Canada

See, that's the thing. The 10 factors in the ranking include 1) Entrepreneurship, 2) "Open for Business", 3) "Movers", 4) Power, and 5) "Agility", or a place that is 'efficient in its actions, adopt and accept modern solutions'

So, like, half the factors are "how badly do you screw the environment and average non-capital-class citizen"

And in case you think I might be wrong about what they mean by "Movers", the top 5 are the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Saudia Arabia, and India.

Of COURSE our country, which is composed a bunch of oil, gas, and mining corps in a trenchcoat shaking hands with a couple of oligipolistic banks and telecoms will score well.

No, but the extreme right call Canada a dictatorship, a third world country, a shithole, etc. Hell, the leader of the official opposition called our freely and fairly elected right of center milquetoast Prime Minister and his father, "Marxists." It's ridiculous. Literally worthy of ridicule.

Most of the people who are complaining have no frame of reference other than being brought up in the safe, warm busom of one of the best countries in the world.

I can really relate to this. I lived outside of Canada for 25 years. I recently-ish moved back to Canada and am totally blown away by things here. Life isn't always amazing in any place you pick on the planet, but god damn, Canadians need to stop contemplating their collective belly button lint and focus on some of the massive issues that need attention.

I have lived all over the world and I agree. It’s one of the better places in the world but it’s not as great as a lot of Canadians believe

Meanwhile my girlfriend just got back from travelling around Europe and all of those "superior" countries, and couldn't wait to get home.

Said everyone was rude, taxis scammed her frequently, the public transit was pretty subpar with no other choice, the food was pretty mediocre, she had to be extra careful about pick pocketers, and lastly she said everyone stunk so bad from perfume that she had a constant headache.

Canada isn't perfect, but it does have a ton going for it.

That's what it looks like from Finland as well. Often in high rankings, it's just horrible to know what others are going through

Hey the USA is a great place to live if you make good money. Not a great place to be poor though.

He also says that it milquetoast right of center Prime Minister is a Marxist. He's a liar but the people who believe his nonsense are fucking idiots.

As a digital nomad, I'm guessing you would have been to relatively low CoL places like Bali, Thailand, maybe Eastern Europe or LatAm. You have to remember that your experience as someone from the global north, earning in a strong currency is very different from a local person there.

Not that i disagree with you that rankings are flawed but by the same token, Canada /is/ in the top 5 for many people from low standard-of-living countries

as a digital nomad

I don't know how they measured this at US News either, but the digital nomad experience is pretty different from the local experience. By digital nomad standards certain third world cities are great.

A set of 73 country attributes

an online survey [...] total of 17,195 individuals from 36 countries. Of the respondents, 8,267 were informed elites, 4,622 were business decision-makers and 7,402 were considered general public (43%). Survey participants were given a random subset of countries and country attributes to consider: about half of the attributes for roughly a third of the countries.

Participants assessed whether they associated an attribute with a nation. The more a country was perceived to exemplify a certain characteristic in relation to the average, the higher that country's attribute score.

Attributes were grouped into 10 thematic subrankings. Subranking scores for each country were determined by averaging the scores that country received in each of the attributes comprising that subranking.

To determine the weight each subranking score had in the overall Best Countries score, using correlation with GDP(PPP) per capita [...] a stronger relationship weighted more heavily: Entrepreneurship (14.13%), Quality of Life (14.12%), Agility (14.02%), Social Purpose (12.83%), Movers (11.54%), Cultural Influence (10.44%), Open for Business (9.43%), Adventure (5.37%), Power (5.00%), Heritage (3.13%).

The math sounds alright. My main gripe would be that it's survey-based (so highly affected by biased perceptions) and that an attribute impact in the overall ranking is dictated by its correlation with wealth, which is kinda arbitrary - and bleak. Great things like "friendly, fun, good for tourism, pleasant climate, scenic" (Adventure) and "culturally accessible, has a rich history, has great food, many cultural attractions, many geographical attractions" (Heritage) are heavily discounted.

To be honest, the only category of attributes I care about in this methodology are in the realm of Quality of Life (Canada #3), but I still find it wildly arbitrary that "good job market" is QoL but things like "pleasant climate" and "good food" are not. Anyway, the top 20 in QoL are the usual suspects, so I don't really care about minor changes in relative position between these - lol at US #23.