The UN produce an annual report ranking our 182 countries in order of desirability using such markers as literacy rates, life expectancy and average earnings. This year Norway has emerged at the top of the pile with Niger beating places like Afghanistan and Iraq to bottom place. The US was placed 13th.

Niger of course is a drought-plagued little country with not much going for it, and without the ability to feed it’s people, and it is not alone in Africa. Norwegians on the other hand earn on average 85 times as much as the man in the street in Niger and always comes out somewhere near the top of the UN’s list. Surprising then that not too many people want to move to make their home their, and the country is relatively under-populated.

However “desirability” is a bit of a misleading term. Not everyone desires to live in Norway, Australia or the USA; not everyone is frightened away from Afghanistan, Malawi or Algeria. Not everyone uses education or wealth as the bench mark to measure a country against, and not many get to chose where they live.

For me the top 5 countries that I’d most desire to live in are

• Ireland (where I currently reside – lucky me)
• India
• Malawi
• Argentina
• Syria

At the other end of my scale of desirability are

• South Africa
• Canada
• England
• Germany
• USA

There’s no accounting for taste, so how can the UN be so arrogant as to decide that most of us use the same yard stick as they do to decide what kind of lives we want and where we want to live them?