Successful societies

Lane Kenworthy, The Good Society
April 2026

Which countries have been most successful at achieving a high level of human wellbeing? The answer, to this point in history, is Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands. Figure 1 shows how each of the world’s rich longstanding-democratic nations fares on 12 wellbeing indicators.1

Figure 1. Successful society rank
Average rank on 12 wellbeing indicators. 1 is the highest rank; 21 is the lowest. The indicators are weighted equally in calculating the average. For descriptions of the indicators and data sources, see figures 2-13.

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THE CORE AIMS OF A GOOD SOCIETY

There are many goals we might seek in a good society.2 Which ones should we prioritize? Here is my take.

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls suggested that in order to decide what we want in a good society, we should imagine having to choose its features knowing we will be born into the society but not knowing what characteristics, interests, and abilities we will have and what our family, friends, neighborhood, and other circumstances will be like.3 Rawls concluded that in this scenario a reasonable person would choose for the society to have basic liberties, equality of opportunity, and the best possible living standard for the least well-off.4 This is compelling, though it needs a clarification and an adjustment.

Begin with the clarification. For Rawls, “basic liberties” means democratic political institutions and personal freedom.5

Next, the adjustment. True equality of opportunity is unattainable. Equal opportunity requires that each person has equivalent skills, abilities, knowledge, and noncognitive traits upon reaching adulthood, and that’s impossible to achieve. Our capabilities are shaped by genetics, developments in utero, parents, siblings, peers, teachers, preachers, sports coaches, tutors, neighborhoods, and a slew of chance events and occurrences. Society can’t fully equalize, offset, or compensate for these influences. Indeed, few of us likely want equal opportunity, as it would require massive intervention in home life and probably also genetic engineering. Moreover, if parents knew everyone would end up with the same capabilities at the end of childhood, they would have little incentive to invest effort and money in their children’s development, and that would result in a lower absolute level of capabilities for everyone. What we really want is for each person to have the most opportunity possible.

A Rawlsian vision of the good society thus features a democratic political system, personal freedom, the best possible standard of living for the least well-off, and extensive opportunity.

Amartya Sen has argued persuasively for seeing wellbeing as capabilities.6 What we should aim for, in Sen’s view, is to maximize each individual’s ability to choose what kind of life to lead and to pursue that life.

Core to capabilities, Sen suggests, are Rawls’s democracy, personal liberty, a decent income floor, and economic opportunity, to which Sen adds security, affluence, education, and health.7

Security means physical safety. It means having family or friends who you can count on to help you if you’re in need. It also includes economic security. People dislike loss, and we’re willing to pay substantial sums to avoid it or limit it.8 As a person’s income or assets increase, she will tend to buy more insurance. Similarly, as nations get richer, they tend to allocate a larger portion of their income (GDP) to insurance. One observer puts it as follows: “Many studies have found that a loss hurts roughly twice as much as an equal gain helps. That is why people are so keen to avoid loss, and so unwilling to incur the risk of loss…. It is precisely because people hate loss that we have a social safety net, a welfare state. People want the security that these entities provide…. If security is what most of us desperately want, it should be a major goal for society.”9

Affluence is desirable not only as a capability enhancer. It also changes what people want, what they believe, and what they prioritize. Drawing on decades of public opinion survey data from multiple countries, Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel have found that once people can be confident of survival and a decent standard of living, they tend to shift away from a worldview that emphasizes traditional sources of authority, religious dictates, traditional social roles, and the wellbeing of the group or community rather than that of the individual. This is replaced by a post-scarcity, “emancipative” orientation.

One element of a post-scarcity orientation is a desire for political rights — for democracy.

Another element is heightened emphasis on personal liberty. Most of us want the freedom to choose what to believe, how to behave, with whom to live, and so on. As material wellbeing increases, this desire for freedom comes to the fore.10 Sen stresses that personal liberty should include the economic sphere. As he puts it, “freedom of exchange and transaction is itself part and parcel of the basic liberties that people have reason to value.”11

A third element of a post-scarcity orientation is universalistic humanism, which deems all persons, including members of “outgroups,” as equally worthy of rights, opportunities, and respect. The goal here is inclusion — similar treatment by key institutions (schools, the legal system, etc.) and by other groups, opportunity to participate fully in society, and embrace as part of the community — for women, religious minorities, racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, people with disabilities, LGBT+ persons, among others.

So far we have nine core aims of a good society: affluence, democracy, personal freedom, security, a high standard of living for the least well-off, health, education and skills, opportunity, and inclusion. What else should we include?

Ask parents what they want most for their children and many will say “for them to be happy.” Richard Layard offers a case for subjective wellbeing as the central goal of a good society: “Jeremy Bentham proposed that all laws and all actions should aim at producing the greatest possible happiness. A society, he said, is good insofar as its citizens are happy. Thus a law is good if it increases the happiness of the citizens and decreases their misery; if it does not, it is bad…. I believe that Bentham’s idea was right and that we should fearlessly adopt it and apply it to our lives…. Why should we take the greatest happiness as the goal for our society? Why not some other goal — or indeed many? What about health, autonomy, accomplishment, or freedom? The problem with many goals is that they often conflict, and then we have to balance one against the other. So we naturally look for one ultimate goal that enables us to judge other goals by how they contribute to it. Happiness is that ultimate goal because, unlike all other goals, it is self-evidently good.”12 I disagree that happiness trumps all other aims.13 But we surely should see it as one of a good society’s core goals.

A good society will be willing to extend a helping hand to people in other societies who aren’t as fortunate. It will trade with them. It will partner with them in international organizations to establish rules and practices that improve people’s lives. It will share technology. It will provide financial assistance. It will allow some, perhaps many, to immigrate. And it will attempt to minimize any damage it does to the global commons.

Finally, a good society is one that aims to be even better, and that doesn’t rely for further improvement mainly on borrowing from elsewhere.14 It is a society that innovates.

Here, then, are 12 goals we should prioritize in a good society:

  • Affluence
  • Democracy
  • Personal freedom
  • Security
  • Living standard of the least well-off
  • Health
  • Education and skills
  • Opportunity
  • Inclusion
  • Happiness
  • Openness and support for people in other societies
  • Innovation

COUNTRY PERFORMANCE ON THE 12 CORE AIMS

What indicators should we use to measure countries’ performance on the 12 core goals? How have the rich longstanding-democratic nations performed according to these indicators?

Affluence

The standard measure of a nation’s affluence is its annual income per person: gross domestic product (GDP) per capita.15 In comparing across countries, the values are adjusted for differences in the cost of living.

Figure 2 shows GDP per capita in each of the rich longstanding-democratic nations. Norway, Switzerland, the United States, the Netherlands, and Denmark stand out at the high end. (Ireland does too, but it isn’t shown in the chart because its GDP is artificially boosted by its tax haven status.) For context, the world average is about $20,000 per person.

Figure 2. GDP per capita
Gross domestic product per person. Average over 2015 to 2024 (excluding the Covid pandemic years 2020-22). Adjusted for inflation. Adjusted for differences in the cost of living using purchasing power parities. 2021 international dollars. “k” = thousand. Data source: World Bank, via Our World in Data, “GDP per capita.” Ireland is omitted because its GDP is artificially high.

Democracy

The best measure of democratic political institutions is the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project’s liberal democracy index.16 V-Dem uses expert judgment to assign scores to each nation on eight components of liberal democracy: share of adult citizens who have the right to vote, executive and legislature are elected, elections are free and fair, freedom of expression, freedom of association, legislative constraints on the executive, judicial constraints on the executive, and individual liberties and equality before the law. These scores are aggregated, yielding an overall liberal democracy score on a scale of 0 to 1. V-Dem has scores for every country in the world from 1789 to the present.

Figure 3 shows these liberal democracy scores. Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, and Norway top the list, followed by Germany, Finland, Belgium, and New Zealand.17

Figure 3. Liberal democracy
Average over 2015 to 2024 (excluding the Covid pandemic years 2020-22). Scale: 0 to 1. Aggregated from country scores on eight criteria: share of adult citizens who have the right to vote, executive and legislature are elected, elections are free and fair, freedom of expression, freedom of association, legislative constraints on the executive, judicial constraints on the executive, individual liberties and equality before the law. The horizontal axis doesn’t begin at zero. Data source: Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), via Our World in Data, “Liberal democracy index.”

Personal freedom

The Cato Institute and the Fraser Institute compile country scores on a scale of 0 to 10 for various components of personal freedom.18 The measure I use here includes eight: rule of law, freedom of movement, religious freedom, freedom of association, freedom of expression and information, freedom of identity and relationships, legal system and property rights, and limited economic regulation.

As we see in figure 4, the nations with the highest levels of personal freedom according to this measure are New Zealand, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Norway.19

Figure 4. Personal freedom
Average over 2015 to 2023 (excluding the Covid pandemic years 2020-22). Scale: 0 to 10. Average country scores for eight elements of freedom: rule of law, freedom of movement, religious freedom, freedom of association, freedom of expression and information, freedom of identity and relationships, legal system and property rights, and limited economic regulation. The horizontal axis doesn’t begin at zero. Data source: Ian Vásquez, Matthew D. Mitchell, Ryan Murphy, and Guillermina Sutter Schneider, The Human Freedom Index 2025, Cato Institute and Fraser Institute, 2025.

Security

I construct an indicator of security that has five components. Two are measures of physical security: the homicide rate and the share of the population answering yes to the question “Do you feel safe walking alone at night in the city or area where you live?”20 The third is the share of people who respond yes to the question “If you were in trouble, do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them, or not?” The fourth and fifth are measures of economic security: the share of households that don’t experience a large income decline from one year to the next and a modest inflation rate.21 Each of the five is scored on a scale of 0 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to greater security. The security indicator is an average of the five scores.

As we see in figure 5, the rich democracies that do best on security according to this measure are Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Japan.22

Figure 5. Security
Average country scores on five items, each of which is on a scale of 0 to 100. Item 1: Homicide rate. Rescaled so a lower rate has a higher score. Average over 2015 to 2023. Data source: Ian Vásquez, Matthew D. Mitchell, Ryan Murphy, and Guillermina Sutter Schneider, The Human Freedom Index 2025, Cato Institute and Fraser Institute, 2025. Item 2: Share of adults responding yes to the question “Do you feel safe walking alone at night in the city or area where you live?” Average over 2016 to 2025. Data source: Gallup World Poll. Item 3: Share of adults responding yes to the question “If you were in trouble, do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them, or not?” Average over 2015 to 2024. Data source: Gallup World Poll. Item 4: Share of households not experiencing a year-to-year income decrease of 25% or more. Average over the two-year periods between 1985 and 2015. Excludes households that enter retirement between one year and the next. Data source: Jacob S. Hacker, “Economic Security,” in For Good Measure: Advancing Research on Well-Being Metrics beyond GDP, edited by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Jean-Paul Fitoussi, and Martine Durand, OECD, 2018, table 8.4, using data from the ECHP, EU-SILC, CPS, and CNEF (BHPS, SOEP, HILDA, KLIPS, SHP, SLID). Data are missing for Japan and New Zealand; the average value for the other nations is substituted for both. Item 5: Modest inflation over the years 2015-2024. Score is 100 if the inflation rate is below 3% in all years. Five points are subtracted for each year in which inflation is 3% to 7.9%. Ten points are subtracted for each year in which inflation is 8% or higher. Data source: OECD Data Explorer, “Consumer price indices (CPIs, HICPs), COICOP 1999.” The horizontal axis doesn’t begin at zero.

Standard of living of the least well-off

Our best indicator of the living standard of the least well-off is household income.23 For all but one of the affluent longstanding-democratic nations, we have comparable income data at the tenth percentile of the income distribution (below this level in the distribution there are worries about data reliability). Government transfers are included in this income measure, and tax payments are subtracted out. As with the GDP per capita data above, these numbers are adjusted for differences across countries in the cost of living.

Norway and Switzerland lead the pack here, as we see in figure 6. They are followed by Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Austria.

Figure 6. Tenth-percentile household income
2019. Posttransfer-posttax household income. The income measure includes earnings, government cash and near-cash transfers, and other sources of cash income. Tax payments are subtracted. The incomes are adjusted for household size and then rescaled to reflect a three-person household, adjusted for inflation, and converted to US dollars using purchasing power parities (PPPs). The PPPs adjust for differences in the cost of living (including housing); they also adjust for differences in consumption taxes, which aren’t subtracted from income. “k” = thousand. Data sources for household income: Luxembourg Income Study, “LIS key figures”; OECD Data Explorer, “Income distribution database.” Data sources for inflation adjustment and purchasing power parities: OECD Data Explorer, “Consumer price indices (CPIs, HICPs), COICOP 1999” and “Annual purchasing power parities and exchange rates.” Japan is omitted due to missing data.

Health

There are many ways to measure health. The most straightforward is how long we live.24 Because we care about the quality of life, not just the quantity, the best single measure is “healthy life expectancy,” which is the expected number of years a person will live in good health — that is, without disability or disease. The World Health Organization has estimates for countries beginning in 2000.

Figure 7 shows that Japan, Korea, Spain, Switzerland, and Italy lead the affluent democracies at around 72 to 74 years of expected healthy life.

Figure 7. Healthy life expectancy
2019. Expected years of life in good health — without disability or disease. At birth. 2019 is the most recent non-Covid year for which these data are available. The horizontal axis doesn’t begin at zero. Data source: World Health Organization, “Healthy life expectancy at birth (years),” data.who.int.

Education and skills

Cognitive skills include knowledge, reasoning, problem solving, and communication abilities. At the country level we typically measure this using years of schooling completed or direct assessments of skills.25 Skill assessments are likely a better measure, especially for comparing across nations, as the number of years of schooling completed means different things in different countries. Periodically the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conducts an assessment of adult skills in literacy, numeracy, and adaptive problem solving. Figure 8 shows the share of persons age 16 to 65 who scored at a level of 2 or higher on the OECD’s 2023 assessment.

Japan, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and the Netherlands are the top performers, each with 88% or more of adults achieving this basic level of competency.

Figure 8. Skills
2023. Share of persons age 16 to 65 who perform at level 2 or higher on OECD assessment of literacy, numeracy, and adaptive problem-solving. Scale: below 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The horizontal axis doesn’t begin at zero. Data source: OECD, Do Adults Have the Skills They Need to Thrive in a Changing World? Survey of Adult Skills 2023, OECD Publishing, 2024, table A.2.3. Australia is omitted due to missing data.

Opportunity

There is no way to directly measure opportunity. A useful indirect measure is the share of persons with parents in the bottom fifth of incomes who end up above the bottom fifth when they are adults (“relative intergenerational income mobility”).26 Unfortunately, comparable data for this measure are available for only a small subset of the rich democratic nations. Another indirect measure comes from a question asked by the Gallup World Poll: “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?” We can treat the share responding “satisfied” as an indicator of opportunity, of the degree to which capabilities extend widely across the population.27

Figure 9 shows Finland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, and Switzerland topping the list, with 90% or more of the population reporting satisfaction with their freedom to choose what to do with their life.

Figure 9. Freedom to make life choices
Average over 2016 to 2025 (excluding the Covid pandemic years 2020-22). Share of adults answering satisfied to the question “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?” Don’t know and refused responses (usually 2% or less) are excluded. The horizontal axis doesn’t begin at zero. Data source: Gallup World Poll.

Inclusion

I construct an indicator of inclusion that has two components. One measures the degree to which people of varying socioeconomic status, gender, ethnicity, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity receive equal treatment in employment, public services, and the judicial system. The other measures public opinion about the degree to which the country is inclusive.

Figure 10 shows that the most inclusive countries, according to this measure, are Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, and Denmark, followed by Sweden, Belgium, and Germany.

Figure 10. Inclusion
Inclusion index. Average over 2016 to 2025 (excluding the Covid pandemic years 2020-22). The index scores are averages from two sub-indexes. The first sub-index measures whether individuals receive equal treatment (are free from discrimination) — based on socioeconomic status, gender, ethnicity, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity — with respect to public services, employment, court proceedings, and the justice system. Data source: World Justice Project, WJP rule of law index, indicator 4.1. Data are missing for Switzerland; I assign it a value such that its rank on this sub-index is 16th, which is where other indicators of legal rights suggest it is positioned.The second sub-index assesses public opinion. It is the average share of the population giving the inclusive response to six questions: (1) Do you believe that women in this country are treated with respect and dignity, or not? (2) Have you, personally, ever experienced any discrimination because of your religion? (3) Is the city or area where you live a good place or not a good place to live for racial and ethnic minorities? (4) Is the city or area where you live a good place or not a good place to live for people with intellectual disabilities? (5) Is the city or area where you live a good place or not a good place to live for gay or lesbian people? (6) Is the city or area where you live a good place or not a good place to live for immigrants from other countries? Data source: Gallup World Poll. The horizontal axis doesn’t begin at zero.

Happiness

Happiness consists of some combination of three elements: life satisfaction, which involves an appraisal of the overall condition of one’s life; positive feelings, such as pleasure and joy; and negative feelings, such as worry, frustration, anger, and sadness. Life satisfaction is the most informative component and hence the most commonly used, especially when comparing across nations.28 It’s typically measured using responses to a question such as “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”

Can we trust survey responses to accurately tap people’s subjective wellbeing? Yes. Responses tend to correlate strongly with the assessments of friends and family and with clinical assessments. There is no indication of desirability bias in responses. When the same people are asked these survey questions over time, their responses tend to be consistent, with predictable changes in the face of major life shocks such as divorce and unemployment. And when people are asked both a life satisfaction question and a happiness question, their answers are strongly correlated.29

Figure 11 shows each country’s average on the life satisfaction ladder question. Finland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Sweden are at the top, with average scores around 7.5. Should we instead use the average among the least well-off — say, those in the bottom fifth of incomes in the country? It wouldn’t change the story, as the ordering of countries is virtually identical.

Figure 11. Life satisfaction
Average over 2016 to 2025 (excluding the Covid pandemic years 2020-22). Scale: 0 to 10. Average response to the question “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?” The horizontal axis doesn’t begin at zero. Data source: Gallup World Poll.

Openness and support for people in other societies

For this good-society goal, I use a composite indicator that attempts to capture a country’s efforts to help people in other nations, especially ones that are less advantaged. It has eight components: foreign aid, openness to imports from developing countries, openness to migrants and refugees, foreign investment, support for technology diffusion, greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental concerns, support for global public health, and contributions to peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention.30

Sweden, Germany, Norway, Finland, and the United Kingdom score highest, as we see in figure 12.

Figure 12. Commitment to development
Commitment to development index. 2025. Scale: 0 to 100. Aggregated from country scores on eight components: foreign aid, openness to imports from developing countries, openness to migrants and refugees, foreign investment, support for technology diffusion, greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental concerns, support for global public health, and contributions to peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention. The horizontal axis doesn’t begin at zero. Data source: Center for Global Development.

Innovation

Each year the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) compiles country-level data on a host of measures of science and innovation investment, technological progress, technology adoption, and socioeconomic impact. It aggregates these into a “global innovation index.”

According to this assessment, the innovation leaders over the past decade have been Switzerland, Sweden, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland, as we see in figure 13.31

Figure 13. Innovation
Global innovation index. Average over 2015 to 2025 (excluding the Covid pandemic years 2020-22). Aggregated from country scores on 78 indicators of science and innovation investment, technological progress, technology adoption, and socioeconomic impact. The index scoring has changed over time, so the countries are ranked each year and the values shown in this chart are average rankings. 1 is the highest rank; 21 is the lowest. Data source: World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Global Innovation Index, various years.

THE MOST SUCCESSFUL COUNTRIES ARE SWITZERLAND, NORWAY, SWEDEN, DENMARK, FINLAND, AND THE NETHERLANDS

The “successful society” country ranking in figure 1 above is calculated as each nation’s average rank on the indicators of the 12 core aims of a good society. The indicator scores themselves are in figures 2-13.

Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands are at the top of the overall ranking. These countries are the most successful at achieving a high level of human wellbeing.

OBJECTIONS AND ALTERNATIVES

Is this conclusion correct? Let’s consider some potential additions, amendments, and alternatives.

Are there additional core aims a good society should have?

There are plenty of additional aims we might seek in a good society — community, employment, good government, housing, income and wealth equality, privacy, trust, work-family-leisure balance, among many others.32 In my view each of these is (1) of secondary importance or (2) likely to affect wellbeing via its impact on one or more of the 12 core goals. For example, income and wealth equality (or low inequality) has considerable value, but not on par with that of the 12 core aims I focus on here.33 A high employment rate contributes to wellbeing mainly via the boost it’s likely to give to affluence, security, the living standard of the least well-off, opportunity, inclusion, and happiness.34

Others may see things differently, however. Does including additional aims and indicators alter the conclusion about which countries have been most successful? Let’s look at some alternative multidimensional wellbeing measures.

The longest-running and best-known multidimensional wellbeing measure is the human development index (HDI). Though it has only three components — affluence, education, and health — its prominence makes it a good starting point. As we see in figure 14, the country ranking on the HDI overlaps quite a bit with the successful society ranking, though on the HDI Germany and Australia do better and Finland worse.

Figure 14. Successful society rank and human development index rank
1 is the highest rank; 21 is the lowest. Horizontal axis: Successful society rank. See figure 1 above. Vertical axis: Rank on the 2023 human development index, which is aggregated from three indicators. Data source: United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 2025, statistical annex table 1. The correlation is +.84.

The OECD has a measure of “current wellbeing” based on 24 indicators of material conditions, quality of life, and community relationships. Figure 15 shows a good bit of similarity here too, though Austria and Ireland do better in the OECD ranking than in the successful society ranking.

Figure 15. Successful society rank and OECD current wellbeing rank
1 is the highest rank; 21 is the lowest. Horizontal axis: Successful society rank. See figure 1 above. Vertical axis: Rank on the OECD’s 2023 current wellbeing measure, which is aggregated from 24 indicators of material conditions, quality of life, and community relationships. Data source: OECD, How’s Life? 2024, OECD Publishing, 2024, table 4.5. The correlation is +.86.

A third measure worth considering is the social progress index, which aggregates 57 “social” indicators (it excludes economic indicators). As we see in figure 16, once again the rankings overlap considerably, though Ireland moves ahead of the Netherlands among the top countries.

Figure 16. Successful society rank and social progress index rank
1 is the highest rank; 21 is the lowest. Horizontal axis: Successful society rank. See figure 1 above. Vertical axis: Rank on the 2025 social progress index, which is aggregated from 57 indicators. Data source: Social Progress Imperative, Social Progress Index, socialprogress.org. The correlation is +.92.

Lastly, figure 17 compares the successful society ranking with that of the Legatum prosperity index, which aggregates 300 wellbeing indicators. The top six countries are identical, and the overall correlation between the two rankings is once again very strong.

Figure 17. Successful society rank and Legatum prosperity index rank
1 is the highest rank; 21 is the lowest. Horizontal axis: Successful society rank. See figure 1 above. Vertical axis: Rank on the 2023 Legatum prosperity index, which is aggregated from 300 indicators. Data source: Legatum Institute, “The 2023 Legatum Prosperity Index,” index.prosperity.com, p. 22. The correlation is +.96.

For the reasons spelled out above, I think the best measure of a good society is one that captures 12 core aims — affluence, democracy, personal freedom, security, living standard of the least well-off, health, education and skills, opportunity, inclusion, happiness, openness and support for people in other societies, and innovation. The successful society ranking does this. While others will favor including additional aims, that may not alter the conclusion. Alternative multidimensional wellbeing measures with as few as 3 indicators and as many as 300 tell a largely similar story about which countries have been the most successful.

Should the core aims of a good society be different ones?

Some believe a good society is one in which no one needs to engage in paid work, or employees control decision making in firms, or private ownership in the economy is limited. If these are the core aims, there is no point in attempting to identify successful countries, because we have too little evidence to draw upon.35

Another version of this objection would say the list of 12 core good-society goals I use here stacks the deck against a country like the United States by giving too much attention to the wellbeing of the less-advantaged. But that’s mistaken. The 12 core aims don’t include institutions and outcomes on which the US typically fares worse than other rich democratic nations, such as welfare state expansiveness and generosity, a low relative poverty rate, low income inequality or wealth inequality, and work-life balance. Instead, America’s low position in the successful society ranking owes to its comparatively subpar performance on democracy, personal freedom, security, health, skills, opportunity, happiness, and openness and support for people in other societies.

The United States was one of the world’s most successful societies from 1870 to 1970.36 It was a leader in mass education, in economic innovation, in longevity-enhancing medical advances. It was among the most affluent, and this affluence extended to Americans in the middle and even at the bottom. It was a leader in democracy, personal freedom, and opportunity, though some notable groups weren’t sufficiently included. And it was in many respects the country most open to and supportive of people in other nations — from its openness to immigration before the 1920s and after 1965 to its military contributions in the two world wars to its central role in creating and sustaining the liberal international order beginning in 1945 (the United Nations, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Marshall Plan, assorted trade agreements and institutions, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and more).

America’s success played a key role in making it possible for other nations to catch up and pull ahead. But pull ahead they have.

A few technical concerns

Should some of the core aims be weighted more heavily than others? In calculating the overall “successful society” ranking, I weight each of the 12 indicators equally. There are arguments for weighting some more heavily, but in the absence of agreement about this, equal weighting is a sensible approach.37

Should the overall success measure be calculated from scores rather than rankings? Figures 2-13 show country scores for each of the indicators. In calculating the overall successful society ranking, I use country rankings on each of the indicators. As a general principle, it’s preferable to use scores (transformed to a common scale) rather than rankings. But sometimes we don’t know whether large gaps are equally meaningful from one indicator to another. That’s the case here. For example, we don’t know whether the gap between Germany and the US in healthy life expectancy (figure 7) is comparable to the gap between Spain and the countries at the low end on freedom to make life choices (figure 9). In this situation, using rankings is a good choice.

Even so, it’s worth checking to see if using scores yields a different conclusion.38 It doesn’t. If we aggregate country scores for the 12 indicators rather than country rankings, the result correlates almost perfectly with the ranking in figure 1 above, and the top six performers are the same.39

Do the indicators need to be measured at the exact same point in time? Ideally, each of the 12 indicators would be measured in a consistent way in each year over the past decade. Where that’s the case, I’ve used an average over that period, usually excluding the Covid pandemic years 2020-22. Where data are available for fewer years or different years, that’s unlikely to be a cause for concern, as the aim is simply to have a country ranking that’s representative of the recent period.40

Successful and more successful, not bad and good

My aim here is to identify the countries that have been most successful. The comparative nature of this exercise makes it easy to lose sight of the fact that all of these rich longstanding-democratic nations are good societies in many respects.

Consider Italy, which comes in last in the overall ranking in figure 1. Italy ranks near the bottom on all but a few of the core goals. The only goal on which it ranks in the top half is healthy life expectancy.

Yet Italy is an affluent democratic nation with immense natural and architectural beauty, wonderful food, and a culture that prizes work-life balance and la dolce vita. It receives more tourists per capita than any other large country.41 It’s my favorite country to visit.

That said, if I’m in Rawls’s “original position” and asked to choose what society to be born into, I’m likely to choose one in which household income for those at the low end is $25,000 (Sweden) rather than $15,000 (Italy), in which healthy life expectancy is equally high, in which 93% of people are satisfied with their freedom to make life choices rather than 66%, in which fewer people experience a large year-to-year income decline and more people feel safe walking alone in the area where they live, and in which the average person is about 1 point happier on a 0-to-10 scale.

CAUSES OF SUCCESS

The purpose of identifying the most successful societies isn’t to establish bragging rights. It’s to help us understand what works for achieving good-society goals.

What are the causes of successful countries’ success? Likely contributors include affluence, liberalism, social democratic capitalism, and well-governed cities.42

SUMMARY

The world’s most successful countries, as of the early decades of the 21st century, are Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands. They’ve been the best at achieving the core aims of a good society.

It bears emphasizing that even the most successful societies have room for improvement. On most indicators, the top-ranking nations are a good bit below the maximum possible level. We haven’t yet reached peak humanity.

  1. I exclude very-low-population Iceland and Luxembourg. ↩︎
  2. Lane Kenworthy, “What Do We Want in a Good Society?,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  3. Rawls refers to this as the “original position.” ↩︎
  4. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, 1971. ↩︎
  5. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, 1996. ↩︎
  6. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, Anchor Books, 1999. See also Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, Harvard University Press, 2011. ↩︎
  7. He says, for instance: “Growth of GNP or of individual incomes can be very important as means to expanding the freedoms [capabilities] enjoyed by the members of the society. But freedoms depend also on other determinants, such as social and economic arrangements (for example, facilities for education and health care) as well as political and civil rights…. [Wellbeing] requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation.” Sen, Development as Freedom, p. 3. ↩︎
  8. Wikipedia, “Loss Aversion.” ↩︎
  9. Richard Layard, Happiness, Penguin, 2005, p. 168. ↩︎
  10. Lane Kenworthy, “Affluence and Progress,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  11. Sen, Development as Freedom, p. 6. ↩︎
  12. Richard Layard, Happiness, Penguin, 2005, pp. 111-113. See also Richard Layard and David M. Clark, Thrive: How Better Mental Health Care Transforms Lives and Saves Money, Princeton University Press, 2015; Richard Layard and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Wellbeing: Science and Policy, Cambridge University Press, 2023; Jeremy Bentham, The Complete Works of Jeremy Bentham, volume 10, Online Library of Liberty, 1843. ↩︎
  13. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Basic Books, 1974; Sen, Development as Freedom. ↩︎
  14. Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson, and Thierry Verdier, “Asymmetric Growth and Institutions in an Interdependent World,” Journal of Political Economy, 2017. ↩︎
  15. Lane Kenworthy, “Economic Growth,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  16. Bastian Herre, “Democracy Data: How Sources Differ and When to Use Which One,” Our World in Data; Lane Kenworthy, “Democracy,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  17. Canada’s comparatively low score on the liberal democracy index is due mainly to the legislative constraints on the executive criterion. “The prime minister and other members of the political executive are responsible to a popularly elected House of Commons. Nonetheless, the Canadian prime minister enjoys wide-ranging powers that in practice are far more extensive than those enjoyed by prime ministers in other Westminster systems. The nature of the leadership selection process, strict party discipline, and a fragmented opposition help ensure prime ministerial dominance over both parliament and cabinet. So too do strong central agencies. While personalization and popularization of prime ministerial leadership is not as pronounced in Canada as in the UK, it is nevertheless an important factor. Prime ministers are beholden to very few interests in their parties, which they dominate. In the Canadian system, one finds many of the characteristics of presidentialization without any of the formal attributes. Federalism and the strength of the provinces act as the major constraint on prime ministerial power. In important respects, Canadian prime ministers are more powerful than presidents in some presidential systems.” Herman Bakvis and Steven B. Wolinetz, “Canada: Executive Dominance and Presidentialization,” in The Presidentialization of Politics: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies, edited by Thomas Poguntke and Paul Webb, Oxford University Press, 2005. ↩︎
  18. Lane Kenworthy, “Personal Freedom,” The Good Society; Kenworthy, “Economic Freedom,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  19. Is France really low on personal freedom? In an absolute sense, no. But in comparison to other affluent democracies, the answer is yes. France scores near or at the bottom on all eight of the personal freedom elements. ↩︎
  20. Lane Kenworthy, “Safety,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  21. Lane Kenworthy, “Stable Income and Expenses,” The Good Society; Kenworthy, “Macroeconomic Policy,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  22. Why does Belgium score so low on the security indicator? It’s because Belgium scores among the lowest on the two measures of physical safety and on the inflation measure and in the middle on the measures of personal support and large income decline. ↩︎
  23. Lane Kenworthy, “A Decent and Rising Income Floor,” The Good Society. A better indicator would include direct measures of material wellbeing, such as inability to adequately heat home, constrained food choices, overcrowding, poor environmental conditions such as noise and pollution, arrears in payment of utility bills, arrears in mortgage or rent payment, difficulty in making ends meet. However, while various EU or country-specific surveys ask questions such as these, these don’t cover enough of the countries. The Gallup World Poll asks in all of the countries “Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have enough money to buy food for you or your family?” and “… to provide adequate shelter or housing for you and your family?” But these aren’t especially helpful for rich nations. ↩︎
  24. Lane Kenworthy, “Longevity,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  25. Lane Kenworthy, “What Good Is Education?,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  26. Lane Kenworthy, “Equality of Opportunity,” The Good Society; Kenworthy, “Types of Mobility,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  27. Across the countries for which there are data, this measure correlates at +.93 with the relative intergenerational income mobility measure. ↩︎
  28. World Happiness Report, various issues. ↩︎
  29. Lane Kenworthy, “Happiness,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  30. Edward Wickstead and Ian Mitchell, “The Commitment to Development Index, 2025 Edition: Methodological Overview Paper,” Center for Global Development, November 2025. ↩︎
  31. Why does Italy score so low on innovation? After digging through the global innovation index documentation, ChatGPT 5.4 Pro concludes that “Italy is relatively good at turning what it has into design, manufacturing, patenting, and other outputs, but relatively weak on the institutional, entrepreneurial, and finance-for-innovation foundations that many peer countries do better on.” ↩︎
  32. Lane Kenworthy, The Good Society. ↩︎
  33. Lane Kenworthy, Is Inequality the Problem?, Oxford University Press, 2025. ↩︎
  34. Lane Kenworthy, “Employment,” The Good Society. ↩︎
  35. Lane Kenworthy, Would Democratic Socialism Be Better?, Oxford University Press, 2022. ↩︎
  36. Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal, W.W. Norton, 2007; Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Economic Growth, Princeton University Press, 2016; J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, Basic Books, 2022. ↩︎
  37. Matija Kovacic, “Weighting Methods,” JRC-COIN, European Commission, 2021; Jeffrey D. Sachs, Guillaume Lafortune, Grayson Fuller, and Guilherme Iablonovski, Sustainable Development Report 2025, p. 52. ↩︎
  38. Competence Centre on Composite Indicators and Scoreboards, European Commission, “Normalisation,” 2020. ↩︎
  39. The scores on each of the indicators are first normalized as standard deviation scores (“z-scores”). Across the countries, the correlation between the average ranking (shown in figure 1) and the average z-score is -.99. ↩︎
  40. One exception is the security indicator’s measure of large income decline, which is only available for 1985 to 2015. I don’t think that’s a problem, as there is no reason to suspect that the country ranking on this measure has changed significantly since 2015. The share is likely to be larger in countries with expansive and generous public insurance programs that compensate for lost or reduced earnings — sickness insurance, unemployment insurance, paid parental leave, disability assistance, and others. A high employment rate also is likely to help; if a household member loses his or her job, it’s easier to find a new one or for another member of the household to become employed, increase work hours, or take on a second job. ↩︎
  41. Our World in Data, “Arrivals of tourists from abroad per 1,000 people.” Large country: population of more than 50 million. ↩︎
  42. Lane Kenworthy, “Affluence and Progress,” The Good Society; Kenworthy, “Liberalism,” The Good Society; Kenworthy, “Social Democratic Capitalism,” The Good Society. ↩︎