their empirical data does not account for factors like wealth distribution, and a lot of the subjective indicators do not correlate strongly with the "objective" measures, with the exception of housing satisfaction.
Data and science doesn't make something objective. For something that claims to measure the quality of life of entire countries and compare them, I'd expect at least 70% of the world to be sampled in a thorough way.
Also, I don't think I've ever met anybody that genuinely believed the US was a third world country. They usually bring up its flaws in response to claims of "USA #1" or something along those lines which are slogans they grew up around their whole life. Now that they are looking into things, traveling, and experiencing more of life, they realize that that blanket statement holds no truth. The arm chair media consumption is definitely an issue but in the same way, I remember only reading good things about the US for almost the entirety of the 90s (consuming news from the BBC, Reuters, and local Japanese/Indian news orgs).
> Data and science doesn't make something objective
Well the “US is a third world country” take is based on no evidence whatsoever and defies all common sense, experience, etc, so I guess I’ll take the significant but imperfect evidence.
The idea of the US "turning into a third world country with a Gucci belt" is just a caricature; you are taking it extremely literally and I'm not sure why. But assuming large amounts of the population believed this to be a fact, this evidence from the website is not significant whatsoever. It's imperfect and insignificant. Any meaning you extract from it would be the equivalent of obtaining a desired trend from a plot full of randomly placed dots.
> The idea of the US "turning into a third world country with a Gucci belt" is just a caricature; you are taking it extremely literally and I'm not sure why.
Some people are intending it as a caricature and others are intending it literally (for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27520754). The literal case is obviously factually incorrect and the caricature case is unhelpful and divisive. Take your pick.
The amount of responses is skewed largely to 2-3 countries and the self-report guide is unreliable.
On top of that, by their own admission here: https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/how-s-life_97892641...
their empirical data does not account for factors like wealth distribution, and a lot of the subjective indicators do not correlate strongly with the "objective" measures, with the exception of housing satisfaction.
Data and science doesn't make something objective. For something that claims to measure the quality of life of entire countries and compare them, I'd expect at least 70% of the world to be sampled in a thorough way.
Also, I don't think I've ever met anybody that genuinely believed the US was a third world country. They usually bring up its flaws in response to claims of "USA #1" or something along those lines which are slogans they grew up around their whole life. Now that they are looking into things, traveling, and experiencing more of life, they realize that that blanket statement holds no truth. The arm chair media consumption is definitely an issue but in the same way, I remember only reading good things about the US for almost the entirety of the 90s (consuming news from the BBC, Reuters, and local Japanese/Indian news orgs).