Visiting different companies from around the world was a unique experience for me. I am intrigued to understand how businesses are started, how they develop, and what their future looks like. This outlook on businesses comes from my family background of entrepreneurs. As we have traveled from city to city with Forum-Nexus, my attention was caught by the OECD professional visit in Paris (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), where we listened to the OECD’s discussion of their better life initiative.
As a student with an ambitious dream of a career, I always wonder why certain people live the way they do. Whether traveling to another country or just walking along the city streets in the U.S., you find hundreds of people begging for money. Some people feel sympathy for these people, and to be honest I do too, but for a majority I wonder how they could not want to work for a better life. There are jobs all over the world that any person could do, even to just get enough money to eat every day. I know this first hand, because my family owns three businesses and all struggling to find workers. So, as I see the people on the sides of the roads I wonder what is going through their heads. My personal view of the world is what made the OECD’s better life initiative catch my attention.
Launched recently in 2011, the OECD Better Life Initiative focuses on the aspects of life that matter to people and what shapes their quality of life. Basically, the OECD has developed a website that people from all over the world can rate different qualities of life on a scale of 1 to 5. The different qualities are work-life balance, social connections, education and skills, civic engagement and governance, environmental quality, subjective well-being, personal security, jobs and earnings, health status, income and wealth, and housing. These qualities help the OECD improve policy making to improve quality of life all over the world. One thing I really liked about this web application is that any person could go in and submit their individual better life index. This makes the website and statistics from the results much more realistic because the information is from real people, in real struggles, instead of the government’s view of their country.
I went to the website and discovered some interesting facts about average American women and men. I have always heard that women live longer than men and the OECD statistics say the average female lives until 81 and the average male until 76. Another interesting discovery was personal safety in the U.S. versus personal safety around the world. The statistics show men and women feel safer in the United States than in other countries as a whole. This has become a realistic observation to me every time I have traveled to Europe. Having a fear of someone always trying to steal my purse is something I don’t enjoy, and makes me thankful to live in the United States. The last interesting observation was that for all users’ life satisfaction, health, and education are all ranked very high.
As I head back home, I will begin to compare different aspects of the United States versus Europe as a whole. I will have to remind myself as I see people begging for food that their life index most likely is not ranked the same as mine. This international trip with Forum-Nexus has been a life-changing experience. Once again my eyes have been opened to the different customs and ways of life for people all over the world.
By: Sarah Urbanczyk, Forum-Nexus 2014 alumna
