The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune

Let me pour a bit of cheer in your Christmas egg-nog - mixed with a grain of salt.

The lead story in my daily online Caribbean Journal recently asked “What’s the best Caribbean country to live in?” and gave the answer “The Bahamas”.

So the most comprehensive review of regional hotels, resorts, travel and tourist development news is telling all you local nay-sayers, gloom bugs and worry-warts, “Cool it, man; you sittin’ in the top seat.”

How did the Journal reach this glorious hosanna for The Bahamas? It relied on the United Nations Index of Human Development. The recent 2015 report, covering 2014, ranks the world’s total 188 nations. Unfortunately, although tops in the Caribbean, The Bahamas ranks only 55 in this worldwide beauty pageant. At the head of the list, we find the usual suspects, Norway (beloved by Norwegians but who else?) followed by other Scandinavian countries, Canada, Australia, Swizerland, UK, USA etc, with our fellow small-island nation Singapore shining at No.11. They make up the elite 49 “Nations with Very High Human Development”.

The next group “Nations with (only) High Human Development”, from 50 to 105, include our country and most of our Caribbean neighbours. The unfortunate laggards, with only “Medium” or “Low” Human Development, take us right down to No.188, Niger, the tailender where I guess the UN finds life pretty miserable.

And lest we feel too boastful about being best in the Caribbean, the ranking includes only sovereign nations, not attractive dependencies like Cayman, Puerto Rico, US and British Virgin Islands, Turks & Caicos, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French and Dutch St Martin, Curaçao and Aruba - quite a carve-out from the competitive race.

Moreover, the rankings are derived from a precise statistical index figure dreamed up by the tireless UN statisticians. They take just three factors – national income per capita (adjusted for purchasing power parity), life expectancy at birth, and required years of schooling – which they combine in a formula of dizzying complexity to arrive at the final index figure for every country, from 0.944 for Norway (nobody’s perfect) to 0.790 for the Bahamas, down to 0.348 for lowly Niger. These strictly numerical metrics clearly measure quantity, not quality, despite the Journal’s fancy rhetoric that they are a “a new approach for advancing well-being, with an eye to quality of life”.

What do we learn about quality of life in The Bahamas from the cold facts that our average individual income is $21,336, our life expectancy at birth is 75.4 years, and 12.4 years of schooling is required? Why not use the number of SUVs per capita, the number of churches per capita, or as a balance, the deplorable average school leaving grade or annual homicide rate per capita?

Like every country, we are a unique mix of the good and the bad. The exercise of naming the best (or the worst) country to live in based on three statistics is patently absurd. The UN back office boffins can slave away on their research, but “best country” will always remain a subjective issue, to which 100 people may give you 100 different answers. Doubtless some individuals prefer to live in Niger rather than Norway.

As Christmas approaches, we can be thankful that despite our problems we have plenty of God-given good things here in The Bahamas, like being an archipelago with unmatched miles of world-class beaches. Let’s get our Christmas cheer from that, not from the over-blown hype published in the Caribbean Journal.

RICHARD COULSON

Nassau,

December 21, 2015.