For example, suppose a country spends more money on health care per capita, but has an inefficient or unfair distribution of that spending. Is that better or worse? Or, suppose a country has a low number of average working hours, but a lower per capita GDP. Is that better or worse?
It seems to me that this ongoing "France versus Britain" thing is typical internecine bickering between politicians: Chirac uses evil capitalist England for his political purposes, while Blair uses evil communist France for his political purposes. Meanwhile we've got global warming, third world starvation, an energy crisis, thousands of poorly controlled nuclear weapons, a shooting war...
Typical politics.
You are right that it is very easy to find convenient statistics for almost anything. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
