Looks Like It's Time To Move To Denmark

[Perezvon]

I thought about going there once for some time. But prices are so there high there you gotta be sure you'll get a job as soon as you move in. Otherwise it's going to wreck your shit.

[Guest Atom Dowry Firth]

so, is watmm danish now?

 

Just finished moving the last of my belongings into my new abode. There's still a van full of music equipment out on the street but it should be OK overnight. This isn't America lol!

[Hugh Mughnus]

heh, you're right. people suggesting we should experiment with the economy by artificially increasing the lowest wages, should be taken lightly. and the idea that the government should have more power over everything as well. we shouldn't think about things like how dictatorships with more power, when corrupted, can do more damage.

 

 

its a group of people somewhere who pick a set of criteria that seems right to them, and then somehow defines how they measure those criteria, then they average all of them down to a single number.

to put it nicely-

its retarded.

 

 

 

HDI is not just some arbitrarily selected criteria. It is very specific, measurable things relating to quality of life such as life expectancy and access to education. These things are generally accepted across the planet as things that are nice to have. Not "retarded" in the least.

 

of course you would view it as a scientific fact, you prob have a copy of the economist on your coffee table right now.

 

And would you look at that?.... I'm also relatively successful.

 

Maybe there's a correlation.

[Friendly Foil]

I hate to break it to you E but a country's HDI value is actually quite reliable.

[MadameChaos]

MadameChaos, on 28 Oct 2014 - 5:47 PM, said:

 

Timothy Forward, on 28 Oct 2014 - 5:36 PM, said:

 

MIXL2, on 28 Oct 2014 - 5:21 PM, said:

 

so, is watmm danish now?

 

Just finished moving the last of my belongings into my new abode. There's still a van full of music equipment out on the street but it should be OK overnight. This isn't America lol!

 

I thought you said you wouldn't even leave some old spanners out in the van.

 

where have you moved to?

[Hugh Mughnus]

I hate to break it to you E but a country's HDI value is actually quite reliable.

 

It is.

 

The numbers don't lie. There is really no "wiggle room" like E says when it pertains to items like "years in school" and "years alive". These aren't values you "interpret". They are absolutes. A mean is taken of the values (absolutes) and equally weighted when determining the final index number. It's just math.

 

Some countries on the lower end of the spectrum have imputed values/indicators because their means of collecting statistics are shoddy, but still.

Unless you live in some backwards country where you want to die younger with no education, the HDI is a pretty good indicator of QOL. It even fixes GNI/capita at 75k to help adjust for outliers.

 

It's a reliable number.

[MisterE]

I hate to break it to you E but a country's HDI value is actually quite reliable.

how exactly can you or anyone honestly think that taking 10 or more factors and boiling them down to one single digit number can be accurate in any sense of the word? it doesn't take a wizard or alfred einstein to know that i'm better off living anywhere in europe than probably anywhere in africa. but the difference on that list between Denmark and USA is 12 places on the list, and you yourself said that you knew Danes who wanted to live in the US so you seem to be contradicting yourself there a bit, don't you?

[azatoth]

Anecdotes always triumph rigorously compiled statistics.

[Rubin Farr]

Royale with cheese please!

[azatoth]

And mayonnaise on them fries, son!

[MisterE]

 

I hate to break it to you E but a country's HDI value is actually quite reliable.

 

The numbers don't lie. There is really no "wiggle room" like E says when it pertains to items like "years in school" and "years alive". These aren't values you "interpret". They are absolutes. A mean is taken of the values (absolutes) and equally weighted when determining the final index number. It's just math.

 

explain to me how for example 'goverment corruption' which is one of the items on that list, and which i'm finding a few items about online with regards to the gov of norway (for example a poll indicating that 4 of 10 people there see their gov and media as corrupt), can be turned into a number, which will be accurate and which i can compare one country to another with accurately? it should be easy since its simple math right, no wiggle room or room for opinion at all?

 

or actually, don't. you can just tell me how they arrive at their figure. obviously they have a method for coming to the figure, i'm aware of that. what i really want to know is, how can anyone honestly think that someone putting a value on something like that is something which can be called 'accurate' and unbiased? the whole reason there is a such thing as corruption is because of people being fallable, and so the value measuring corruption being assigned by people is a bit of a problem.

[Rubin Farr]

And mayonnaise on them fries, son!

The little plastic fry forks made us chuckle as children.

[Hugh Mughnus]

 

I hate to break it to you E but a country's HDI value is actually quite reliable.

how exactly can you or anyone honestly think that taking 10 or more factors and boiling them down to one single digit number can be accurate in any sense of the word? it doesn't take a wizard or alfred einstein to know that i'm better off living anywhere in europe than probably anywhere in africa. but the difference on that list between Denmark and USA is 12 places on the list, and you yourself said that you knew Danes who wanted to live in the US so you seem to be contradicting yourself there a bit, don't you?

 

 

I think you should look into how the number is arrived at.

 

It's not 10 or more factors to begin with. lol

 

 

I hate to break it to you E but a country's HDI value is actually quite reliable.

 

The numbers don't lie. There is really no "wiggle room" like E says when it pertains to items like "years in school" and "years alive". These aren't values you "interpret". They are absolutes. A mean is taken of the values (absolutes) and equally weighted when determining the final index number. It's just math.

 

explain to me how for example 'goverment corruption' which is one of the items on that list, and which i'm finding a few items about online with regards to the gov of norway (for example a poll indicating that 4 of 10 people there see their gov and media as corrupt), can be turned into a number, which will be accurate and which i can compare one country to another with accurately? it should be easy since its simple math right, no wiggle room or room for opinion at all?

 

 

What HDI are you looking at? lol

 

HDI is a geometric mean of an income, life expectancy, and education indexes.

[Guest Atom Dowry Firth]

 

 

so, is watmm danish now?

 

Just finished moving the last of my belongings into my new abode. There's still a van full of music equipment out on the street but it should be OK overnight. This isn't America lol!

 

I thought you said you wouldn't even leave some old spanners out in the van.

 

where have you moved to?

 

 

[Friendly Foil]

 

I hate to break it to you E but a country's HDI value is actually quite reliable.

how exactly can you or anyone honestly think that taking 10 or more factors and boiling them down to one single digit number can be accurate in any sense of the word? it doesn't take a wizard or alfred einstein to know that i'm better off living anywhere in europe than probably anywhere in africa. but the difference on that list between Denmark and USA is 12 places on the list, and you yourself said that you knew Danes who wanted to live in the US so you seem to be contradicting yourself there a bit, don't you?

 

A Danes opinion on the country and the system itself doesn't make that person die any sooner and the HDI value doesn't take individuals' opinions into account. It's about living standards, not the opinions of the people, so I don't really see how I'm contradicting myself in any way here.

[MisterE]

how do you measure living standards if not by the opinions of people?

[Adieu]

You don't needs statistics or math to know that the system the USA is operating under is shitty. And to say that a corrupted dictatorship is somehow more dangerous or worse than a corrupted democracy is false. A corrupted democracy is a just a dictatorship in disguise.

[Hugh Mughnus]

how do you measure living standards if not by the opinions of people?

 

We're talking about HDI. That number you said is unreliable.

 

straight from the association that administers the program:

 

"The HDI does not reflect on inequalities, poverty, human security, empowerment, etc. The HDRO offers the other composite indices as broader proxy on some of the key issues of human development, inequality, gender disparity and human poverty."

[Friendly Foil]

how do you measure living standards if not by the opinions of people?

E pls

[MisterE]

foil you literally said that peoples opinions on their own living conditions isn't important when considering the living standards of people. denmarks life expectancy in 2012 was about a year greater than the US's. so that extra year of 'wishing you werent paying for dumb people to go the hospital for a hurt toe every other day' is where that extra .63 points comes from?

 

we're literally debating whether the opinion of the actual people who live in a country, about their own feelings on their lives, is more accurate of an indicator of whether it is a good country to live in, compared to a 1 out of 10 score compiled by some rich people. theyve boiled 10 factors of living down into a 1-10 score. many people here would usually agree that converting anything into a 1-10 score is dumb, but apparently if that 1-10 score encompasses an entire country, it makes sense. and some of those factors aren't mathematical things, some are opinions- such as amount of corruption, what the best climate is, etc. some people wouldn't even agree that living longer is necessarily better. but we're saying the opinions of the Economist Intelligence Unit are more important than the opinions of the masses. and guys like adieu who were probably at occupy protests crying about the 1% (who compiled this list) are now jumping in to agree. beautiful.

[Npoess]

Denmark is pretty overrated tbh.

 

Move to Norway instead.

[auxien]

It's not that people's opinions don't matter, it's that they're hard/impossible to quantify. You can't just go talk to five random people from every country and get an idea of the living standards. You could go talk to 50,000 random people from every country and get a decent idea, though. But since interviewing 50,000 each in hundreds of countries would be highly expensive, statisticians look at the other data that already exist that we assume best hints at a peoples' well-being.

 

To be honest, even if you interviewed 50,000 people, I don't think I'd trust everything they said anyway. And most research tends to agree on this, hell even the justice system does. People's accounts of events, of their lives, of many things, are inherently biased when they themselves are reporting on it, whatever it is. Because people aren't generally good at being objective.

 

But you know what is good at being objective? Numbers. Stats, about mortality rates, cost of living, etc.

[Friendly Foil]

I have no idea what kind of argument you're trying to make here, to be honest. But no, that is most likely not where that extra year comes from. Maybe it has something to do with Europeans in general not eating food that'd be considered unhealthy for farm animals in such large quantities. What do I know.

 

Apparently not much. So now I'll be quiet. You win.

[psn]

Yeah, just let him win. Arguing with fundamentalists is futile.

[Npoess]

To be fair I'm a fan of the scandinavian welfare model and the general equality. I don't mind paying high taxes. But I'm currently a student, so maybe that sounds a bit hollow (I some years on the workforce on my CV though)

 

But the downside is that this high level of social services and other equality ensuring constituents has completely taken away the incentive for people be committed and responsible for their own lives, thus making Denmark lacking behind in things like innovation, just to use an example.

 

It's a very liberal thought, and I'm not particularly liberal person to be honest. But I have to agree with that criticism of the welfare state. I mean the level of "curling children" I see on a day to day basis is insane (the curling child phenomenon also applies to "adults", just to be clear).

 

Also the Danish welfare is not a given, it has a lot issues going forward, I think we have get used to the more insurance characterized welfare model in the future. Not something I'm a fan of, but we cant' keep paying for our current welfare model as it is now, in the future (only Norway has that kind of money). But maybe it's what a lot people need to wake up a little from their current slumber.

 

But I'm pretty ambivalent about the whole thing, as you might can hear. But I sure as shit don't mind high living standards as a student.