I usually put life satisfaction relatively high, along with health, safety, education, and housing. Yet, there is one problem for me. I want there to be an adjustment for the inequality of a society. Why is this important? One reason is, when I look at an index, I think of myself being dropped into one of these societies. If I were to be dropped into a society with tremendous life satisfaction ratings, but where inequality creates an equally tremendous underclass, I may not experience this life satisfaction as I would in another country. So, in order to rank these counties appropriately, we should adjust for the potential difference in experience.
Currently, the Better Life Index opens with all these categories ranked with equal weighting. With this setting, the United States ranks 6th out of the 34 countries. Pulling their data, I notice that each of the categories has one to three different measures to impact the total. To extend this including an inequality category, I added two measures: the gini coefficient and the wealth gini coefficient. To compare to the initial setting of the current index, I readjusted the ranking with equal weightings for all categories. Here are the results: