Tunnel vision over wealth measures exposed by international prosperity survey – we come 10th.

Another international survey looking at how we’re doing as a nation compared with the rest of the world again highlights the gulf between our rankings for quality of life and wealth.

In the 2009 Legatum Prosperity Index, which measures the quality of our institutions, education, health, personal safety, governance, freedom and social capital as well as wealth, we rank 10th, just behind the US.

Take out the wealth stuff – that is our economic fundamentals (our poor exporting performance drags us down) and entrepreneurship (not as good at innovation as we think we are) – and we do better than Australia ranked four places above us in the full rankings.

The index has a nifty little tool that allows you to make these types of comparisons.

Anyway, in the most commonly used measure of relative wealth, the OECD’s gdp per capita stats, we currently rank 22nd out of the 30 OECD countries though it’s a hell of a lot worse than that as the OECD is a bit of an odd-ball exclusive club.

If you want to include wealth measures for all countries, such as in the CIA factbook, then we’re 51st out of 227 countries.

The Legatum Institute, a Dubai-based international investment group interested in sustainability, defines prosperity as both wealth and wellbeing.

It says “the most prosperous nations in the world are not necessarily those that have only a high gdp, but are those that also have happy, healthy, and free citizens”.

And it’s these latter qualities that make NZ such a great place to live. I’ve posted before on how governments focusing on NZ’s poor economic performance, though the narrow lens of wealth, ain’t going to spur most of us on to greater economic activity because Kiwis are more motivated by national wellbeing than by pure wealth.

The New Zealand Institute’s nzahead campaign for a “big picture” growth goal that has 16 measures including traditional gross domestic product per capita, along with ones for inequality, education, unemployment, productivity, innovation and the environment.

In case anyone’s felling complacent some of the nzahead social measures, such as inequality and assault deaths ain’t that sh!t hot either.

Overall the country gets a ‘C’.

The Institute wants New Zealanders to start talking about what really matters and how we measure those things we identify as important.

It’ll be the ‘big picture’ measure of how we’re doing overall as a nation that’ll motivate Kiwis to change, not harping on about falling incomes, gdp per capita etc.