Yesterday the Institute for Economics and Peace released their numerical index of how "peaceful" a country is. Peace is measured by 24 different values from internal crime to the percentage of a countries GDP that is military.

Unsurprisingly Western and Central Europe took the rest of the world to school, though Japan and New Zealand (and most island states) ranked extremely high as well. Canada came in #11. United States by comparison is #97.

Iraq came in last place with Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, and most of Africa joining it down at the bottom.

A large portion of the countries at the top of the list seemed to have very low corruption and internal problems while very active and thriving economies. They also found a lot of anecdotal evidence that the higher you are on the chart, generally the more money you have to spend on leisure activities, travel, and stuff

http://www.visionofhumanity.org/gpi/results/rankings.php

I shot the presser on this and made "web clips" for them if anyone is interested at www.chadhorn.net/gpi/

Wonder how that correlates to population?

Looking at their site, it seems most of their values were X per Y number of citizens.

Yesterday the Institute for Economics and Peace released their numerical index of how "peaceful" a country is. Peace is measured by 24 different values from internal crime to the percentage of a countries GDP that is military.
Not that it's great that we spend so much on the MI-complex, but I'm always very wary of numbers that include this as a factor. For example, we spend lots of money defending Japan (whether they need it or not), boosting their ranking and lowering ours.

97!!! top 100!! errrrr

I tend to agree San, if we were to withdraw all our funds and troops from everyone else and live "peacefully" how the rankings would change.

Lets face it, noone would dare to attack a self focused US so we'd be safe and happy!

But thats just 1 of the 24. Their index is trying to prove its not a coincidence that spending as much as we do on war is part of why our citizens have a lower disposable income of those in Europe, Australia, Canada and Japan, our crime is higher, our level of corruption is higher, etc. etc. As one guy said at the press conference yesterday, as a countries score goes down 10 places, every citizen would have ~$1,000 more to spend on travel, ~$250 more to spend on clothing, and he kept going ... watch the videos its pretty interesting.

Though the main point and the most interesting point is watching how countries change positions over the years, and 5-10 years from now will provide serious data.

'Lets face it, noone would dare to attack a self focused US so we'd be safe and happy!'

- You tried that. Hello - Pearl Harbor.

Splendid Isolation doesn't work. We tried it. You tried it. Even the Celestial Empire tried it. Just don't work.

Jesus, Halo. Anyone who's studied any recent history, at this point, knows that FDR knew about the impending Japanese attack before it happened. It was purposely provoked by the interment camps in California.

Have you been reading picture-book history at university?

I was being sarcastic ;P

You can't isolate and proper in this day and age, some can because others take a lion share upon themselves. So of course their index is skewed imho.

Compared to the rest of the economy and what the government (local, state, and federal combined) will be spending on pensions, social security, welfare, and health benefits in the years to come will be laughably uncomparable to the "MI-complex".

No other government entity can hope to achieve even a fraction of what military R&D has over the past century for civilization... internet, GPS, and 1000's of other advancements that directly and indirectly have drastically improved the standard of living of the world's population.