skarpi -

A somewhat inadequate explanation of how they calculate their "Human Development Index" is given in the report:

The human development index (HDI) is a composite index that measures the average achievements in a country in three basic dimensions of human development:
(1) a long and healthy life;
(2) access to knowledge; and
(3) a decent standard of living.

These basic dimensions are measured by
(1) life expectancy at birth,
(2) adult literacy and
(3) combined gross enrolment in primary, secondary and tertiary level education, and
(4) gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in Purchasing Power Parity US dollars (PPP US$), respectively.

A note cautions:

The HDI in this Report is constructed to compare country achievements across the most basic dimensions of human development. Thus, the indicators chosen are not necessarily those that best differentiate between rich countries. The indicators currently used in the index yield very small differences among the top HDI countries, and thus the top of the HDI ranking often reflects only very small differences in these underlying indicators.

For these high-income countries, an alternative index—the human poverty index (shown in Table 4)—can better reflect the extent of human deprivation that still exists among the populations of these countries and can help direct the focus of public policies.

Unfortunately(?) Table 4 shows data for Iceland in only two of the 9 columns, so that comparison is a bit vague.

It's quite clear that the "index" isn't intended to show the "best places to live," and the news release was just some reporter's attempt to make a headline. It's nice to make a list like this, even given the inappropriate "interpretation for us" by the reporter; but such lists generally have little significance - other than possibly for "beer brags."

For reasonably developed countries, the second index is closer to indicating the "amount of misery left in the tolerable places." At that, the US scores far too high and the "score" for Iceland is, at best, ambiguous.

There's not really much significant difference among the "rich developed" countries - which includes most of us here.

There are citations in this report for other sources of details of the index calculations; but this isn't the information I downloaded the report for, so it likely will be a while before I chase any of them down.

John