But the good news for Canadians is that we are no far behind on the ranking — 7th out of 100 countries.No, wrong, thanks for playing.
In lists like this your position doesn't matter so much as your distance from whatever you think your achievable score is.
Look, if these countries were in a line up and the first ten countries got something like I dunno a sane politician, then yes being 7th is pretty good. But being 11th is just as bad as being 100th -- all you get for turning up is wasted time.
But since this list we are talking about involves some kind of scoring, what's important is both the total score and the scores of those ahead (and, if you care, behind) of us. Otherwise your "position on the list" is completely meaningless.
Let's consider a hypothetical list of 100 countries where we come last. But the countries are scored on a scale of 1 to 100, and the first 99 countries get 100, and we get 99. So just looking at the list we'd say "we are the last one! boo hoo!" and "we are the only country to score below average! Boo hoo!" But the fact that we are only 1% out of the logjam for #1 means we really did pretty well.
But what do you expect -- the IS the media we are talking about.
(Posted here because the Citizen's signup thing hates me.)
