3 ms·

Show HN: Greatcountry.org – Ranking all countries in the world

7 points by freediver 5y ago

beardyw 5y ago
This is good. Would be good to have an indication as to what the figure mean - even is higher better than lower. Or are they rankings themselves, etc. Also maybe ability to sort by column?
freediver 5y ago
I was curious what is the greatest country in the world so took about a week to find out. The lists one may find in magazines or "news" sites are usually based on just a few factors like income or life expectancy. I always wondered what would happen if you average in as many factors as you can, including things like happiness, air pollution, olympic medals per capita, climate change risk, wealth inequality... Using data from reputable sources I assembled the rankings. Methodology: - I found as many relevant factors I could with data coming from reputable sources (existing indexes, academic data/research, wikipedia, ...) - Ranked the countries from the data - Removed factors that had high Pearson correlation to others (>0.8) so to not repeat a factor in score. This left 16 factors. - Removed countries that did not have at least 11 factor appearances. This left 139 countries. I did not normalize ranking data for remaining countries, felt that leaving it as is was useful signal. - Averaged all factors Observations: - Greatest country in the world is... Switzerland! - Only two non-european countries to make it to top 10 are New Zealand and Japan - Traffic death rate is a pretty good overall indicator of how great a country is (0.81 correlation) - The highest inverse correlation (-0.58) is between inclusiveness and cocaine use Wanted to get this concept out there and get some feedback for a v2.
new_guy 5y ago
CIA World Factbook is a good source as well https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/ https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/
manx 5y ago
I love the idea! But averaging ranks might not be the best method to calculate the final ranks. Here are two results of a quick Google search: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Where-can-I-find-an-explanation-for-the-dangers-of-averaging-ranks-from-different-measures https://www.researchgate.net/post/Where-can-I-find-an-explan... https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/56852/overall-rank-from-multiple-ranked-lists https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/56852/overall-rank...
r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
Nice concept! It might be nice to include the Corruption Perception Index and/or Global Corruption index as well.

7 points by freediver 5y ago

This is good. Would be good to have an indication as to what the figure mean - even is higher better than lower. Or are they rankings themselves, etc. Also maybe ability to sort by column?

freediver 5y ago

I was curious what is the greatest country in the world so took about a week to find out. The lists one may find in magazines or "news" sites are usually based on just a few factors like income or life expectancy. I always wondered what would happen if you average in as many factors as you can, including things like happiness, air pollution, olympic medals per capita, climate change risk, wealth inequality... Using data from reputable sources I assembled the rankings. Methodology: - I found as many relevant factors I could with data coming from reputable sources (existing indexes, academic data/research, wikipedia, ...) - Ranked the countries from the data - Removed factors that had high Pearson correlation to others (>0.8) so to not repeat a factor in score. This left 16 factors. - Removed countries that did not have at least 11 factor appearances. This left 139 countries. I did not normalize ranking data for remaining countries, felt that leaving it as is was useful signal. - Averaged all factors Observations: - Greatest country in the world is... Switzerland! - Only two non-european countries to make it to top 10 are New Zealand and Japan - Traffic death rate is a pretty good overall indicator of how great a country is (0.81 correlation) - The highest inverse correlation (-0.58) is between inclusiveness and cocaine use Wanted to get this concept out there and get some feedback for a v2.

new_guy 5y ago

CIA World Factbook is a good source as well https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/ https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/

manx 5y ago

I love the idea! But averaging ranks might not be the best method to calculate the final ranks. Here are two results of a quick Google search: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Where-can-I-find-an-explanation-for-the-dangers-of-averaging-ranks-from-different-measures https://www.researchgate.net/post/Where-can-I-find-an-explan... https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/56852/overall-rank-from-multiple-ranked-lists https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/56852/overall-rank...

r_hoods_ghost 5y ago

Nice concept! It might be nice to include the Corruption Perception Index and/or Global Corruption index as well.