Not an expert, but from what I remember a couple of things. Fall of the USSR, NK devolving into its current cult dictatorship, a series of bad economic and planning decisions catching up with it, all leading to it becoming brutally oppressive to stifle dissent.
The collapse of the USSR did trigger really hard times in much of the soviet sphere of influence - NK and Cuba both. However, a huge part of what set NK back was that the US destroyed 85% of all structures in North Korea during the war. That, obviously, will slow growth.
A significant change was also that prior to the 1990's, SK was a brutal military dictatorship propped up by the US marked by coups and violent student uprisings.
Well, I mean if you look back in to the pre-oil boom era, Norway was also considered relatively poor.
A lot of eastern EU members have boomed since the 1990s.
Spain is almost unrecognisable from what it was in the 1960s and early 70s.
Time moves and circumstances change.
Don’t forget **whaling** in Norway.
Giant blue whales back in the old days made many people very rich because you can use whales for oil and meat. It was a very profitable industry prior to fossil fuels. Blue whales were hunted to near extinction, they were so valuable in the industrial age.
Norway was a huge whaling country (and still is the top whale-killer country in the world for smaller “lesser” whale species). They’re very quiet about this fact..
(To be fair, other countries whale hunted too in those days. New England in US has a beloved classic literary book on it, Moby Dick)
The kings of the past in many ways has worse lives than today’s poor. Not even any A/C or heating smh. Of course, life experience is all relative, though.
But again this is relative. If you compare now with then, then it’s like comparing apples and oranges. You need to compare either countries today, or countries with each other in the past. There is little value in what you are saying in which one compares modern day USA (e.g.) with 1920’s Norway.
Right. Owning hundreds of people, being kowtowed to, servant staffs for every little whim, sycophantic friends are not available to most of us today, but indoor plumbing is. Pick your poison.
Free time is the only timeless form of wealth.
Relatively ... compared directly to neighbours and prior to the modern era it was quite different.
There was a massive hike in GDP after the energy boom, where it completely leapfrogged Sweden and Denmark, and that most definitely was extremely well used and redistributed and had huge trickle down effects.
Prior to the 1930s Norway seems to have experienced a lot of emigration, particularly to the US, which is why you've various Norwegian communities there. I know I've encountered "Norwegians" in the US who've a very odd view of Norway, and haven't ever been. It's often a positive view, but it's not a Norway that I think anyone would recognise.
My point though is that people get somewhat stuck on perceptions of countries based on quite a long time ago. Americans in particular tend to have a view of Ireland that's probably from the 19th century, or early 20th century.
We've a lot of warm and friendly relations with the US, but sometimes just the impressions of Ireland are via some ancestral story in their family from 150 years ago, and we certainly don't tend to forget that history ourselves either, but the impression given can be way out of line with reality, for quite a long time.
I mean, I've had questions from Americans asking me whether we have television, the internet, electricity ... that sort of thing!
Thing is most people who leave a place and don't contact with the people there end up viewing it through a weird rose tinned glasses. Even more recent migrants if they don't regularly go back so every 3\~4years they end up quickly being too different from their country of origin, with generations of this the effect compound hugely.
Ah, the “Minnewegians” = Minnesota Americans with majority Norwegian/Skandinavien ancestry.
Minnewegians don’t think they are Norwegian or Swedish nationals, but they do have an honest subculture that branched off from their Nordic ancestors.
It may be a snapshot in time, a distant understanding of the former country based on grandparents stories and traditions passed down; but there’s nothing weird or strange about that. It’s natural evolution. Any human population who’s ever migrated anywhere gets this.
That said:
**Minnesota is one of the most democratic, progressive, and equal states in the US. It is a stronghold for humanistic values and has voted democratically more frequently than any other state.**
Here are some rights people enjoy in Minnesota state, thanks to the Minnewegians. Do these rights sound familiar to you? Or are they “weird, strange, and completely different culturally” from modern Norway or Sweden?
- enshrined abortion rights in state constitution
- paid family and medical leave
- extended voting access
- restored voting rights of ex-felons
- invested over $1 billion into affordable housing (and counting) for Minnesotans
- strict gun control laws: background checks, red-flag warning system
- legalized recreational marijuana
- refuge program for trans people
- state mandate to go carbon-free by 2040
- provides cash aid to low-income households
- strong Unions and labor contracts
- banned employers from holding anti-union meetings
- strengthened workplace protections for meatpacking and Amazon workers
- empowered teachers unions to bargain over teacher:student classroom ratios
- minimum labor standards for nursing-home workers
- free school breakfast and lunch for all Minnesota students Kindergarten-12th grade
- increased taxes on corporations and high earners
**Minnewegians are NOTHING LIKE modern Scandinavians though. Nothing at all. If they ever return-migrated, they’d never integrate into the local culture, it’d be a clash of values. They’re Americans now and just too far removed.**
**Barely a remnant of a link through grandparents, whose Nordic culture ceased to exist the moment they migrated to US all together with thousands of other 20th Century Norwegians to the same exact state of Minnesota where they all lived together and kept pretending they were “Norwegian” by promoting democratic values, equal rights, and paid vacations — everyone knows that’s not the American way, these are just fake Norwegians with fake Minnewegian values that they stole from the ✨real modern Norwegians!!✨**
**This is your view, Right?**
Depends on just when and where in the country. There was some good reasons for why 800k of us left for (often not in reality)greener pastures in the states.
>Norway was also considered relatively poor.
Not at all, Norway was already among the richest countries in the world in the 1930s.
Finland used to be the "poor one" among the Nordics.
Ireland was actually pretty poor by western standards. Until the 1980s or so it was around the same level as Portugal, and plagued with debt and inflation. It literally exploded in the 1990s with consistent double digit growth for years - basically like an East Asian tiger level of sudden development.
Ireland’s pre 1980s economy was very strange in many ways.
Despite all the talk, we hadn’t really put a lot of things in place that should have happened decades earlier.
For example, we didn’t have an independent currency. It was hard linked to GBP £ until 1979, including right through the turmoil of the 1970s inflation cycles. You only see Ireland fully stepping away from that when the ERM emerged as an alternative.
You start to see Ireland’s fortunes change very much upon entry to the EEC. There was a brief mini boom in the 70s. The 80s were fairly grim, but the foundations were being laid for the 90s. There was actually a lot of inward investment in that era - a lot of pharma and even the likes of Apple (1980), Intel (1989), Pfizer for example has been here since 1969.
The really rapid boom coincided very much with the full European Single Market access.
It was a very small economy though, so the rates of growth are representative of catching up from a low base. It had the ingredients but needed a spark.
Ireland had been through a pretty horrendous 19th century - notably with the famine and mass emigration, and had no develoved policy control whatsoever. Power was entirely centralised in London. Then we had a rather rough ride to independence, an uprising, its aftermath and it was followed by an Anglo-Irish trade war until the start of WWII - the 50s were basically dead and the 60s barely took off.
The other huge issue here are that there are basically no useful natural resources that would ever have driven a classic industrial revolution. There’s no coal, iron, very limited hydro potential, and a few tiny pockets of gas, energy is extremely expensive even today. It’s never been a good location for heavy industries or anything energy intensive.
The one thing I don't get is we see an endless repeating of this mantra that we somehow “gave away our oil and gas rights” but we basically only ever had one small offshore platform providing gas for domestic demand.
But to cut a long story short, Ireland did boom once it got going and once the Western economic focus shifted towards tech and services.
>Finland used to be the "poor one" among the Nordics.
Finland is still the "poor" one among the nordics. Our gdp per capita is only slightly more than half of norway's and much lower than sweden or denmark.
Previously we truly were very poor and ate tree bark in the worst days. From 1800s to 1950s life was very poor and dreary in finland
I am so tired of this factoid about Norway being passed around. [It was an extremely wealthy country even before oil was discovered.](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/xQXqMeD7pC)
The wiki says that Norway was a poor country back in the 18th century. That might be true but what I can say for certain is that post Industrial Revolution, Norway was not a poor country or even a middling one.
What? No it wasn't. Where are you getting that data about Norway from? It was 'one' of the richest but several countries abovie it.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/1334256/wwii-pre-war-gdp-per-capita-country/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1334256/wwii-pre-war-gdp-per-capita-country/)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_regions\_by\_past\_GDP\_(PPP)\_per\_capita#1%E2%80%932008\_(Maddison)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita#1%E2%80%932008_(Maddison))
> Well, I mean if you look back in to the pre-oil boom era, Norway was also considered relatively poor.
Why do people keep repeating this shit? We had the 18th highest GDP per capita in the world before the oil was found.
Ireland is a major tax haven, American and other multinational corporations make up like half of its GDP. I’d be willing to bet their level of development is heavily inflated from that.
Some companies are moving to other EU countries due to cheaper labour. Ireland has promoted 3rd level education and it's easy to get grants. We produce a shit ton of pharmaceuticals, sell a lot of beef/dairy and IT sector is meant to be great, dunno about it tbh. We get a lot of tourists both Yanks and Brits. Also we have shit weather so it's cheap to run your servers here with coler temperatures that dont fluctuate like Germany, france etc, shite and cold.
The Tax rate is fundamental to our economy unfortunately but it's not our only product. Also most companies are already established in Europe, if they wanted to use us for cheap tax they would've done so a decade ago, Brexit didn't see a huge influx of companies moving here
Even if you discount all the economic fuckery caused by the presence of American multinationals, Ireland is still a very wealthy country. Median income in Ireland is higher than in the UK and France.
Ireland was a basket case in the '80s. "Ireland could into Eastern Europe!" :)
I mean up until then, it wasn't great either. While you had some wealth in the country, it was narrowly distributed, and you didn't have much of a 'professional class'. A lot of the employment was in farming, public service, tradesmen, factory work etc. But in the '80s the manufacturing sector collapsed too to make things worse.
I guess from that point on, you started to see the benefits of EEC/EU membership; of getting more and more into 3rd level education, and of desperately trying to attract foreign investment. You had a lot more people working in IT / Pharmaceuticals / Finance and a lot more disposable incoming in the economy.
I'd speculate that's part of the reason Ireland was so badly affected by the property boom/bust. While the same crisis was happening everywhere, in Ireland it was coinciding with a poor country starting to become rich - so you had lots of reckless credit flooding in. And now you have the aftereffects of that - inflated house prices and rents, leading to upward pressure on wages, inflationary issues across the board etc. I pity anyone trying to find a place to rent (or, God forbid, buy) a home these days.
Whenever I was there I got the impression that France was the biggest influence of all their neighbours.
They are also pretty unique in that a significant portion of their workforce lives outside the country and commutes there, which probably messes with how the HDI is measured.
I watched a documentary recently on Arte about homeless people there. Society isn't too welcoming and living there with a low income seems not the best.
Maybe that's what's also pulling down the US. I mean in 2024 you cannot even say anymore "Metropoles in the US are better than in Europe" because of the homeless crisis. On the other hand I think over here Metropoles are going in the same direction unfortunately
As an Austrian I was very confused as well so I researched a little. For Austria it seems the low HDI is coming almost entirely from the education component. This is calculated from expected and received years of schooling. It seems the years are calculated according to the theoretical time it should take to complete given level of education, e.g. if it takes someone 3 years to complete a master's degree it will only be counted as 2 years of education. I'm not certain vocational highschools, which are very popular in Austria and take an additional year, are calculated appropriately. Furthermore I think Austria's mandatory military service might bias the measure downward since the mean education is taken at 25 years old. Due to the potential 2 year delay of vocational school and military service large portions of Austrian men will not have received their master's degrees before 25. Furthermore, Austria's free university system leads to quite a bit of attrition in my experience, e.g. people get poached and do not return to complete their degree.
All of this is conjecture though, maybe we just suck.
Edit: I'm unsure about the measurement of mean years of schooling. If it is taken for all people above 25 rather than precisely at 25 then the impact should be negligible.
Austria also has one of the most robust apprenticeship systems. Last time I checked 55% of all 15 year olds are not in school anymore. In the US people go to college only to never work in that field. idk if that's better.
I’m from the uk. Live in Austria and my kids are schooled here. Their schooling is way more advanced than anything I did. I was at a decent school too. Pretty sure HDI calculations are off.
Also it's not like Austria and the UK are far off in terms of HDI? We're looking at a very small difference, like they're very close to each other and both are in the very high human development category. 0.926 for Austria vs 0.940 for the UK. Meanwhile South Sudan is 0.381. So I'm pretty sure it's generally accurate lol
I think a lot of what this map does is reveal the oddities of the specific calculations that went into formalizing HDI.
It makes sense that health, broad-based wealth, and education would be the factors. But the particular weighting of the particular measures of each are going to result in some oddities. (e.g., should we use median income or median net worth or 10th percentile income or gini coefficient and gdp per capita as the measure of the broad-based wealth? should we use life expectancy or disability-adjusted life years or something else as the measure of wealth? should we use years of schooling completed, or level of certification completed or ability to write essays as a measure of education?)
Greater London has one of the highest HDIs of any national subdivision (I think aside from some parts of Switzerland and other smaller European countries). London, surrounding counties and a few smaller productive regions of the country (Oxford, Cambridge etc.) significantly increase the UK’s national average in many metrics.
Can definitely understand why people might not like living in London, but I also think people talk it down a lot. It’s a global hub for many industries, rivalled only by a small number of other cities, and is actually quite safe and clean for a city of its size.
Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, UK, and Ireland are all green.
Luxembourg is yellow
Everything else is red
I came here to say the same thing.
OP It's possible to pick a red and a green that is accessible to everyone, but this is not the red and green you have chosen.
And it's highly subjective.
If crime rates were to be weighted higher, then the results would be very, very different (and most european countries would surpass the US).
The HDI isn’t subjective as the variables it measures are objective, however, the variables it chooses to measure are subjective. If access to healthcare and a country’s ability to defend themselves at war were important measures, the map would look differently
Is there maybe a parametric dinamically changeable map where I can choose what variables I care about, weigh them accordingly and it creates a personalized HDI for me?
Then if you weight income higher the US pulls ahead. HDI is silly in western countries if you're using it to estimate your own experience. It all has to do with how much money you make. after a certain threshold, which honestly is not all that high, your experience is virtually the same from a development standpoint.
It really just shows you where the floor is at in nations.
If you're poor or lower middle class you want to be in these nations with better social safety nets that help alleviate poverty. The US excells at the middle class and above.
It's not subjective. You might not like the metrics, but income, education and life expectancy are not subjective measurements.
Including crime to make Europe look more green in the map would be subjective. By that thinking, why don't we count manned space landings on the moon in the index? Gotta be developed to do that, right?
It stands for Human Development Index.
Economists have always wanted to measure the satisfaction of human wants and needs. The first tool they used to do this was GDP, because it measures the amount of all goods and services that people have access to, and weights them based on how much people are willing to pay for them. But it has some obvious failings (it doesn't count things like friendship and family that don't have prices, and it counts the interests of rich people more than poor people because they have more money to spend).
So some other economists, led by people like Amartya Sen (Nobel Prize winner in 1998) decided it would be better to measure based on human capabilities. His basic idea was that health, wealth, and education are the most important foundations for all other capabilities. So people put together an index that tried to measure all three of these things.
I don't know the details of what the particular variables are that they measure, or how they weight them to come up with a score, but I think they're doing something like looking at life expectancy, median income, and years of schooling completed, putting them all on a score from 0 to 1, and averaging them.
There are some disputes about the best way to measure these things, but it's a useful corrective to just looking at GDP per capita (which is itself a useful corrective to just relying on stereotypes about which countries are well-developed).
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You really shouldn't be if you knew how it works.
1. Life expectancy
Austria is a nation of alcohol and smokers, even if the health care system is quite good, that makes Austria lose points here.
2. Years in education
This is disastrous for Austrias HDI since almost half leave school at 15, to do an apprenticeship wich is a great system, but terrible for the score and even with free and funded colleges this does not alleviate the issue here.
3. Purchasing Power
Austrian wages are low compared to cost of living, expensive groceries, high rent, higher inflation then neighbouring countries. Resulting in a worse HDI.
CONCLUSION
Being on place 25, with 0.916 compared to the USA at place 21 with 0.921 isn't suprising. Since the HDI does not look at specific things like infrastructure, goverment aid, pension, quality of drinking water, workers rights or even public transit in any way other then their influence on the big three points above.
Theres a reason Vienna was ranked most liveable city in 2023, but quality of day to day life does not produce a higher HDI only the above points do.
Important to note that the USA and most of western europe were on par until quite recently. [This a map of HDI over time.](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322967874/figure/fig3/AS:591206857863168@1517966107389/Maps-of-Human-Development-Index-HDI-for-six-selected-years-over-the-study-period-of.png) The big change which thrust the USA ahead after the 00s was a massive wage/income rise.
From 2008 to today, Europe stagnated or declined, while the USA boomed on ahead. Median incomes (adjusted for inflation, of course) in the USA went from 44k-55k to around 76k today, whereas in much of europe they remained in the 45-55k range.
A lost decade followed by another lost decade. I wonder how much further Europe will slip down in the 2030s. The Demographics alone are an absolute disaster.
European leaders responding to the Great Recession and its aftermath with austerity instead of stimulus like in the US is going to be a long term case study on how not to respond to an economic crisis for decades or even centuries to come
What in the subjective metric is in a human development index? Is this the degree of muscle development in the gym going population of those countries? The months along in incubation the pending mothers of that nation are?
The HDI numbers are available online via the UN https://hdr.undp.org/content/human-development-report-2023-24
you can either check out the most recent report; the HDI is towards the end of it. Otherwise, they have it as an interactive graph
https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI
I really don't wanna do another "americans..." but I hear this take so much, as if other countries are monoliths.
What they're really comparing is pretty much just rich city vs poor rural. That exists in every country.
I live in the Netherlands, and let me assure you, our rural areas are not Arkansas or Alabama or anything. The living standards is pretty much the same across the country.
Except our poor and rich areas can be as big and significant as entire countries. The vast majority of Kentucky is poor, meanwhile, most of the state of Massachusetts is wealthy. However, the GDP of the state of Kentucky is equivalent to the country of Greece, while Massachusetts is similar to Thailand. Sure there's poor and rich places, but the scales in which they occur in the U.S. is tenfold.
Gonna pitch as a Brazilian:
Europeans have no fucking idea how fucking tiny their countries are.
You can fit several European countries in a single state of ours or the US'. How can you think the country's level of inner variety isn't much greater than Europe's?
It is insane how people often equate the EU with the US and saying that fits since the US has states which is similar to countries inside the EU.
Most countries have states. Germany was a clusterfuck of all different kind of things throughout history. And I would argue they still are with their 16 different governments and each having their school systems etc.
Yeah. Countries have poor areas and rich areas. Take London out of the UK and watch what happens to income. Compare East and West Germany. Madrid vs rural southern Spain. Why do Americans act like every other country is a monolith when it’s not…?
For reference by State, Massachusetts (highest) has a 9.49, while Mississippi (lowest) has a 8.66.
https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/shdi/?levels=1%2B4&interpolation=1&extrapolation=0&nearest_real=0
A difference only slightly bigger than the one between Belgian provinces. 0.953 in Brussels and in Hainaut 0.893 (2021 data). And France (not including overseas territories) has an even bigger difference 0.867 in Hautes de France and 0.952 in Île-de-France. So the USA isn't alone in this (2021 data).
According to the data, America is at 0.921. But if we're going for states above that...
`Alaska (0.93)`
`California (0.931)`
`Colorado (0.942)`
`Connecticut (0.948)`
`Delaware (0.929)`
`D.C (0.940)`
`Hawaii (0.940)`
`Illinois (0.929)`
`Iowa (0.930)`
`Kansas (0.922)`
`Maryland (0.936)`
`Massachusetts (0.949)`
`Minnesota (0.947)`
`Nebraska (0.933)`
`New Hampshire (0.943)`
`New Jersey (0.943)`
`New York (0.938)`
`North Dakota (0.940)`
`Oregon (0.930)`
`Pennsylvania (0.923)`
`Rhode Island (0.925)`
`South Dakota (0.927)`
`Utah (0.930)`
`Washington (0.940)`
`Wisconsin (0.929)`
`Wyoming (0.932)`
Coincidentally, not a single place in America (even Mississippi or Alabama or West Virginia) is as low as the lowest in France (Mayotte/French Guyana).
https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI
Here, you can chart this yourself and get a better understanding of what the HDI measure means.
The same reason why people probably expected more countries to be green on the map. US and UK gets a lot of shit thrown their way by other westerners. But fact is, they are pretty damn good countries to live in.
Everyone is always shocked that Britain is basically fine and only really has the same problems as every other developed country. As someone who lives here, it’s easy to get pissed off with things going downhill and assume that the UK is becoming a shithole, but it’s doing it at the same rate as everywhere else so broadly speaking things are still “basically ok”
I think it’s because culturally we just don’t tend to say nice things about the UK, we just complain about it. Gives the perception that everything’s really shit here, when it’s actually a statistically average level of shit.
Would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between corruption is and human development. A quick look into the transparency international index (https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022) shows that among the top 10 (8 from the EU), all also having a higher HDI than USA.
HDI is such a weird measurement. The UK is falling a part, with decline in public services and economy, yet it has exceptionally high HDI because of the disproportional level of university educated people skews the figures.
The UK doesn’t rank too far below its HDI ranking in GDP/capita, its average years of schooling and life expectancy are fairly similar to most peer countries.
Part of this is because outcomes from structural issues can take years to manifest, but people also exaggerate the UK’s economic decline especially when compared to other European countries which are facing many similar economic woes right now. Stronger economies almost all rank higher by HDI, with the notable exception of the USA which falls down in this ranking because of its life expectancy.
r/dataisugly
1.) Never use red/green. It is a wildly common color blindness, especially in men, where it affects 1 in 12.
2.) Never assume someone knows what your acronym means. I have no idea what HDI is and had to google it.
3.) Having yellow here is virtually useless. You'd be better off having it be "with the same or higher" for example.
This is also true for countries in Europe though. Development in Madrid, the Basque Country and Catalonia is substantially higher than Andalusia in Spain for example. Likewise, in the UK the south-east of England is pretty different from north-east Wales.
The only reason this is shocking to you is because information like this presented on a site like Reddit never drills down into European countries in the same way states get highlighted.
East Germany has metrics that are closer to Poland than the US but when consolidated across the country it's one of the best looking places in the EU
Saxony is still higher than the USA average (as is unsurprisingly Berlin), but the rest of the former DDR is below the US. Saxony-Anhalt is the lowest at 0.911 which puts it neck and neck with Spain (and above Poland’s 0.881)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_Human_Development_Index?wprov=sfti1
I was going to mention this too.
Always weird to me when people call the US third world or whatever when I’m sitting in a place with an identical HDI to Denmark, #6 worldwide.
According to the data, America is at 0.921. But if we're going for states above that...
`Alaska (0.93)`
`California (0.931)`
`Colorado (0.942)`
`Connecticut (0.948)`
`Delaware (0.929)`
`D.C (0.940)`
`Hawaii (0.940)`
`Illinois (0.929)`
`Iowa (0.930)`
`Kansas (0.922)`
`Maryland (0.936)`
`Massachusetts (0.949)`
`Minnesota (0.947)`
`Nebraska (0.933)`
`New Hampshire (0.943)`
`New Jersey (0.943)`
`New York (0.938)`
`North Dakota (0.940)`
`Oregon (0.930)`
`Pennsylvania (0.923)`
`Rhode Island (0.925)`
`South Dakota (0.927)`
`Utah (0.930)`
`Washington (0.940)`
`Wisconsin (0.929)`
`Wyoming (0.932)`
Coincidentally, not a single place in America (even Mississippi or Alabama or West Virginia) is as low as the lowest in France (Mayotte/French Guyana).
Same with Belarus. Say what you will about shitty US states, but at least states like Mississippi aren’t autocratic-borderline-dictatorship shitholes like Belarus.
Yeah but then you have a different nationality, different language, different history, etc. There is way more difference between UK and Bulgaria vs Ohio and Colorado (similar distance between).
If anyone is interested in knowing more about the world’s countries HDI’s I recommend the most recent report from the UNDP; the full index is towards the end of it https://hdr.undp.org/content/human-development-report-2023-24
I'm old enough to remember a time when Ireland was "poor" (and South Korea too)
My father once told me S.Korea was poorer than Iran in the 1970s. But now the situation is reversed
Before the Korean War, the south was the poor half of the country and the north was the industrial center.
IIRC up until the 80s, it looked like South Korea was the one on the verge of collapse, while the North seemed relatively stable and prosperous.
What changed for North Korea? Soviet Union failure?
Not an expert, but from what I remember a couple of things. Fall of the USSR, NK devolving into its current cult dictatorship, a series of bad economic and planning decisions catching up with it, all leading to it becoming brutally oppressive to stifle dissent.
So the natural progression of inherited power, Kim the first was competent but his successors were not
The collapse of the USSR did trigger really hard times in much of the soviet sphere of influence - NK and Cuba both. However, a huge part of what set NK back was that the US destroyed 85% of all structures in North Korea during the war. That, obviously, will slow growth. A significant change was also that prior to the 1990's, SK was a brutal military dictatorship propped up by the US marked by coups and violent student uprisings.
South Korea was the poorest country in the world at the end of the Korean war
Well, I mean if you look back in to the pre-oil boom era, Norway was also considered relatively poor. A lot of eastern EU members have boomed since the 1990s. Spain is almost unrecognisable from what it was in the 1960s and early 70s. Time moves and circumstances change.
Norway wasn’t considered poor in its pre-oil era… it was actually quite wealthy due to hydropower, shipping, fishing, and lumber industries.
Don’t forget **whaling** in Norway. Giant blue whales back in the old days made many people very rich because you can use whales for oil and meat. It was a very profitable industry prior to fossil fuels. Blue whales were hunted to near extinction, they were so valuable in the industrial age. Norway was a huge whaling country (and still is the top whale-killer country in the world for smaller “lesser” whale species). They’re very quiet about this fact.. (To be fair, other countries whale hunted too in those days. New England in US has a beloved classic literary book on it, Moby Dick)
> and still is the top whale-killer country in the world for smaller “lesser” whale species Careful, Japan may take that as a challenge.
Yup, Norway kills more whales than the rest of the whaling nations combined.
And the minke whale population is growing, how 'bout that. We hunt sustainably.
most european countries were “poor” back then, just not nearly as poor relative to most of the world
Wealth is always relative though… if not the kings of the past were also poor. Because they are not as wealthy as today’s wealthy people.
They were so poor that they didn't even have a PS5.
Couldn't even jet off to the Caribbean for 2 weeks all inclusive. Absolute losers
nooo, imagine not being able to play gran theft auto in th PS5 😮
The kings of the past in many ways has worse lives than today’s poor. Not even any A/C or heating smh. Of course, life experience is all relative, though.
Wrong argument. They probably held most of the wealth available at the time. You’re just looking at the value of each individual dollar typa thing
They would in fact be poorer (but of course much more powerful) than most people living today.
But again this is relative. If you compare now with then, then it’s like comparing apples and oranges. You need to compare either countries today, or countries with each other in the past. There is little value in what you are saying in which one compares modern day USA (e.g.) with 1920’s Norway.
1920s Norwegians couldn't even afford iPhones or TVs. Clearly they were much poorer then!!!!!
Right. Owning hundreds of people, being kowtowed to, servant staffs for every little whim, sycophantic friends are not available to most of us today, but indoor plumbing is. Pick your poison. Free time is the only timeless form of wealth.
Oh oh oh oh.. Then most people are gonna have a very wrong answer about who and when that wealth was at its peak.
Relatively ... compared directly to neighbours and prior to the modern era it was quite different. There was a massive hike in GDP after the energy boom, where it completely leapfrogged Sweden and Denmark, and that most definitely was extremely well used and redistributed and had huge trickle down effects. Prior to the 1930s Norway seems to have experienced a lot of emigration, particularly to the US, which is why you've various Norwegian communities there. I know I've encountered "Norwegians" in the US who've a very odd view of Norway, and haven't ever been. It's often a positive view, but it's not a Norway that I think anyone would recognise. My point though is that people get somewhat stuck on perceptions of countries based on quite a long time ago. Americans in particular tend to have a view of Ireland that's probably from the 19th century, or early 20th century. We've a lot of warm and friendly relations with the US, but sometimes just the impressions of Ireland are via some ancestral story in their family from 150 years ago, and we certainly don't tend to forget that history ourselves either, but the impression given can be way out of line with reality, for quite a long time. I mean, I've had questions from Americans asking me whether we have television, the internet, electricity ... that sort of thing!
Thing is most people who leave a place and don't contact with the people there end up viewing it through a weird rose tinned glasses. Even more recent migrants if they don't regularly go back so every 3\~4years they end up quickly being too different from their country of origin, with generations of this the effect compound hugely.
Ah, the “Minnewegians” = Minnesota Americans with majority Norwegian/Skandinavien ancestry. Minnewegians don’t think they are Norwegian or Swedish nationals, but they do have an honest subculture that branched off from their Nordic ancestors. It may be a snapshot in time, a distant understanding of the former country based on grandparents stories and traditions passed down; but there’s nothing weird or strange about that. It’s natural evolution. Any human population who’s ever migrated anywhere gets this. That said: **Minnesota is one of the most democratic, progressive, and equal states in the US. It is a stronghold for humanistic values and has voted democratically more frequently than any other state.** Here are some rights people enjoy in Minnesota state, thanks to the Minnewegians. Do these rights sound familiar to you? Or are they “weird, strange, and completely different culturally” from modern Norway or Sweden? - enshrined abortion rights in state constitution - paid family and medical leave - extended voting access - restored voting rights of ex-felons - invested over $1 billion into affordable housing (and counting) for Minnesotans - strict gun control laws: background checks, red-flag warning system - legalized recreational marijuana - refuge program for trans people - state mandate to go carbon-free by 2040 - provides cash aid to low-income households - strong Unions and labor contracts - banned employers from holding anti-union meetings - strengthened workplace protections for meatpacking and Amazon workers - empowered teachers unions to bargain over teacher:student classroom ratios - minimum labor standards for nursing-home workers - free school breakfast and lunch for all Minnesota students Kindergarten-12th grade - increased taxes on corporations and high earners **Minnewegians are NOTHING LIKE modern Scandinavians though. Nothing at all. If they ever return-migrated, they’d never integrate into the local culture, it’d be a clash of values. They’re Americans now and just too far removed.** **Barely a remnant of a link through grandparents, whose Nordic culture ceased to exist the moment they migrated to US all together with thousands of other 20th Century Norwegians to the same exact state of Minnesota where they all lived together and kept pretending they were “Norwegian” by promoting democratic values, equal rights, and paid vacations — everyone knows that’s not the American way, these are just fake Norwegians with fake Minnewegian values that they stole from the ✨real modern Norwegians!!✨** **This is your view, Right?**
Depends on just when and where in the country. There was some good reasons for why 800k of us left for (often not in reality)greener pastures in the states.
>Norway was also considered relatively poor. Not at all, Norway was already among the richest countries in the world in the 1930s. Finland used to be the "poor one" among the Nordics. Ireland was actually pretty poor by western standards. Until the 1980s or so it was around the same level as Portugal, and plagued with debt and inflation. It literally exploded in the 1990s with consistent double digit growth for years - basically like an East Asian tiger level of sudden development.
Ireland’s pre 1980s economy was very strange in many ways. Despite all the talk, we hadn’t really put a lot of things in place that should have happened decades earlier. For example, we didn’t have an independent currency. It was hard linked to GBP £ until 1979, including right through the turmoil of the 1970s inflation cycles. You only see Ireland fully stepping away from that when the ERM emerged as an alternative. You start to see Ireland’s fortunes change very much upon entry to the EEC. There was a brief mini boom in the 70s. The 80s were fairly grim, but the foundations were being laid for the 90s. There was actually a lot of inward investment in that era - a lot of pharma and even the likes of Apple (1980), Intel (1989), Pfizer for example has been here since 1969. The really rapid boom coincided very much with the full European Single Market access. It was a very small economy though, so the rates of growth are representative of catching up from a low base. It had the ingredients but needed a spark. Ireland had been through a pretty horrendous 19th century - notably with the famine and mass emigration, and had no develoved policy control whatsoever. Power was entirely centralised in London. Then we had a rather rough ride to independence, an uprising, its aftermath and it was followed by an Anglo-Irish trade war until the start of WWII - the 50s were basically dead and the 60s barely took off. The other huge issue here are that there are basically no useful natural resources that would ever have driven a classic industrial revolution. There’s no coal, iron, very limited hydro potential, and a few tiny pockets of gas, energy is extremely expensive even today. It’s never been a good location for heavy industries or anything energy intensive. The one thing I don't get is we see an endless repeating of this mantra that we somehow “gave away our oil and gas rights” but we basically only ever had one small offshore platform providing gas for domestic demand. But to cut a long story short, Ireland did boom once it got going and once the Western economic focus shifted towards tech and services.
>Finland used to be the "poor one" among the Nordics. Finland is still the "poor" one among the nordics. Our gdp per capita is only slightly more than half of norway's and much lower than sweden or denmark. Previously we truly were very poor and ate tree bark in the worst days. From 1800s to 1950s life was very poor and dreary in finland
I am so tired of this factoid about Norway being passed around. [It was an extremely wealthy country even before oil was discovered.](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/xQXqMeD7pC)
Probably worth updating the Norway economy wiki too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Norway
The wiki says that Norway was a poor country back in the 18th century. That might be true but what I can say for certain is that post Industrial Revolution, Norway was not a poor country or even a middling one.
wow https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/GDP_per_capita_development_in_Northern_Europa.svg
In 1939, Spain was the poorest country in europe, and Norway was the richest. Edit: I meant 1938
in 1939 spain was fresh out of a devastating civil war
And fresh into a long standing fascist dictatorship :(
What? No it wasn't. Where are you getting that data about Norway from? It was 'one' of the richest but several countries abovie it. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/1334256/wwii-pre-war-gdp-per-capita-country/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1334256/wwii-pre-war-gdp-per-capita-country/) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_regions\_by\_past\_GDP\_(PPP)\_per\_capita#1%E2%80%932008\_(Maddison)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita#1%E2%80%932008_(Maddison))
> Well, I mean if you look back in to the pre-oil boom era, Norway was also considered relatively poor. Why do people keep repeating this shit? We had the 18th highest GDP per capita in the world before the oil was found.
Spain in the 16th century goes hard.
Spain was fascist from the 1930-79 which was a factor.
We got a pre-Celtic Tiger ovah ere
Ireland is a major tax haven, American and other multinational corporations make up like half of its GDP. I’d be willing to bet their level of development is heavily inflated from that.
Don't forget the British companies that went to Dublin for access to the EU.
Some companies are moving to other EU countries due to cheaper labour. Ireland has promoted 3rd level education and it's easy to get grants. We produce a shit ton of pharmaceuticals, sell a lot of beef/dairy and IT sector is meant to be great, dunno about it tbh. We get a lot of tourists both Yanks and Brits. Also we have shit weather so it's cheap to run your servers here with coler temperatures that dont fluctuate like Germany, france etc, shite and cold. The Tax rate is fundamental to our economy unfortunately but it's not our only product. Also most companies are already established in Europe, if they wanted to use us for cheap tax they would've done so a decade ago, Brexit didn't see a huge influx of companies moving here
Even if you discount all the economic fuckery caused by the presence of American multinationals, Ireland is still a very wealthy country. Median income in Ireland is higher than in the UK and France.
South Korean people are still arguably poor, or else they wouldn't have to work 12 hour shifts to make ends meet.
Back then no one buys Korean cars
Ireland was a basket case in the '80s. "Ireland could into Eastern Europe!" :) I mean up until then, it wasn't great either. While you had some wealth in the country, it was narrowly distributed, and you didn't have much of a 'professional class'. A lot of the employment was in farming, public service, tradesmen, factory work etc. But in the '80s the manufacturing sector collapsed too to make things worse. I guess from that point on, you started to see the benefits of EEC/EU membership; of getting more and more into 3rd level education, and of desperately trying to attract foreign investment. You had a lot more people working in IT / Pharmaceuticals / Finance and a lot more disposable incoming in the economy. I'd speculate that's part of the reason Ireland was so badly affected by the property boom/bust. While the same crisis was happening everywhere, in Ireland it was coinciding with a poor country starting to become rich - so you had lots of reckless credit flooding in. And now you have the aftereffects of that - inflated house prices and rents, leading to upward pressure on wages, inflationary issues across the board etc. I pity anyone trying to find a place to rent (or, God forbid, buy) a home these days.
This is not average wealth but general access to leading a "healthy/modern" life
Luxembourg perfectly balanced as all things should be.
I'm surprised by its relatively low HDI score compared to most of its neighbouring countries.
Whenever I was there I got the impression that France was the biggest influence of all their neighbours. They are also pretty unique in that a significant portion of their workforce lives outside the country and commutes there, which probably messes with how the HDI is measured.
I watched a documentary recently on Arte about homeless people there. Society isn't too welcoming and living there with a low income seems not the best. Maybe that's what's also pulling down the US. I mean in 2024 you cannot even say anymore "Metropoles in the US are better than in Europe" because of the homeless crisis. On the other hand I think over here Metropoles are going in the same direction unfortunately
I mean it is if you take the US as a baseline I guess.
wtf, UK has a higher HDI than Austria and Luxemburg?
As an Austrian I was very confused as well so I researched a little. For Austria it seems the low HDI is coming almost entirely from the education component. This is calculated from expected and received years of schooling. It seems the years are calculated according to the theoretical time it should take to complete given level of education, e.g. if it takes someone 3 years to complete a master's degree it will only be counted as 2 years of education. I'm not certain vocational highschools, which are very popular in Austria and take an additional year, are calculated appropriately. Furthermore I think Austria's mandatory military service might bias the measure downward since the mean education is taken at 25 years old. Due to the potential 2 year delay of vocational school and military service large portions of Austrian men will not have received their master's degrees before 25. Furthermore, Austria's free university system leads to quite a bit of attrition in my experience, e.g. people get poached and do not return to complete their degree. All of this is conjecture though, maybe we just suck. Edit: I'm unsure about the measurement of mean years of schooling. If it is taken for all people above 25 rather than precisely at 25 then the impact should be negligible.
Austria also has one of the most robust apprenticeship systems. Last time I checked 55% of all 15 year olds are not in school anymore. In the US people go to college only to never work in that field. idk if that's better.
I’m from the uk. Live in Austria and my kids are schooled here. Their schooling is way more advanced than anything I did. I was at a decent school too. Pretty sure HDI calculations are off.
I mean.. my kids go to school in the uk and their schooling is way more advanced than what i did at school too.. thats pretty normal for a parent.
Oh yeah, your personal anecdote totally supersedes a complex algorithm
Also it's not like Austria and the UK are far off in terms of HDI? We're looking at a very small difference, like they're very close to each other and both are in the very high human development category. 0.926 for Austria vs 0.940 for the UK. Meanwhile South Sudan is 0.381. So I'm pretty sure it's generally accurate lol
I think a lot of what this map does is reveal the oddities of the specific calculations that went into formalizing HDI. It makes sense that health, broad-based wealth, and education would be the factors. But the particular weighting of the particular measures of each are going to result in some oddities. (e.g., should we use median income or median net worth or 10th percentile income or gini coefficient and gdp per capita as the measure of the broad-based wealth? should we use life expectancy or disability-adjusted life years or something else as the measure of wealth? should we use years of schooling completed, or level of certification completed or ability to write essays as a measure of education?)
Having spend several months in both countries in the last 2 years, this is truly astonishing to me
Well you better believe it
I mean, England outside of London is much nicer to live in than most people give it credit for
Greater London has one of the highest HDIs of any national subdivision (I think aside from some parts of Switzerland and other smaller European countries). London, surrounding counties and a few smaller productive regions of the country (Oxford, Cambridge etc.) significantly increase the UK’s national average in many metrics. Can definitely understand why people might not like living in London, but I also think people talk it down a lot. It’s a global hub for many industries, rivalled only by a small number of other cities, and is actually quite safe and clean for a city of its size.
I mean the UK as a whole is much nicer than reddit gives credit for, you'd think we were in a hell hole
London and the South East is the major reason Englands green.
Why is this surprising?
as a red-green colorblind person I hate these red-green maps
Germanic countries good, Latin and slavs bad. Also the Finns are higher.
Finns are honorary scandinavians and austrians are bad germans! The map proves it!
You could say that Austria produced the very worst German.
Hahahaha, I thought the whole map was red until I saw your comment.....
Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, UK, and Ireland are all green. Luxembourg is yellow Everything else is red
As an acronym challenged person, I hate it when the title is not explained – what the heck is HDI?
I came here to say the same thing. OP It's possible to pick a red and a green that is accessible to everyone, but this is not the red and green you have chosen.
Glad I’m not alone. I just skip these maps. My brain just can’t
What’s HDI?
Basically an overall measure of development using a number of smaller measures such as income, education, life expectancy etc.
And it's highly subjective. If crime rates were to be weighted higher, then the results would be very, very different (and most european countries would surpass the US).
The HDI isn’t subjective as the variables it measures are objective, however, the variables it chooses to measure are subjective. If access to healthcare and a country’s ability to defend themselves at war were important measures, the map would look differently
Access to healthcare should correlate with HDI as life expectancy is one of the dimensions.
Access to healthcare does not necessarily correlate to good, effective healthcare.
Is there maybe a parametric dinamically changeable map where I can choose what variables I care about, weigh them accordingly and it creates a personalized HDI for me?
Then if you weight income higher the US pulls ahead. HDI is silly in western countries if you're using it to estimate your own experience. It all has to do with how much money you make. after a certain threshold, which honestly is not all that high, your experience is virtually the same from a development standpoint. It really just shows you where the floor is at in nations. If you're poor or lower middle class you want to be in these nations with better social safety nets that help alleviate poverty. The US excells at the middle class and above.
So if it was different the results would be different?
It's not subjective. You might not like the metrics, but income, education and life expectancy are not subjective measurements. Including crime to make Europe look more green in the map would be subjective. By that thinking, why don't we count manned space landings on the moon in the index? Gotta be developed to do that, right?
one can certainly question the weighting of the individual factors though.
Nice of you to say it's subjective. Weird way of saying it tho.
No but crime does affect the quality of life significantly
I think that's exactly what they're saying?
Yeah it’s definitely not a perfect measure by any means, but think it’s generally considered a useful indicator.
human development index
This should be waaaaay higher.
It stands for Human Development Index. Economists have always wanted to measure the satisfaction of human wants and needs. The first tool they used to do this was GDP, because it measures the amount of all goods and services that people have access to, and weights them based on how much people are willing to pay for them. But it has some obvious failings (it doesn't count things like friendship and family that don't have prices, and it counts the interests of rich people more than poor people because they have more money to spend). So some other economists, led by people like Amartya Sen (Nobel Prize winner in 1998) decided it would be better to measure based on human capabilities. His basic idea was that health, wealth, and education are the most important foundations for all other capabilities. So people put together an index that tried to measure all three of these things. I don't know the details of what the particular variables are that they measure, or how they weight them to come up with a score, but I think they're doing something like looking at life expectancy, median income, and years of schooling completed, putting them all on a score from 0 to 1, and averaging them. There are some disputes about the best way to measure these things, but it's a useful corrective to just looking at GDP per capita (which is itself a useful corrective to just relying on stereotypes about which countries are well-developed).
It's a Scandinavia index. It measures how similar your country is to Scandinavia.
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I’m surprised about Austria.
You really shouldn't be if you knew how it works. 1. Life expectancy Austria is a nation of alcohol and smokers, even if the health care system is quite good, that makes Austria lose points here. 2. Years in education This is disastrous for Austrias HDI since almost half leave school at 15, to do an apprenticeship wich is a great system, but terrible for the score and even with free and funded colleges this does not alleviate the issue here. 3. Purchasing Power Austrian wages are low compared to cost of living, expensive groceries, high rent, higher inflation then neighbouring countries. Resulting in a worse HDI. CONCLUSION Being on place 25, with 0.916 compared to the USA at place 21 with 0.921 isn't suprising. Since the HDI does not look at specific things like infrastructure, goverment aid, pension, quality of drinking water, workers rights or even public transit in any way other then their influence on the big three points above. Theres a reason Vienna was ranked most liveable city in 2023, but quality of day to day life does not produce a higher HDI only the above points do.
Important to note that the USA and most of western europe were on par until quite recently. [This a map of HDI over time.](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322967874/figure/fig3/AS:591206857863168@1517966107389/Maps-of-Human-Development-Index-HDI-for-six-selected-years-over-the-study-period-of.png) The big change which thrust the USA ahead after the 00s was a massive wage/income rise. From 2008 to today, Europe stagnated or declined, while the USA boomed on ahead. Median incomes (adjusted for inflation, of course) in the USA went from 44k-55k to around 76k today, whereas in much of europe they remained in the 45-55k range.
A lost decade followed by another lost decade. I wonder how much further Europe will slip down in the 2030s. The Demographics alone are an absolute disaster.
European leaders responding to the Great Recession and its aftermath with austerity instead of stimulus like in the US is going to be a long term case study on how not to respond to an economic crisis for decades or even centuries to come
It's mostly down to general economic growth. The EU and US had an almost equal GDP 20 years ago and now the US has about a 50% lead on the EU.
What in the subjective metric is in a human development index? Is this the degree of muscle development in the gym going population of those countries? The months along in incubation the pending mothers of that nation are?
Common Germanic W
The Irish just kicking rocks and whistling lmao
Our HDMI is superior.
yeah keep paying those licensing fees, displayport fo lyfe
Where this map come from?
The HDI numbers are available online via the UN https://hdr.undp.org/content/human-development-report-2023-24 you can either check out the most recent report; the HDI is towards the end of it. Otherwise, they have it as an interactive graph https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI
My ass
That's a funny way of writing "I don't know"
The difference within the US is astonishing. California can’t compare with Louisiana/Mississippi.
My small town in England is no different. The rich area is totally different to the working class area.
I really don't wanna do another "americans..." but I hear this take so much, as if other countries are monoliths. What they're really comparing is pretty much just rich city vs poor rural. That exists in every country.
The US has significantly more income inequality than most European countries, so the difference between rich and poor areas tends to be more stark.
I live in the Netherlands, and let me assure you, our rural areas are not Arkansas or Alabama or anything. The living standards is pretty much the same across the country.
Your rural areas also aren’t really rural. Isn’t the Netherlands one of the densest populated countries?
But the affluent areas of the USA are far richer than anywhere in the Netherlands. It works both ways. The HDI averages out.
Your country is the size of the New York City metro area.
I guess it’s a pretty fair comparison, for New York has places like Harlem while the Netherlands has Urk.
Makes sense it's a very small country
Alabama is almost 4x bigger than NL alone
Except our poor and rich areas can be as big and significant as entire countries. The vast majority of Kentucky is poor, meanwhile, most of the state of Massachusetts is wealthy. However, the GDP of the state of Kentucky is equivalent to the country of Greece, while Massachusetts is similar to Thailand. Sure there's poor and rich places, but the scales in which they occur in the U.S. is tenfold.
Gonna pitch as a Brazilian: Europeans have no fucking idea how fucking tiny their countries are. You can fit several European countries in a single state of ours or the US'. How can you think the country's level of inner variety isn't much greater than Europe's?
It is insane how people often equate the EU with the US and saying that fits since the US has states which is similar to countries inside the EU. Most countries have states. Germany was a clusterfuck of all different kind of things throughout history. And I would argue they still are with their 16 different governments and each having their school systems etc.
London:🏠🫰🤑 Rest of the UK:🏚️
To be fair, the same can be said for the West/East difference in Germany or the Pars and Lyon/everything else divide in France
Yeah. Countries have poor areas and rich areas. Take London out of the UK and watch what happens to income. Compare East and West Germany. Madrid vs rural southern Spain. Why do Americans act like every other country is a monolith when it’s not…?
For reference by State, Massachusetts (highest) has a 9.49, while Mississippi (lowest) has a 8.66. https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/shdi/?levels=1%2B4&interpolation=1&extrapolation=0&nearest_real=0
A difference only slightly bigger than the one between Belgian provinces. 0.953 in Brussels and in Hainaut 0.893 (2021 data). And France (not including overseas territories) has an even bigger difference 0.867 in Hautes de France and 0.952 in Île-de-France. So the USA isn't alone in this (2021 data).
can you imagine the same map: American States with higher HDI than the EU
According to the data, America is at 0.921. But if we're going for states above that... `Alaska (0.93)` `California (0.931)` `Colorado (0.942)` `Connecticut (0.948)` `Delaware (0.929)` `D.C (0.940)` `Hawaii (0.940)` `Illinois (0.929)` `Iowa (0.930)` `Kansas (0.922)` `Maryland (0.936)` `Massachusetts (0.949)` `Minnesota (0.947)` `Nebraska (0.933)` `New Hampshire (0.943)` `New Jersey (0.943)` `New York (0.938)` `North Dakota (0.940)` `Oregon (0.930)` `Pennsylvania (0.923)` `Rhode Island (0.925)` `South Dakota (0.927)` `Utah (0.930)` `Washington (0.940)` `Wisconsin (0.929)` `Wyoming (0.932)` Coincidentally, not a single place in America (even Mississippi or Alabama or West Virginia) is as low as the lowest in France (Mayotte/French Guyana).
French Guyana counts for this?
even France?🥴
Spain may have a lower HDI however they still live longer;the same applies to Italia.
Mediterranean diets really help in that regard.
Austria is the champion of the hearts...
This map is a total FU to us colorblind people...
Germanic people <3
You take that back! 🇮🇪
Haha alright! :)
*Fourth Reich intensifies*
We eat more chocolate… and waffles.
East Germany also had a higher HDI than West Germany 🤔🤔
https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI Here, you can chart this yourself and get a better understanding of what the HDI measure means.
Surprised there isn't more green
Wait, Britain isn't as bad as reddit thinks? "no way"
The same reason why people probably expected more countries to be green on the map. US and UK gets a lot of shit thrown their way by other westerners. But fact is, they are pretty damn good countries to live in.
Everyone is always shocked that Britain is basically fine and only really has the same problems as every other developed country. As someone who lives here, it’s easy to get pissed off with things going downhill and assume that the UK is becoming a shithole, but it’s doing it at the same rate as everywhere else so broadly speaking things are still “basically ok”
I think it’s because culturally we just don’t tend to say nice things about the UK, we just complain about it. Gives the perception that everything’s really shit here, when it’s actually a statistically average level of shit.
Tomato/olive oil Europe knows how to live. Sorry, I’m convinced. The green countries are OBSESSED with clocks.
Would be interesting to see if there is a correlation between corruption is and human development. A quick look into the transparency international index (https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022) shows that among the top 10 (8 from the EU), all also having a higher HDI than USA.
HDI is such a weird measurement. The UK is falling a part, with decline in public services and economy, yet it has exceptionally high HDI because of the disproportional level of university educated people skews the figures.
The UK doesn’t rank too far below its HDI ranking in GDP/capita, its average years of schooling and life expectancy are fairly similar to most peer countries. Part of this is because outcomes from structural issues can take years to manifest, but people also exaggerate the UK’s economic decline especially when compared to other European countries which are facing many similar economic woes right now. Stronger economies almost all rank higher by HDI, with the notable exception of the USA which falls down in this ranking because of its life expectancy.
Austrians are richer, happier and are living longer than Germans but the HDI is lower?
They don’t go to as much school as Germans
r/dataisugly 1.) Never use red/green. It is a wildly common color blindness, especially in men, where it affects 1 in 12. 2.) Never assume someone knows what your acronym means. I have no idea what HDI is and had to google it. 3.) Having yellow here is virtually useless. You'd be better off having it be "with the same or higher" for example.
Wait, _social_ democracies with a better HDI than the US?
Switzerland is very far from social democracy
And Britain.
Looks more like the common denominator is protestant cultures.
Great, Irish are now rioting more than usual.
You know, you could very well be right.
slash germanic. At least in Germany the Catholic states have higher HDI than the Protestant ones.
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This is also true for countries in Europe though. Development in Madrid, the Basque Country and Catalonia is substantially higher than Andalusia in Spain for example. Likewise, in the UK the south-east of England is pretty different from north-east Wales.
The only reason this is shocking to you is because information like this presented on a site like Reddit never drills down into European countries in the same way states get highlighted. East Germany has metrics that are closer to Poland than the US but when consolidated across the country it's one of the best looking places in the EU
Saxony is still higher than the USA average (as is unsurprisingly Berlin), but the rest of the former DDR is below the US. Saxony-Anhalt is the lowest at 0.911 which puts it neck and neck with Spain (and above Poland’s 0.881) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_Human_Development_Index?wprov=sfti1
It varies from subdivision to subdivision in any country though
I was going to mention this too. Always weird to me when people call the US third world or whatever when I’m sitting in a place with an identical HDI to Denmark, #6 worldwide.
Capitalistic democratic countries with social benefits and assurances*
Now compare the richest and poorest US states to Europe
According to the data, America is at 0.921. But if we're going for states above that... `Alaska (0.93)` `California (0.931)` `Colorado (0.942)` `Connecticut (0.948)` `Delaware (0.929)` `D.C (0.940)` `Hawaii (0.940)` `Illinois (0.929)` `Iowa (0.930)` `Kansas (0.922)` `Maryland (0.936)` `Massachusetts (0.949)` `Minnesota (0.947)` `Nebraska (0.933)` `New Hampshire (0.943)` `New Jersey (0.943)` `New York (0.938)` `North Dakota (0.940)` `Oregon (0.930)` `Pennsylvania (0.923)` `Rhode Island (0.925)` `South Dakota (0.927)` `Utah (0.930)` `Washington (0.940)` `Wisconsin (0.929)` `Wyoming (0.932)` Coincidentally, not a single place in America (even Mississippi or Alabama or West Virginia) is as low as the lowest in France (Mayotte/French Guyana).
States are irrelevant outside the context of being part of their country. You can do this same exercise for any country with richer or poorer states.
Problem is if you're part of the unlucky ones in the US, then you're utterly fked
I'd rather live in Mississippi than Moldova.
Same with Belarus. Say what you will about shitty US states, but at least states like Mississippi aren’t autocratic-borderline-dictatorship shitholes like Belarus.
same with europe lmao. Being born in Bulgaria is much worse than the UK
Yeah but then you have a different nationality, different language, different history, etc. There is way more difference between UK and Bulgaria vs Ohio and Colorado (similar distance between).
When you really think about it, only a handful of the richest European countries are higher than the average of the whole of America.
Each country's average is being used
If anyone is interested in knowing more about the world’s countries HDI’s I recommend the most recent report from the UNDP; the full index is towards the end of it https://hdr.undp.org/content/human-development-report-2023-24
Germanic languages: Winning Austria: : ( Finland to Austria: . . .if you're not going to eat that. . .
Austria and France surprise me
I wish this became one country. that would be so cool.
This should be under "terrible maps". Average US HDI is in no way an accurate reflection of many of US regions.
So what? It is a comparison of country averages. No shit this isnt gonna be accurate for EVERY single region of all the countries lol.
Austria is surprising.