The Global Flourishing Study national report card: A case study in comparative wellbeing assessment across 22 countries
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Evaluating how countries are faring is notoriously difficult, especially given the widespread tendency to rely on single metrics or indices, whether objective (e.g., GDP) or subjective (e.g., life evaluation). The underlying issue is that countries and their flourishing are multidimensional, and moreover invariably do better in some ways and less so in others (even if some countries do get more things “right” than others), so any comprehensive assessment of flourishing must be fine-grained and multifaceted. We demonstrate this by evaluating and comparing 22 countries in the Global Flourishing Study (GFS) on 77 self-reported flourishing-related indicators in the GFS (involving 207,919 participants) together with 34 national-level objective indicators. The results paint a complex picture. For a start, there was only a relatively modest positive correlation between self-reported flourishing (per an index involving 12 GFS items) and objective flourishing (per a seven-indicator index created for this paper), with an r of 0.32 when using individual-level GFS data, which fell to just 0.15 when using country means. Next, no place ranks “best” on all indicators, with countries varying an average of 6.1 ranks across subjective indicators and 5.4 ranks across objective indicators. The top three nations on the subjective index, for example, were Indonesia, Philippines, and Mexico, but on the objective index these were only 16th, 13th, and 12th respectively. The objective index was instead led by Japan, Germany, and Australia (who, conversely, ranked last, 18th, and 17th on the subjective index), with Japan strikingly thus first on the objective index yet last on the subjective index. To help articulate and interpret the complexities of each country’s flourishing, for each we present and interpret a country-specific “report card” reporting their top five strengths and weaknesses, both in subjective and objective terms, as well as overall index scores, taking inspiration from the way an educator might convey student progress with both an encouraging and a constructively critical eye (while also recognizing, with humility, that our approach is not the only way to “grade” a country). The results will be useful to all seeking to better understand and promote flourishing at a societal level.
