed than others at certain points in time. It’s an issue that is particularly pressing today. As wealth and power shift from West to East, and a new post-crisis world order continues to take shape, it’s no longer clear that being born and raised in Omaha offers quite the edge that it once might have.

In NEWSWEEK’s first-ever Best Countries special issue, we set out to answer a question that is at once simple and incredibly complex—if you were born today, which country would provide you the very best opportunity to live a healthy, safe, reasonably prosperous, and upwardly mobile life? Many organizations measure various aspects of national competitiveness. But none attempt to put them all together. For this special survey, then, NEWSWEEK chose five categories of national well-being—education, health, quality of life, economic competitiveness, and political environment—and compiled metrics within these categories across 100 nations. A weighted formula yielded an overall list of the world’s top 100 countries (for a look at the exact data points we used and how we weighted them, as well as how each country did across the various categories, check out newsweek.com).

The effort took several months, during which we received copious aid from an advisory board that included Nobel laureate and Columbia University professor Joseph E. Stiglitz; McKinsey & Co. Social Sector Office director Byron Auguste; McKinsey Global Institute director James Manyika; Jody Heymann, the founding director of McGill University’s Institute for Health and Social Policy and a professor at the university; and Geng Xiao, director of Columbia's Global Center for East Asia.

They would be the first to admit that like any list, this one isn’t perfect. Finding comparable data points for the world’s richest and poorest countries alike was hugely constraining—often we had to choose fewer or less-nuanced metrics in order to include the broadest array of nations. What’s more, our list represents a snapshot of how countries looked in 2008 and 2009 (we always used the most recent data available for each metric), rather than a historic or predictive view—a country like Thailand or Kenya, for example, may have scored higher on political stability two years ago than it would today. Careful readers will notice that while some of the effects of the financial crisis can already be seen in our list, others are still playing out. (Rich but indebted countries like the U.S. and the U.K. may pay a price for their massive deficits in the future.) It’s also important to remember that rankings are perhaps most illustrative when comparing countries of equal size and wealth—which is why we broke down our main group of 100 into smaller sublists based on population and income.

All that said, the list tells us some important things about the world. For starters, smaller is often better. While there’s no denying the vitality of emerging-market giants like China or Brazil or Turkey, they are often bested by tiny nations like Slovenia or Estonia, according to the data, simply because it takes less effort for these countries to improve their overall levels of well-being. (China may be the world’s second-largest economy, but more than half of its 1.3 billion population still lives in grinding poverty.) Of course, being small and rich is best—witness the continuing success of the Nordic nations. A good, broad-based educational system is crucial—it’s very closely linked to future economic prosperity, and one of the most important reasons that the U.S., Western Europe, and rich Asian nations like South Korea and Japan score well.

Throughout this package, we’ll dig more deeply into what makes a country great, and deconstruct how and why certain countries rose to the top of our lists. But perhaps the most important thing that this exercise has reinforced is that there is no one model for national success; any conventional wisdom that says Beijing or Brasília now has the answer, rather than Washington, is wrong. The winners are quite a varied group, and have found myriad ways to create vibrant, healthy, and (dare we say) happy societies. That’s a nugget of wisdom that leaders and policymakers would do well to keep in mind as they try to score better in years ahead.

It’s Just What the Doctor Ordered
Japan shows how it’s done: keep quality up, costs down, and M.D.s on board.
Michael S. Yamashita / Corbis

The best countries in the world, by category
Best Countries in the World

To gauge a health-care system’s success, it’s standard to consider three points: quality, coverage, and cost. On all three measures, Japan stands at or near the top in every comparative ranking.

Quality: The Japanese have the world’s longest life expectancy and the best recovery rates from just about every major disease. Infant mortality is less than half the U.S. rate. Japan usually leads the world in rankings of “avoidable mortality”—its effectiveness in curing diseases that can be cured.

Coverage: Japan’s health-insurance sys-tem covers everybody, including illegal aliens. It pays for physical, mental, dental, and long-term care. The Japanese are the world’s most prodigious consumers of medical care; on average they see the doctor about 15 times per year, three times the U.S. norm. They get twice as many prescriptions per capita and three times as many MRI scans. The average hospital stay is 20 nights—four times the U.S. average.

Cost: And yet Japan produces all that high-quality care at bargain-basement prices. The aging nation spends about $3,500 per person on health care each year; America burns through $7,400 per person and still leaves millions without coverage.

Japan has universal coverage, but it’s not “socialized medicine.” It’s largely a private-sector system. There is government insurance for the unemployed and the elderly, but most people rely on private plans. Japanese doctors are the most capitalist and competitive in the world. But we’re talking Japanese-style free enterprise here; there’s significant government regulation of the private players. Health insurers are required by law to cover everybody, and to pay every claim; the corollary is that everybody is required to buy health insurance. The price for a given treatment is identical everywhere in Japan. Officials say this is designed to attract doctors to rural communities, but that’s not working very well; many small towns on the outer islands have no doctor at all these days.

That fee schedule is the key to cost control in a country where people love going to the doctor. Basically, it shafts doctors and hospitals, paying some of the lowest fees on earth. As a result, doctors work long hours. They are comfortably middle-class, but not in the country-club set. But the savings can be huge in the high-tech realm that drives U.S. bills so high. An MRI scan of the neck region—routinely $1,400 or so in America—is $130 in Japan. Cost cutting like that has stimulated innovation and efficiency. Low fees are taking a toll, though. In a sense, Japanese medicine is the mirror opposite of America’s. We spend too much on health care, but still cover too few of our citizens; Japan provides lots of care to everybody, but probably spends too little to make its best-in-the-world system sustainable.

Reid’s bestselling book The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care will be released in paperback this fall.

Pulling Hands Out of the Till
The best countries keep public and private sector graft in check.
DADANG TRI

For every success in fighting corruption, there’s a fresh backslide. Although the U.S. and Europe have made spectacular gains in cracking down on corporate bribery, the financial crisis and its $20 trillion in bailouts and stimulus spending created a rash of opportunities to shift public resources to private pockets. It didn’t help that the programs concentrated on some of the most fraud-ridden sectors, such as banking, real estate, energy, and infrastructure. China alone has arrested more than 3,000 officials for graft related to its $586 billion stimulus.

10 leaders who have managed to win respect
Go to the Head of the Class

What’s clear, however, is that some countries do much better than others in rooting out corruption. Their lessons, according to corruption experts at Transparency International, the Basel Institute on Governance, and the Brookings Institution:

Get government out of the shadows. Corruption thrives not just on plainly illegal bribes, but even more on legal practices such as political donations, lobbying, and the revolving doors that reward lawmakers and regulators with juicy jobs in industry. Sweden, a star performer in the corruption rankings, has cleaned up government by opening virtually all government records to the public. It’s no coincidence that economists consider Sweden the world’s textbook example for how to resolve a banking crisis resolutely and at minimal cost to taxpayers.

Peer pressure. For years, the U.S. was the only country seriously pursuing corporate bribery. After relentlessly exposing many of the world’s biggest companies, the U.S. shamed others into stiffening their laws and stepping up prosecution. Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair once snuffed out an inquiry into British Aerospace payments in Saudi Arabia, just passed the world’s toughest anti-bribery law. Germany, until recently, considered bribes standard business practice and even made them tax-deductible. Reluctant German prosecutors didn’t start investigations of their own until after German companies kept showing up in U.S. courts.

Litigate, litigate, litigate. Massive fines have made bribery a high-risk game. Germany’s Siemens has paid $1.6 billion and still faces prosecution in several other countries. That both the U.S. and U.K. can litigate any bribe anywhere as long as the company involved does business in America or Britain could one day make even Chinese, Indian, and Russian companies come clean (they now count among the world’s most corrupt, according to Transparency International’s Bribe Payer Index). Already, über-corrupt Russia has begun to cooperate with OECD anti-corruption fighters as the country tries to raise its standing in Western trade and economic bodies.

The silver lining from the financial crisis: governments facing tighter budgets and exploding deficits will have all the more reason to fight the misuse of public funds.

How to Close the Achievement Gap
The world’s best schools offer important lessons about what works.
Zhao Changchun / Xinhua Press-Corbis

All over the world, your chances of success in school and life depend more on your family circumstances than on any other factor. By age three, kids with professional parents are already a full year ahead of their poorer peers. They know twice as many words and score 40 points higher on IQ tests. By age 10, the gap is three years. By then, some poor children have not mastered basic reading and math skills, and many never will: this is the age at which failure starts to become irreversible.

A few school systems seem to have figured out how to erase these gaps. Finland ensures that every child completes basic education and meets a rigorous standard. One Finnish district official, asked about the number of children who don’t complete school in her city, replied, “I can tell you their names if you want.” In the United States, KIPP charter schools enroll students from the poorest families and ensure that almost every one of them graduates high school—80 percent make it to college. Singapore narrowed its achievement gap among ethnic minorities from 17 percent to 5 percent over 20 years.

These success stories offer lessons for the rest of us. First, get children into school early. High-quality preschooling does more for a child’s chances in school and life than any other educational intervention. One study, which began in the 1960s, tracked two groups of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Some were given the opportunity to attend a high-quality preschool; others were not. Thirty-five years later, the kids who went to preschool were earning more, had better jobs, and were less likely to have been in prison or divorced.

Second, recognize that the average kid spends about half his waking hours up until the age of 18 outside of school—don’t ignore that time. KIPP students spend 60 percent more time in school than the average American student. They arrive earlier, leave later, attend more regularly, and even go to school every other Saturday. Similarly, in 1996, Chile extended its school day to add the equivalent of more than two more years of schooling.

Third, pour lots of effort into training teachers. Studies in the United States have shown that kids with the most effective teachers learn three times as much as those with the least effective. Systems such as Singapore’s are choosy about recruiting; they invest in training and continuing education; they evaluate teachers regularly; and they award bonuses only to the top performers.

Finally, recognize the value of individualized attention. In Finland, kids who start to struggle receive one-on-one support from their teachers. Roughly one in three Finnish students also gets extra help from a tutor each year. If we can learn the lesson of what works, we can build on it.

From the Ashes
The most dynamic economies rely on creative destruction to grow.

As the world continues to recover from the Great Recession, governments and businesses are focused on how to spur economic growth. But if they really want to create jobs, raise incomes, and lift living standards, they should devote more energy to figuring out how to generate economic dynamism over the long term.

At times like this, governments tend to champion particular sectors like manufacturing, or industries like green technology. But true dynamism flows from continuous innovation, experimentation, adaptation, and change, all of which raise productivity over time. Those productivity gains, in turn, lift incomes and drive consumption. This fuels more innovation—and a dynamic economy thus expands in a healthy, sustainable way.

Unfortunately, economic dynamism can also cause dislocation and turmoil as workers lose jobs in failing companies or in fading industries. Change in the ranking of companies has accelerated in many countries, including the United States, over the last century. The 90 names listed on Standard & Poor’s index of major U.S. companies in the 1920s remained there for an average of 65 years. By 1998 a company listed on the S&P 500 could expect to stay there for an average of only 10 years.

The distress caused by such turnover causes many people to resist change. But this process, famously labeled “creative destruction” by economist Joseph Schumpeter, frees resources for new uses that can vastly improve life over time. We may have fewer farmers, coachmen, and switchboard operators today than in Schumpeter’s time, but we have software engineers, EKG technicians, Google mapmakers, and a host of other occupations people couldn’t have imagined back then. The “productivity paradox” is that while we may need fewer workers in certain occupations in the short term, improved productivity leads to a stronger economy as a whole. Over the past half century, in fact, three out of every four dollars of new U.S. GDP per capita have come from gains in labor productivity. So policies to spur economic dynamism are essential elements of any strategy to create jobs.

How exactly do we foster economic dynamism? Twenty years of McKinsey Global Institute research shows that the mix of sectors within an economy explains very little of the difference in a country’s GDP growth rate. In other words, dynamism doesn’t turn on whether an economy has a large financial sector, or big manufacturers, or a semiconductor industry, but instead on whether the sectors are competitive or not. Instead of picking winners and funneling subsidies to them, countries must get the basics right. These include a solid rule of law, with patents and protections for intellectual property, enforceable contracts, and courts to resolve disputes; access to finance, particularly for startups; and an efficient physical and communications infrastructure.

Once the basics are in place, the key is ensuring strong competition within sectors. Governments can encourage this by minimizing the barriers to entry and exit in an industry, opening their markets to trade, repealing subsidies and regulations that favor incumbents, and breaking up monopolies. They can create greater transparency in heavily regulated sectors such as health care and power generation. They can also nurture human talent by providing workers with the ongoing education and skills needed to adapt to 21st-century jobs.

Ireland is a good example of how to do this. Beginning in the 1980s the Irish government invested in developing the skills of their citizens, and facilitated collaboration between industry and academia. Global tech companies set up subsidiaries in Ireland, tripling its software revenues between 1995 and 2008. The takeaway is that economic dynamism is built from the ground up. It can be tempting, in the short term, to prop up old industries and preserve obsolete jobs. But as Schumpeter said, “With capitalism, we are dealing with an evolutionary process.” Nations that want to move up the list should be prepared to evolve.

Manyika is a director of McKinsey & Co. and of the McKinsey Global Institute, where Lund is the director of research. Auguste is the director of McKinsey & Co.’s social-sector office.

Happiness Is...

For most of the last seven decades, which is to say about as long as economists have been calculating what’s now called “gross domestic product,” it’s been criticized for being, well, too gross. “Economic resources are not all that matter in people’s lives,” warns Angel Gurría, secretary--general of the 32-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Yet as a convenient marker of national economic health, GDP tends to dominate discussions of how nations rank against one another. Is the answer to change the way you count up GDP? Do you try to play it down as an indicator? Or do you throw it out? That debate is in full swing among economists now, and how it’s decided will have a profound effect on the way we perceive our ability to survive or thrive in the years to come.

As a very general picture of production and consumption, GDP is, after all, a huge improvement on the scattershot numbers that came before the Great Depression of the 1930s. The problem, pointed out by one of the statistic’s original architects, Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets, is that so much social and political importance is read into a single figure that focuses exclusively on market activities. What isn’t bought or sold—housework or caring for your own children, for instance—doesn’t figure. The numbers are also infamously and literally disaster-prone: hurricanes and floods push up GDP because the reconstruction gets factored in as new spending. Countries with more prisons look better than those with fewer (building and running them counts as good economic activity). And if corporations and the very rich are doing well, that can skew the averages to make it look as if everyone is prospering when, in fact, the majority is not.

Depletion of finite resources and environmental depredation don’t get counted either. In the 1980s the French undersea explorer and environmentalist Jacques-Yves Cousteau preached obsessively against the global fixation on GDP growth that implied all consumption was good even if it meant dooming future generations to a declining quality of life—or no life at all. The true measure of prosperity, he used to say, should be based on a broader understanding of “happiness,” even if this sounded like “a crazy idea.”

A growing awareness of climate change and looming social inequities has sparked a serious reappraisal of GDP among many of the world’s top economists. The debate gained urgency with the Great Recession, which has prompted a broad rethink about what kind of growth is both desirable and sustainable. In early 2008 French President Nicolas Sarkozy brought together Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen with French economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi and more than 20 other experts for a Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. Its report issued last year concluded “the time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being.”

Since then, such influential bodies as the OECD have embraced the commission’s work. Even skeptics who fear the huge costs of developing new global statistics and question how the public will react to what may look like a basket of apples and oranges are willing to nod to the commission’s findings. The only real remaining divide is among those who want to improve the inputs into GDP and related statistics as they exist now, and those who think GDP as a whole should be given less importance.

Steven Landefeld, who oversees the compilation of America’s GDP numbers as director of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, thinks much more can be done with the data already in hand. He wrote last year that there may well be a place in government statistics for a new analytical approach to the way people spend their time, in effect “a measure of happiness.” The risk is that the inclusion of softer data in GDP would make the figure more nebulous and would diminish its usefulness as a tool for policymakers trying to manage the market economy.

Stiglitz and his colleagues, well aware of this problem, recommend what they call “a dashboard,” on which some dials would measure quality of life, environmental impact, depletion of resources, and the like. Obviously policymakers need temperature and fuel gauges if they want to know how far they’re able to go, not just how fast, but a new and improved GDP probably will remain front and center and still recognizable as the speedometer.

With Best Countries Like These…
Why cold, dark, small, and depressive nations top the rankings.
Tracey Kusiewicz / Foodie Photography-Getty Images

I used to eat at a Scandinavian cafeteria in San Francisco that called itself a “smorgasbord” and advertised its reindeer meatballs over pasta as superior to the Italian meatballs at the U.S. Cafe next door. This place was just outside Chinatown. It also had Swedish meatballs, but if there was a difference only a Finn could tell for sure. After the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performing Gypsy music from Slovenia under the direction of a Japanese conductor in Salt Lake City, this is my second-favorite example of the great American smorgasbord.

The word may have originated in Sweden, but looking over the metrics for “best countries”—where Sweden is No. 3 and Finland No. 1, Norway No. 6 and Denmark No. 10—I find it hard to imagine just how much variety that Northern European buffet holds. Why is it that the Nordics always dominate such lists, anyhow? Since it’s dark and cold outside for most of the year, the smorgasbord itself must be an attempt to offset tedium, angst, and monochromatism. Even so, there couldn’t be that many kinds of pickled herring, smoked fish, dark rye bread, and mustards on the smorgasbord, be-cause we know from the 1987 movie Babette’s Feast that a French woman on the run in Scandinavia after the Paris Commune turned the austere locals into insane bons vivants by means of spices. Also, as Ingmar Bergman’s movies and Stieg Larsson’s novels show, Scandinavian angst is nothing to laugh about. Pass the vodka, the incest, and the noose.
Illustration by Frank Chimero

The World's Real Winners

Still, metrics are metrics, and art is subjective, so let’s try another tack. Intuitively, one would think that people who are warm most of the year would be better off than people who are not. Yet Finland is in the No. 1 spot, and tropical Burkina Faso dead last at 100. The link between freezing and a high ranking becomes more explicable when the following dots are connected: a heated classroom is better than being outside chopping trees, hence education is important; moving briskly is good preventive medicine, thus health is robust; quality of life improves immensely when one must get as close to one’s beloved as possible to fend off the chill; the political environment is likewise better when governance is kept simple and equitable because it’s too cold to fight in the streets; and finally, economic dynamism is bound to be high among peoples who have learned to combat frostbite with a maximum of movement and the least expense of calories.

A large portion of Finland’s well-being is also the result of its historical reputation for fierceness and diplomacy; it has had to fight and appease both the Russians and the Germans. Switzerland, at No. 2 on the “best countries” list, shares a similar history: squeezed between warring powers, it looked most appetizing to its French, German, Austrian, and Italian neighbors. The Swiss Alps are very good for health, Swiss banks are (or were, until recently) very good for hiding ill-gotten gains, and its so-called neutrality made it an excellent place for enemy combatants to do business and spy on each other. All these reasons, combined with a reputation for martial valor, enabled the Swiss to thrive and plan; the Alps are honeycombed by tunnels stocked with food that would enable every Swiss citizen to survive a nuclear war. Switzerland is a Swiss-cheese country hiding an underground smorgasbord.

The world’s “best countries” seem to have this in common: they avoid war, they live in the dark, and they maintain a steady state of depressive and productive activity. No wonder, then, that we in the United States rank a pathetic No. 11. We are the only country in the world that has written “the pursuit of happiness” into its founding document, thus guaranteeing that we’ll never be satisfied. We are a geographically and socially diverse nation doomed by law and custom to optimism. We are not too healthy, are quite belligerent, and we borrow too much without thinking much about how we’ll pay it back. To achieve better metrics we’d need to tolerate a lot more (smorgas) boredom.

Go to the Head of the Class
10 of the most respected leaders

The Ambitious Newcomer: David Cameron
By William Underhill

When David Cameron took office three months ago, Britain held its breath. The country's youngest prime minister in more than a century, untested in government, the 43-year-old inherited a fragile economy, an unpopular war, and a country fed up with politicians. But his drastic plans for tackling the budget deficit have soothed the markets, and his assured manner has impressed fellow heads of state--even in the European Union, normally tricky territory for a British Conservative. His calm managerial style also makes a welcome change at Downing Street after volatile predecessor Gordon Brown. As a result, Cameron's satisfaction rating among voters has climbed to almost 50 percent, and analysts across the political spectrum are hailing him for his daring: "He is showing himself as potentially the best all-round prime minister of the modern era," says Guardian columnist

Martin Kettle. Britain can breathe easy, for now.
By Craig Simons

As president of an island nation imperiled by rising sea levels, Mohamed Nasheed has become a hero among environmentalists. In the run-up to last year's United Nations climate-change meeting, Nasheed attracted global attention by hosting a cabinet meeting underwater. In Copenhagen, he shamed rich governments by pledging to make the Maldives the world's first carbon-neutral nation. Al Gore likes to quote him on the human cost of climate change. And in April, the U.N. elected him one of six "2010 Champions of the Earth." Achim Steiner, director of the U.N. Environment Program, praised Nasheed as a politician "who is showcasing to the rest of the world how a transition to climate neutrality can be achieved and how all nations, no matter how big or small, can contribute."

The Loved-Abroad-Hated-At-Home: Nicolas Sarkozy
By Christopher Dickey

French President Nicolas Sarkozy may be one of the world's great leaders, but at home his approval ratings are dismal. Intramural sniping and scandals plague his cabinet. Unemployment has topped 10 percent; economic recovery is anemic. But give Sarkozy the chance to perform on a bigger stage--heading the European Union, as he did in 2008, for instance--and suddenly he's right in his element. Back then he took the lead on everything from fighting Somali pirates to brokering an end to war between Russia and Georgia. Next year, Sarko will host both the G8 and G20, with Iran and the recession on his to-do list. He's expected to push for more regulation of financial markets and a new international monetary system. Once again, all the world will be his stage.

The Man of the People: Wen Jiabao
By Melinda Liu

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has earned a reputation as a leader with a heart. Speaking with survivors of the massive 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Wen openly wept. In early August, his empathy was once again on display when he flew to the site of deadly floods in remote Gansu province and shouted encouragement to villagers trapped by the heavy rains. The premier has also dedicated himself to reducing the country's yawning rich-poor gap. No wonder ordinary Chinese seem truly fond of "Grandpa Wen."

The Fiscal Taskmaster: Brian Cowen
By William Underhill

With Ireland's once-roaring economy staggered by the banking crisis--unemployment is at 13 percent, emigration is rising, and the money markets rank Ireland not far behind Greece on the list of Europe's big-time losers--Prime Minister Brian Cowen and his able finance minister, Brian Lenihan, are prescribing harsh medicine. They've pushed through austerity packages drastic enough to win the admiration of the international community, raised taxes, and slashed some public salaries by more than 10 percent. But the Irish aren't showing much gratitude--Cowen's ratings have plunged to a mere 18 percent, and his Fianna Fail party can expect a drubbing in the 2012 national elections. Still, there's some hope that his government's unpopular measures will be rewarded in the long run: surveys suggest that Irish consumer confidence is on the rise again, and the economy notched up modest growth in the first quarter of 2010.

The Lion in Winter: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
By Mac Margolis

As Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva prepares to leave office, he still enjoys rock-star status at home and red carpets abroad. Granted, Brazil was poised to rise before Lula's 2002 election. But the former union boss was wise enough to recognize business as an ally rather than an enemy. Under Lula, Brazil morphed from the developing world's chronic underachiever to an emerging-market powerhouse. With a stable economy, clean-burning biofuels, giant new oil fields, a rising middle class, and falling inequality, Brazil today seems to have it all. While some critics now claim glory has gone to Lula's head—citing his recent overtures to demagogues such as Hugo Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—Lula has remained essentially a pragmatist, savvy enough not to gamble his country's newfound fortunes on a populist adventure. As a result, Brazil has soared on his watch. And in politics, that's all that counts.

The CEO-in-Charge: Lee Myung-Bak
By B. J. Lee

The global financial crisis provided a showcase for South Korean President Lee Myung-bak's management skills. Drawing on his experience as a former Hyundai CEO, Lee guided Korea Inc. through the storm, slashing interest rates to historic lows, setting up funds to save troubled banks and companies, and striking currency-swap deals to secure dwindling foreign-currency reserves. The result: the fastest economic recovery among OECD nations, and forecasts of 5.8 percent growth in 2010 (the highest rate among developed economies). His talent will again be on display at the upcoming G20 summit in November in Seoul, which South Korea will host and chair. Given that the summit's main purpose is to prevent another global economic crisis, Lee's skills will surely be in high demand.

The Rebuilder: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
By Jason McLure

When Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was elected Liberia's president—and Africa's only female head of state—in 2005, she inherited a country decimated by years of violence. Between 1989 and 2003, two horrific civil wars had killed as many as 250,000 of Liberia's 3 million people, and displaced thousands more; more than 15,000 U.N. peacekeepers were deployed on the ground to maintain a fragile peace. At the time of her election, Sirleaf—who held positions at the World Bank and the U.N. before her political run--told NEWSWEEK, "I'm most concerned with being a mother to Liberia. I want to heal the deep wounds of this nation." Now, five years later, fewer than than 8,000 U.N. troops remain in Liberia. The country has boosted school enrollment by 40 percent, restored power and running water to urban centers, and turned its timber and diamond industries into thriving—and legitimate—trades. Sirleaf has also slashed Liberia's external debt from $4.9 billion in 2006 to $1.7 billion today. Under her leadership, Liberia is a country rebuilt and reborn.

The Reformer: King Abdullah
By Katie Baker

Since taking the throne in 2005, Saudi Arabia's King Adullah bin Abdel Aziz al-Saud has tried to lift his ultraconservative country from the dark ages. He's given the go-ahead to modernize schools, has appointed women to high office, and invested in science and technology education and nuclear power initiatives. He's also proven a stalwart ally against Islamic extremism, delivering a much-applauded speech in Mecca that called on Muslims to embrace "the spirit of tolerance, moderation, and balance." At 86 years old, the monarch's window for change may be short, but he's still going strong.

The Middle Man: Lee Hsien Loong
By Isaac Stone Fish

The steward of the fastest-growing economy in the world, Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong is a master at risk management. In the lead-up to the global financial crisis, Singapore's institutions mostly avoided troubled assets, saving the country the banking shock that hit other nations. Global credit insurers such as France's Coface now rate Singapore as the safest place to do business in Asia. In foreign policy, Lee's managed to carve out a role as friend to all the big powers in the region. China wants to emulate Singapore's feat of liberalizing the economy while maintaining one-party rule. And Lee's close political and economic relationship with Beijing has given him the room to do things that might otherwise rankle China. This April, he pushed Beijing to allow the yuan to strengthen. He also just announced free-trade talks with Taiwan. If Singapore can manage to reduce tensions with its immediate neighbors, Malaysia and Indonesia, expect a decade or more of smooth sailing for the country under the indomitable Lee.

The Future King Midas: Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj
By Isaac Stone Fish

Mongolian president Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj knows he's sitting on a gold mine. His resource-rich country boasts the world's largest underdeveloped copper and gold lodes, the world's second-largest uranium reserves, and huge coal deposits. Thanks to this mostly untapped mineral wealth, analysts from Eurasia Capital and Renaissance Capital predict Mongolia will be the fastest-growing economy of the next decade (the IMF predicts the fourth-fastest). Elbegdorj is intent on using this resource wealth to help develop his country, still one of the poorer nations in the world. He's sent officials to Chile to study how to keep resource profits in-country. And he's assured that Mongolians will benefit from developments: at the Turquoise Hill gold and copper mine, which is expected to account for more than 30 percent of Mongolian GDP when completed, Mongolians will have a 34 percent stake in the project. While it's too early to tell whether Elbegdorj will be able to stave off the resource curse that befalls so many economies, the outlook is certainly promising.

While I was typing regarding the best countries, Butrflynet asked me if I noticed that the best countries seem to be democratic socialists. Yes, I knew that.

I'm registered as a Democrat, but I have greater respect for Democratic Socialist countries.

BBB

The Newsweek article is a deliberately designed parlor game intended to engage jingoists and self-loathers.

The magazine has long been a joke.

It was sold for $1

should I pick up a time or a newsweek I feel an immediate need to wash my hands.