This is laughable... I only checked your link and saw Poland's bottom 10% having a better life index than France's bottom 10% by quite a wide margin, and Poland's top 10% having a better life index than France's top 10%. It's a complete joke.

There are at least a dozen countries I'd rather live than in the US when it comes to well being. And that's not bad by the way, for a country of over 300 million, to rank top 5 or top 10 in an very broad and averaged parameter (like standard of living) is very hard to do. There's a ton of stuff the US gets wrong, but for a country of its size and age, it's a very successful experiment in politics that does extremely well, all things considered. But that doesn't mean it's among the top 10 in standard of living, which its not.

One of the key issues with a lot of these indices is that they have tons of factors that are based on nominal income. So the OECD better life index for example, has about 10 factors, one of them is how much you earn from a job, the other is wealth and household income, another is spending on housing and real estate prices.

But what it fails to mention is that in Germany, university is free. In the Netherlands, I pay about $2k per year and I get an equal stipend from the government for free (as long as I finish, if I don't it becomes a 1% interest rate loan). In France it's a few hundred bucks per year. Similar stories for all of scandinavia etc etc, only the UK is an outlier in this regard. And if you look at the rankings, probably half of Dutch universities are in the top 100 worldwide, the average US student pays orders of magnitude more and doesn't go to even remotely a world class educational institution.

In other words, would I prefer to be an average American and rack up $30k in debt and go to an unknown local university? Or go to a world class uni in the Netherlands for free? The answer is clear.

Which is why purely droning on about income levels is ignorant. Just to make this clear, would you be willing to reduce your income by 50%, if your expenses would drop by 90%? Obviously. Yet you only look at income, and don't look at expenses. I mentioned education but it's really broad. I live in a lovely apartment by the park with my gf for a few hundred bucks in Amsterdam. My net healthcare payments are a few hundred bucks a year for full coverage. Do I really care I could make a few grand more somewhere else? Nope.

You mentioned maternity leave, one of the issues within work life balance that was covered in this thread before... according to your OECD index the US doesn't even make the top 25 in work life balance, they're in place 29. Out of a possible 36, by the way. It's poor. So you have all these financial indicators that say 'we make this much money and it's the most', yet very little about 'things like healthcare is twice as expensive, education makes you a debt slave instead of being free or near free in many other OECD countries', and then to make all that money to pay for much more expensive stuff, you sacrifice work life balance and come in at an appalling figure.

Time devoted to leisure and free time? Oh place 32 out of 36. Must be amazing. You also work some of the longest hours of all the countries in the study. The only reason the final score isn't as bad is because gender equality was better than average. (which was quite suspect given the Netherlands, quite often respected for being a frontrunner country when it comes to equality in many forms, including gender, came in last by a wide margin. Why? Because Dutch mothers tend to work part-time out of choice, considering they're better educated than men and have financial independence without having to work overtime. And the positive effects of that shows. Yet it's regarded as the worst country of all of them.)

In short, I'm not terribly impressed with the OECD index, but I think that's clear to anyone who sees Poland's bottom and top 10% rank better than say the bottom and top of France or Japan, with all due respect to Poland.

Again, for a country of 300 million I can't think of a more successful country or region than the US, an absolutely great feat for a country and one of the reasons I do admire the US, but it doesn't mean that compared to smaller countries it ranks in the top 10, often not even the top 20 depending on the metric. That's not to bash the US as it's not a fair comparison, but if you do want to make the comparison and list countries of 1 billion and 1 million in the same list, then you'll naturally end up with a lot of the small countries that are outliers at the top.