INTRIGUED BY THE BIG RESPONSE TO THE GOOD COUNTRY INDEX and my TED talk, and the similar sentiments that many of the people who wrote to me expressed, Robert Govers and I conducted further research to find out how many people were likely to share the values of the Good Country philosophy.

Were the eighteen thousand people who had written to me most of the people in the world who were attracted by this worldview, or were they the tip of an iceberg? And if so, how big was the iceberg?

To estimate the size and distribution of these people, whom I nicknamed natural cosmopolitans, we used the World Values Survey, which polls respondents from seventy-six countries, representing about 83 percent of the world’s population.²⁵ In this way we found that, at a very conservative estimate and setting the bar extremely high, no less than 10 percent of the world’s population, or seven hundred million people, were natural cosmopolitans—people who strongly and instinctively feel that they are members of the human race first, and citizens of their own nation second or perhaps first equal.

Plainly, this cohort was bigger than any party, movement, organization, or NGO; it was a group the size of a nation. Indeed, if it were a nation, it would be the third biggest on earth, after India and China.

The distribution of the natural cosmopolitans is interesting: these core values of the Good Country are correlated less strongly with education, income, gender, and other demographic indicators than one might suppose. Although there are many natural cosmopolitans in wealthy Western countries, the ranking is by no means as dominated by these countries as, for example, is the Good Country Index.

The countries with the highest proportion of natural cosmopolitans in their populations turned out to be Andorra and Sweden, both with 60 percent. But more than a third of the populations of Trinidad and Tobago and Uruguay are natural cosmopolitans; in Burkina Faso it’s nearly a quarter; in Serbia and Mali more than a fifth. In some respects, being a natural cosmopolitan seems to be as much a character trait as anything else.

Indeed, there are some striking commonalities between the natural cosmopolitan and the character traits defined in the field of personality psychology as agreeableness, which “reflects individual differences in general concern for social harmony. Agreeable individuals value getting along with others. They are generally considerate, kind, generous, trusting and trustworthy, helpful, and willing to compromise their interests with others. Agreeable people also have an optimistic view of human nature.” Commonalities can also be found with the traits defined as openness to experience, “a general appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, imagination, curiosity, and variety of experience. People who are open to experience are intellectually curious, open to emotion, sensitive to beauty and willing to try new things. They are also more likely to hold unconventional beliefs.… interested in learning and exploring new cultures.…There is a strong connection between liberal ethics and openness to experience such as support for policies endorsing racial tolerance.”²⁶ Of course, billions of people who aren’t natural cosmopolitans are agreeable, kind, generous, trustworthy, and so forth, but relatively few people who are natural cosmopolitans lack these qualities.

The experience of growing up as a natural cosmopolitan must vary enormously depending on what country you happen to be born in. If you’re a natural cosmopolitan in one of the countries at the bottom of the distribution list, say in India or Tunisia, where you are among just 2 percent of the population, then it’s highly likely that you will never have met anybody in your life who shares your view of the world, your natural tolerance toward outsiders, your interest in the world outside your own country’s borders. That must feel pretty lonely.

It was clear from the thousands of messages that continued to reach me in response to the Good Country Index and my TED talk that many of the natural cosmopolitans around the world wanted to engage actively with the Good Country idea, and simply examining the index wasn’t satisfying their curiosity about this new way of looking at the world.

So in 2016 I launched the Global Vote, an online platform that lets anybody, anywhere in the world vote in the elections of other countries.

When a general election takes place in America or Indonesia or Namibia or anywhere else, the citizens of those countries pick the candidate who they think will do the most for them: in the Global Vote, people around the world pick which candidate they think will do the most for everyone else, for the rest of humanity.

Every few weeks, starting with the Icelandic presidential elections in June 2016, I chose an election going on somewhere in the world. It might be for a head of state, an important referendum, or even for the secretary-general of the United Nations (a process which is about as far from being transparent, open, and democratic as one can get). The site provided a short explanation of the main issues in each election, whether it was in São Tomé and Príncipe or the United States of America, and a succinct, balanced, scrupulously neutral and factual profile of each of the candidates, describing their published views on all matters connected with the world outside their own country’s borders.

I also wrote to each candidate in each election and gave them the opportunity to tell the Global Vote voters in person what, if elected, they would offer to the world outside their own country. I always asked them the same two questions: “If you are elected, what will you do for the rest of us, around the world?” and, “What is your vision for your country’s role in the world?”

Some of the candidates were happy to do this: Saviour Chishimba, a candidate for the Zambian presidential election in 2016, submitted a highly detailed manifesto setting out his international aims and aspirations for Zambia, should he be elected.²⁷ He was not elected as president of Zambia, but 38 percent of the voters from more than twenty-six countries chose him for the Global Vote.

I even started getting emails from candidates intending to stand in future elections that the Global Vote hadn’t yet covered, asking whether their election could be covered and whether they could provide a statement for the Global Voters.

A university lecturer in Bangladesh, Sabiha Matin Bipasha, wrote to say that she had been using the Global Vote as a teaching tool. She would pick a far-away country that her students knew little about, tell them about its history, geography, and politics; they would follow the election on the Global Vote, campaign on campus for their favorite candidates, cast their votes online, and would often stay up late to see who won the Global Vote and who won the formal election. It honestly hadn’t occurred to me that the Global Vote could be used as an educational tool, but it is now used in schools and universities around the world.

Writing the candidate profiles and keeping them strictly factual and impartial was never easy, and the Global Vote would have been impossible without dozens of volunteers all over the world who gave up their time to help me collect information about the candidates.

As we worked on the profiles, it never failed to strike me how many political candidates, even though relationships with other states were fundamental to the prosperity and even survival of their country, still campaigned on purely domestic issues. One might also wonder why their voters tolerate this, and for how long they will continue to do so.

And speaking of São Tomé and Príncipe, people might also wonder how some of the countries whose elections are covered in the Global Vote with a small population, a small economy, a small land area, and a low international profile could possibly have much impact on the rest of the world. Well, as I’ve explained in earlier chapters, globalization has created such a dense tangle of economic, social, political, technological, commercial, legal, and cultural connections that every country, small or large, rich or poor, humble or ambitious, now affects, and is affected by, every other country, near or far.

If a country fails to control its waste or its emissions, it will harm the atmosphere and the oceans, and they belong to all of us. If it fails to make its proper contributions to the international system, others will need to contribute more. If it fails to maintain peace and stability, other countries may have to get involved. If it can’t offer its citizens good prospects, it will produce more migrants who will bring both benefits and stresses to the countries they move to. If it remains poor, other countries may need to help out; if it becomes wealthy, it may help poorer countries. Any country’s people, its culture, its cuisine, its products, and its services may bring delight and variety to the lives of people in distant countries. People might visit as tourists or investors and contribute to its economy while enriching their own lives and experience.

These are just some of the reasons why we should care about every country on earth. And this is why we should care whether the leaders of those countries are outward-looking or inward-looking, whether they occasionally think about the rest of us and not merely their own voters. Everybody who becomes a head of state or head of government joins the team that runs the planet, whether they like it or not.

And any country of any size or strength can produce a great leader and share that leader with the world when it comes to making the big collective decisions that affect all of us. Great leaders work for all of humanity. They benefit all of us with their wisdom and courage and imagination, not just their own voters.

The Global Vote is purely symbolic, but my hope is that as it grows, it might begin to achieve real influence: as soon as there are more people outside any given country voting in its election as there are inside the country, the Global Vote becomes very hard to ignore. And, over time, leaders the world over might start thinking not only about what they’re going to do for their own people, but also about their legacy to humanity.

Despite the absence of a marketing budget, the Global Vote performed rather well, and by the time the US presidential elections came around in 2016, nearly a hundred thousand people in 170 countries were casting their symbolic vote for the candidates they felt were most likely to represent the interests of people around the world, not merely of their own voters.

The candidates who have been picked in each of the elections so far covered by the Global Vote are not, usually, the candidates picked in the “real” election. This creates an interesting by-product: a collection of individuals who stood for high office and now have a bit of time on their hands as they are suddenly and unexpectedly not the president of their country, yet who arguably have one of the broadest democratic mandates in history, having been elected by people from over a hundred countries. For fun, I call this group the Glorious Losers Club, and one day I’ll bring them together and we’ll do something amazing.