The first six: where the numbers landed, and why
Sweden and Canada lead all three decisions; the US and China share the bottom by opposite routes. A walk through the inaugural six-country snapshot and what the confidence bands are really saying.
This is the first batch of country assessments under the framework - six countries, three decisions each (living, assets, currency), every score paired with an explicit confidence level. Read the ratings app for the interactive view; this piece is the narrative.
The headline
For the living decision (a 5-10 year horizon), Sweden and Canada are the two clear positives, effectively tied once personal fit is included. The United States and China occupy the bottom two slots - and that pairing is the most important thing in the whole table, because they get there by opposite routes: the US through democratic erosion from a high baseline, China through an authoritarian baseline that was never high to begin with.
That symmetry is a feature of the scale, not a coincidence. A score is a directional read, not a moral verdict. Two countries can sit at similar numbers with completely different underlying stories - which is exactly why the skew annotation matters.
Skew is doing real work
Look at Ukraine. On central tendency alone it looks unremarkable for the living decision, but it carries positive skew: a war that must eventually end, EU accession on the table, reconstruction upside. China carries negative skew at a similar central score. Same midpoint, opposite tails - and for an individual decision, the tail is often what you actually care about.
Confidence is a separate axis
None of these numbers are presented as precise. The v2 source-discipline re-run has been applied - the hard exclusion rule run uniformly, China's economics rebuilt from independent proxies, US official data from 2025 on discounted as partially-entangled - and a second pass re-checked every country through non-Anglophone independent sources. Where official data is compromised, confidence is pulled down and the caveat is recorded on the assessment itself rather than smoothed over.
That is the whole point of the project: a score you can argue with, attached to a confidence you can audit. If the inputs are thin, the framework says so out loud instead of manufacturing certainty.
What's next
The big corrections have landed - the hard-exclusion re-run, China's proxy rebuild, the slant-balance audit, and a non-Anglophone second pass - and they confirmed the ordering rather than overturning it, which is the reassuring part. What remains is maintenance: watch the fast-moving factors (trade actions, the Ukraine war, the US statistical agencies, the Swedish election) and refresh as they move.
Start with the grid, then compare two countries side by side.