With all 193 UN members assessed, the shape of the board is clear enough to read

at a glance. The top is small, rich, and institutionally boring. The bottom

is conflict and state collapse. The interesting story is in the residuals,

the countries that rank far from where a reader's priors would put them. This is

the map, decision by decision, with the surprises called out.

For living, the top ten are Norway (6.67), Switzerland (6.60), Luxembourg

(6.42), Iceland (5.54), Liechtenstein (5.38), Denmark (5.12), Austria (5.10),

Slovenia (4.83), Finland (4.64), Estonia (4.51). On assets and currency

the same cluster reshuffles. Switzerland takes the top of both, with Singapore

breaking in at #4/#3. The pattern: small open economies with deep institutions,

independent central banks, and no large adversaries on the border. None of them

score top marks on any single dramatic factor; they win by having no weak

category. A confidence-weighted average rewards the absence of holes more than

the presence of peaks.

The bottom ten for living are Sudan (-8.99), Haiti (-8.46), North Korea (-7.94),

Yemen (-7.64), Myanmar (-7.60), Afghanistan (-7.39), South Sudan (-6.95),

Eritrea (-6.54), Cuba (-6.38), and Iran (-6.32). None of this is controversial. Active war,

state collapse, or totalitarian closure drag every category down at once. Where a

state runs only captured or state media, that institution is excluded rather

than scored as neutral, which is why closed regimes don't accidentally float up

on thin data; they are flagged low-confidence and low-score.

• Uruguay (#17, living 3.74) leads the Americas, above Canada (#37), Chile

(#31), and Costa Rica (#34). Quiet institutions, low corruption, stable

democracy, no adversaries. The Americas' best living read is not the obvious

G7 name.

• Mauritius (#22) and Botswana (#25) lead Africa, ahead of South Africa

(#69). Decades of stable, lawful governance outscore raw size.

• Singapore (#15) tops Asia for assets and currency despite a thin civil-

liberties score. Its economic and institutional reliability carry it for the

money decisions specifically.

• The United States (#173) is the marquee outlier and has its own piece: a rich democracy scoring in the

bottom decile because the framework prices institutional trajectory, not

prosperity.

• China (#159) ranks above the US on living, and below it near-term on

assets/currency, because the dollar cushion is still real. They land in the

same neighborhood by opposite routes.

The top and bottom validate the framework (they match consensus); the middle is

where it earns its keep. If your mental ranking of "good places" puts the large,

famous, rich democracies on top and small countries you rarely think about in the

middle, the board will feel wrong in exactly the places the methodology is

designed to surprise you: it is scoring observable stability and direction,

not GDP, soft power, or reputation.

Mid-table scores (roughly -1 to +1) are the least robust. They often reflect one

or two swing factors and modest confidence, so small data revisions move ranks by

double digits there. Treat the clusters (top cluster, recovery-skew cluster,

floor) as the durable signal and the exact ordinal rank within the middle as

noisy.

The top cluster is stable barring a security shock to a neutral small state; the

floor changes only when a war ends or a regime opens. The middle is where the

next year's movement will be. Watch the positive-skew recovery cases and any

institutional slippage among today's mid-table democracies.

Open the grid (https://themildtake.com/ratings/) and sort by each decision to see the reshuffle.