TO SOLVE A BIG PROBLEM, YOU NEED TO STEP BACK IN ORDER TO see the whole of it. The bigger and more complex the problem, the further back you must step in order to see it in its simplest outlines. Then you walk forward and begin to consider the details as they emerge.

To make sense of everything I’d learned over the previous twenty years and more, I needed to take a big step back. It felt like the mental equivalent of stepping back six billion kilometers, as Voyager 1 did when it took the famous image of planet Earth as a “pale blue dot.”

So why doesn’t the world work?

Let’s have another look at the Good Country Equation.

Saying that our main problem is the way countries and people behave is a pretty obvious statement, but that’s the six-billion-kilometer view. In this chapter I will summarize what I’ve found to be the problem with the way countries behave, followed by one example of how I have begun to tackle this problem—the Good Country Index—and, in the next chapter, some suggestions about how this work can be continued. After that, I’ll summarize what I think is wrong with the way people behave, and how I’m hoping we can tackle this problem.

As I have learned in country after country, global problems need global solutions, and we need to work together as a species if we’re going to solve and survive these challenges. That’s difficult because we’re still organized the way we were in the days before advanced globalization: as a group of competing, inward-looking, self-serving nation-states; a collection of warring tribes. It’s a seventeenth-century system trying desperately to confront twenty-first-century globalized chaos.

I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with competition. Competition has helped rescue entire generations of people from poverty; and human nature is unimaginable without it. Competition becomes a problem when it’s the only altar at which we worship, and that’s been the case for the last seventy or eighty years. Its presence as the fundamental driver of modern economic theory has ensured its primacy.

Competition is by no means incompatible with cooperation and collaboration. These are not alternative systems; they are simply modes of engagement, for both companies and communities. The auto industry proved many decades ago that cooperation and competition can exist quite happily alongside each other in the same system. The “co-opetition revolution” is an experiment that’s now long overdue for countries.²³

Changing the culture of governance worldwide from fundamentally competitive to fundamentally collaborative is a huge ambition, but changing a culture is often a good deal easier than changing systems. It’s a fun game designing new and better systems for international good governance, but as I’ve said, since nobody has the authority to impose any such systems, it’s a futile exercise. When the culture changes, on the other hand, the systems must change to accommodate it.

And, as I’ve discovered over the years, the act of cooperating and collaborating with the international community, if done with courage and imagination, is very far from being an act of national or political self-sacrifice. It brings enormous advantages in innovation and can help solve domestic problems more effectively. It also produces a higher national standing, which in turn delivers more income. In cases of global threats like pandemics and climate change, it is simply indispensable.

Now, I certainly don’t find it easy to think on the planetary scale, to be constantly trying to visualize the future of all humanity and the fate of the planet. After a short while thinking at this level the brain gets tired, but the good news is that the principle of the Good Country works at any level you choose. The basic idea of trying to combine your responsibility for your own people and your own slice of territory with a wider responsibility for the rest of humanity and the rest of the planet not only makes sense at a smaller scale; it is actually necessary at the smaller scale if humanity is to survive and prosper.

A Good University, for example, is one that fulfills its responsibilities toward its own students, researchers, and teaching and administrative staff, but at the same time always considers the impact of its behaviors on the wider world, the global academic community, the environment, and so forth. A Good City harmonizes the needs of its citizens with those of the wider world, and so on, down to the level of the company, the village, the family, and the individual. Fundamentally, it’s about everybody—and every body—recognizing that they have a balance sheet: What do I owe myself? And what do I owe everyone else?

The connection isn’t just intellectual; it’s causal. What you do at home has an impact on the world, just as the world has an impact on your home.

I can’t claim to have changed the culture of governance worldwide to any noticeable extent through the work I’ve done with governments. But it occurred to me some years ago that if I could execute a “pincer movement,” and take the discussion into the public sphere, and encourage more and more people to give the same message in public to their leaders as I was giving in private, perhaps things might start to change.

A first step toward that widescale cultural change might be a change in the way people start discussing countries, their role in the world, and the way we measure their progress. I knew from my experience with the Nation Brands Index and City Brands Index that many people (and the media) find rankings irresistible. Building an index doesn’t have to cost much money or take years to build, as long as you’re prepared to publish it in a “beta” version, take the criticism, listen to people’s suggestions, stick with it, and gradually improve it. The comments and criticisms aren’t always as courteous or as well-informed as one might like, but they are always freely given, and I work on the assumption that each one may contain useful advice for a better index in the future.

The Good Country Index was an outcome of this thinking. There are already dozens of surveys and indexes that rank the most “successful” countries, in isolation: the quality of life, prosperity, equality, freedom, and happiness which they offer their own citizens, visitors, migrants, or investors. Countries don’t exist in isolation, yet somehow, nobody had ever thought of measuring what they contribute to the world around them outside their own borders.

In this age defined by big, borderless challenges, each country must surely be able to show its balance sheet: how much of the world’s wealth and goodwill has it spent, and how much has it saved or added? Which countries are simply free riders on the global system? The GCI would rank each country’s overall contribution—or its overall debt—to the rest of humanity, to the planet, and to our shared resources.

So in 2012, I and my long-term collaborator Dr. Robert Govers, who is among other things a skilled statistician, started work on designing and preparing the first edition of the Good Country Index. We produced the rankings by combining thirty-five indicators published by the UN system and other international agencies. We grouped the indicators, some of which were positive and some negative, into seven subrankings:

•   Contributions to Science and Technology

•   Contributions to Culture

•   Contributions to International Peace and Security

•   Contributions to World Order

•   Contributions to Planet and Climate

•   Contributions to Prosperity and Equality

•   Contributions to Health and Well-Being

Each subranking contains five indicators.

Obviously, some of the behaviors we included had more impact than others. But we decided that we couldn’t reflect this by assigning different weights to the different subindicators, as it’s largely a matter of personal opinion whether, for example, emitting carbon dioxide does more harm to humanity than turning away migrants or invading another country. For this reason, we decided that all the data should be weighted equally. Then people could look at the individual indicators and decide for themselves which ones they thought were more important.

At some point in the future, perhaps when funds allow (I still pay for the project out of my own not very deep pockets, so at any given moment I have a long list of hoped-for improvements and enhancements to the index), I’d like to include a feature that allows people to input their own views on which global issues are most important, so that the website will then produce a personalized GCI ranking based on those weightings.

We also decided that, for most indicators, each country’s score in the Good Country Index would be divided by its GDP so that smaller and poorer countries weren’t unduly penalized for their limited ability to make a difference in the world. In any case, only a small handful of the thirty-five indicators are directly related to money, so the size of a country’s economy shouldn’t have an enormous impact—at least not a direct one—on its rankings.

Even though the Good Country Index is a ranking, it was important to me that people should understand that it wasn’t attempting to pass any kind of judgment on countries, nor did it comment on the reasons behind any country’s scores. It is certainly true that countries which need to focus on severe domestic challenges tend to be, quite understandably, more concerned about their own population and their own stability than those of other countries; and countries with an extremely large population are affecting the lives of a significant proportion of humanity purely through their domestic policies.

The first edition produced a couple of surprises, the first of which was that Ireland came first in the list. Relative to the size of its economy, its combined global contributions to science and technology, culture, international peace and security, world order, planet and climate, prosperity and equality, and the health and well-being of humanity, outranked those of any other country. Considering that the data we’d used to build the first edition came from 2010, the year in which Ireland’s government debt was at its highest point, the fact that this country should have managed to remember its international responsibilities to a greater extent than any other country was a real credit both to its government and to its people.

The second surprise was that the African nation which contributed most to the global commons was Kenya: at twenty-sixth place in the global ranking, it was the only African nation to break into the top thirty. This was an inspiring example to show that it’s by no means the exclusive province of rich, “first world” nations to make a meaningful contribution to humanity.

I launched the first edition of the Good Country Index at a TED event in Berlin in 2014. To everybody’s surprise, the video of my talk went viral, and by the time it hit six million views on TED.com and another four million on YouTube, I’d received over eighteen thousand messages from people in 180 countries telling me in many different ways that they too wanted to live in a Good Country, and that this meant more to them than living in a country which was only successful by traditional measures. I seemed to have struck a chord.

My sudden introduction to public life was a turbulent one. In the weeks after the video of my talk was published, I found myself answering hundreds of messages. They were overwhelmingly positive, but some were written in absolute fury. It’s an odd quirk in my nature that I’m incapable of ignoring a message that’s directed at me, so for the first month or so after the talk was published, I was spending up to eighteen hours a day answering posts about my talk and about the index.

I also met some trolls. I took one look at the comments on YouTube and decided that, no matter how strong my curiosity, I should never again read what people were writing there. The sinkhole of venom, anger, hatred, and ignorance was enough to make a far more self-assured person than me just want to crawl away and die. Most of the comments on TED.com, on the other hand, were more rational and seemed to be invitations to dialogue, or questions that wanted answers. They were by no means all positive, and there were plenty of insults, but the quantity was just about manageable and the comments positive enough to make it feel that I wasn’t simply defending myself.

Responding to the insults was a fascinating if exhausting process. I would answer the initial slap across the face with a polite request for more detail: “I’m sorry you didn’t like my talk but could you explain why you think I should have been shot at birth?” You can’t really have a stunned silence on the internet, but there would be a pause before the meek reply came back, very frequently containing words to the effect of “I didn’t realize you’d be reading these. I didn’t mean to offend you.” Well, telling somebody they don’t deserve to be alive does rather suggest an intention to offend, but never mind: the important thing was that we were having a dialogue. It was like naughty pupils bad-mouthing their teacher and suddenly noticing the teacher standing behind them. I suppose it’s also a bit like road rage: because you’re on a screen or inside a metal box on wheels, it’s possible for people to forget you’re a human being, and to treat you like something else altogether.

Anyway, over the next few exchanges we’d quite often end up having a decent conversation. On more than one occasion, I would then notice the same person aggressively defending my talk or the index against another critic: I’d acquired a self-appointed bodyguard.

A lot of people seemed to assume that the index somehow took into account everything each country has ever done, but in reality it can’t be, nor does it attempt to be, a historical overview of each country’s contribution to humanity and the planet. It can only focus on a single point in time, or else the data becomes overwhelming. And good global statistics of the kind we use only go back a couple of decades anyway, so to examine, measure, and account for the roots and causes and origins of today’s world would be a 99 percent subjective exercise.

Certainly, understanding a country also means understanding its history. As George Santayana said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But how would we even begin to put a reliable numerical score on the past actions of 163 countries, no matter how strong our feelings and opinions about them might be? Exactly how many points should we take away from the Germans of today for the Holocaust, two generations after the crimes of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents? And why go back a mere seventy or eighty years, and randomly draw the line there? Does the fact that older crimes have faded from our memory somehow also mean that their significance has faded? I don’t think so.

How many points should we deduct from Britain for the British Empire, or from India for its own Chola Empire six hundred years earlier? How many points should we give the Greeks for their country’s contribution to human wisdom two thousand years ago, and is it right that present-day Iran should take all the credit for what the Persians achieved five thousand years ago? Do we give more points to the Italians for the poetry of Virgil or deduct more points for the crucifixion of Christ by the Romans? Shouldn’t we penalize the entire Western world for slavery? Is it right to mark down the whole South African nation for the crime of apartheid?

Wherever and whenever we draw the line, we would be guilty of making a subjective choice, and showing prejudice toward some group, nation, or individual whose deeds lie just on the other side of that line. The simple fact is that man (and I use the term advisedly) is capable of great cruelty and has demonstrated this over and over again throughout history. Some nations—or, to be more fair and more precise, some regimes and some individuals—have done so in particularly egregious ways that humanity cannot and should not forget (but must try to forgive, or else we simply cannot move forward).

Another common objection, often coupled with the accusation that I’d obviously cooked up the whole index just in order to produce this result, was the fact that it’s mostly European countries at the top of the index. Well, there are two possible explanations for this: one is that the index is deliberately or accidentally biased in their favor; the other is that they really do contribute more to the world outside their own borders than other countries do, at least according to the available data.

In all honesty I would rather it were the former, because that could more easily be corrected. As I said in my TED talk, the fact that Kenya managed to reach the top thirty in the first edition gave me more pleasure than any other result. It would have suited my agenda far better if more Eastern, Southern, and/or developing countries had put rich Western countries to shame for their greater contribution to humanity or the planet. But unfortunately it just doesn’t seem to be the case—at least not using any of the data that’s robust, reliable, relevant, and available. And most of the data is produced by big international agencies—mainly in the UN system—which usually means that it’s actually collected by the statistical offices of the countries themselves. This leaves relatively little room for bias, and the UN represents most countries on earth.

So based on the available data, the fact we have to come to terms with is that Western countries do appear to contribute more to the international community at this point in history, even once you’ve factored out the size of their economies. There are clear historical reasons for this. In the case of EU member states, I believe that this is because they have a long habit of international collaboration and cooperation which other countries simply don’t have. To a limited extent, they’ve been attempting to practice what the Good Country preaches for the last forty years.

For the rest, maybe it’s just down to the fact that the whole idea of the “international community” and pulling your weight on global challenges is something that the West—for all its faults—has led from the start, and it continues to do. The West, with its dominance in technology and business, has driven globalization, has profited most from globalization, has suffered in many ways from globalization, and on the whole has made the greatest efforts to correct its risks and imbalances. Or at least it has done so in the case of financial, technological, and organizational solutions. When it comes to simple humanity, such as accepting refugees, the West continues to play a highly inconsistent role and is frequently put to shame by some non-Western countries.

Countries in the South and East, on the whole, have tended to be more inwardly or regionally focused. Many of them have big domestic problems still to address (in some cases, this is thanks to the legacy of colonialism left by today’s rich countries); some are not only happy to be free riders on the planet but also feel it’s their right. And there may be some rough justice in this, but the kind of justice that punishes everybody, including the righteous, is primitive justice indeed.

Perhaps others feel somehow excluded from the “international community,” despite the plethora of international institutions that all countries can belong to these days, and perhaps lack the necessary confidence to participate actively in global issues.

Things are gradually changing. For example, some wealthy Middle Eastern countries are starting to contribute more substantially to poverty reduction in Africa and Asia. But somehow we have to face these realities, however uncomfortable they are, and work out the consequences. It’s too easy to dismiss the data as biased, as some do, simply because it doesn’t produce results that correspond to their worldview. We can’t make progress on these critical issues as long as we remain in denial about the fact that not enough countries do enough to make the world work better.

And that includes Western countries too. Just because they rank higher in the index doesn’t mean they are doing anything like enough for the world, and most of them do enormous amounts of harm to humanity and the planet, as well as good. For example, Sweden ranks low in the Peace and Security category, mainly because of its huge weapons exports. This behavior shows a double standard, no matter that it managed to rank top in the second edition of the index despite this. One can make similar criticisms of most Western countries.

Rightly or wrongly, the West cannot shoulder the burden of the global challenges on its own. It seems right that it should contribute in proportion to the damage it has done and continues to do, and in proportion to its greater resources. But humanity won’t begin to progress until we’ve reached the stage where these distinctions are set aside, and all countries take on the responsibility to contribute equally to making a better, fairer, and more stable future for all of us.

The Good Country Index achieved its main aim and continues to do so. It can’t possibly claim to provide a complete account of how much each country contributes to humanity and the planet: what I wanted to do was encourage people to think about countries in a new way. Instead of constantly asking, “How well is this country doing?” I wanted people to start asking, “How much is this country doing?” Perhaps ten million people have now done so, perhaps many more.

Even more encouragingly, I now get a steady trickle of emails from governments around the world asking me to explain their country’s results in the Good Country Index, or asking what they would need to do to improve them next time. One government which shall remain nameless even asked me, without any apparent embarrassment, how much it would cost to raise their ranking in the next edition. Governments are starting to take notice of the index; some are starting to brag about their ranking in their propaganda materials; perhaps some are even starting to care.

One Australian political NGO recently got in touch to say that they were interviewing prime ministerial candidates for the next election and were using Australia’s scorecard in the Good Country Index to quiz each of them on their policy intentions for Australia’s role in the world, should they be elected. This is a really good sign that the index is starting to find a useful role for itself.

I was keen to discover how far the Good Country Index would tally with the Nation Brands Index. A correlation between the two would add extra weight to the MARSS analysis, reinforcing the key tenet that principled national behavior is indeed associated with a stronger national image (and, in turn, more productive engagements with other countries).

According to Robert Govers’s analysis, the correlation coefficient between the third edition of the Good Country Index (based on 2014 data) and the 2014 edition of the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index, is no less than 80 percent.²⁴ This is a remarkably high figure, and is statistically significant, with a less than 0.05 percent chance the result is random.

Obviously, correlation isn’t the same thing as causation, and many underlying factors will influence the relationship between being a Good Country and achieving a positive reputation. Our research on these matters continues.

In late 2019, I launched the Good Leaders Index. Each month, with the help of a team of volunteer international relations and political science students from around the world, I highlight one national, regional, city, institutional, or even business leader who appears to be doing the best job of balancing their domestic and international responsibilities, and one who is doing the opposite. Unlike the Good Country Index, the Good Leader Index is an editorial exercise, not a statistical one: it’s an opinion piece which I hope will generate more discussion about what political leadership is really all about in the age of global crisis.

And while I should stress that I’m far more interested in changing things than measuring things, I’m pretty certain that the temptation to build a Good City Index, a Good University Index, and a Good Company Index will at some stage prove irresistible.