If you were born today, which country would provide you with the very best opportunities to live a healthy, safe, and reasonably prosperous life? If you had a choice, would you still pick to live during this lifetime, in the United States? The fact of the matter is, certain countries give their citizens much greater opportunity to succeed than others, at certain points in time. As wealth and power shift from West to East, a new world order is taking shape, and it is no longer clear as to who is on top.

This past week, Newsweek published its results for a recent study done to find the world’s best countries. Unlike other competitions that occur throughout the world, this study took into account different criteria offering a nice change of pace from the criteria in the World Cup, the Olympics, and even the favorite Miss Universe pageant. Sure, I admit, I watch all three, but you can’t judge a country by its good looking sports players and beautiful women who like to prance around a stage in evening gowns. I don’t care what anyone says.

Newsweek explored and studied five aspects of national well-being that included health, education, quality of life, economy, and politics to find the globe’s true national champions. I bet you will be surprised to see who won. (Just an FYI, it wasn’t us.)

With the top 100 countries listed, the United States placed at number 11, a ranking that made people angry for a variety of reasons. I’ve heard people say that we should have been higher and others say that that is too generous of a rating for our country and the way it’s doing today (to put it politely). Despite the problems we are having today, if you look at the scores, the United States isn’t doing too badly on the playing field at all. With over an 85% in education, health, quality of life, and political environment, the United States would still be my choice of countries to live in.

I think that this country has forgotten all of the opportunities that are available here. We have a 99.0% literacy rating and an average of 15.8 years of schooling for the population, not to mention that our life expectancy is just two years below the number one country. Sure our economy is struggling, but that is a normal occurrence in the history of the world. What goes down must eventually come up, even if it has to come up slowly, bounce a little, and then roll for a bit. I would rather live here than in any of the countries that didn’t even manage to make the list.

So, which country took the crown home? Drum roll please. “And the winner of the 2010 World’s Best Country Award is… Finland…???”  [cricket…cricket…awkward silence…cricket]
Little Finland, with its small population, has in fact done surprisingly well for itself in this big world. Not far behind in the rankings come Switzerland, Sweden, and Australia respectively. But everyone has to remember that these rankings will continue to change from year to year, because countries change and the balance of power shifts. Let’s hope that in a couple of years, the USA will move back up into one of the rankings it undoubtedly occupied many years ago.