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Danielle Batist is an experienced freelance journalist, founder of Journopreneur and co-founder of the Constructive Journalism Project. She lived and worked all around the globe and covered global and local stories of poverty, exclusion and injustice. Increasingly, she moved beyond ‘problem-reporting’ to include stories about the solutions she found. She witnessed the birth of the new nation of South Sudan and interviewed the Dalai Lama. She reported for Al Jazeera, BBC and the Guardian and regularly advises independent media organisations on innovation and sustainability. She loves bringing stories to the world and finding the appropriate platforms to do so. The transformation of traditional media fascinates rather than scares her. While both the medium and the message are changing, she believes the need for good storytelling remains.
Why It Can Pay Off To Be Top Of The 'Loser' Countries
If you’ve never come across it before, I recommend taking a look at The Book Of Life. It aims to be a ‘curation of the best and most helpful ideas in the area of emotional life’ and is made by the people behind the School Of Life, including the great author and philosopher Alain de Botton. Its justification for existing: ‘Ultimately, life is only 700,000 hours long so we have to make sure the ideas we need don’t get lost — or take too long to find.’ What’s not to like?
This blogpost-type article, like pretty much all entries in The Book of Life, is based on a simple but clever idea.
It’s about ‘winner’ countries versus ‘loser’ countries. Winner countries (US tops the list, followed by the UK) go out of their way to make the consequences of winning as pleasant as possible. In loser countries on the other hand “voters graciously assume that they are and will remain losers — and therefore set about trying to make their condition as pleasant as possible”. The top five of such countries are Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Germany and The Netherlands.
In a series of pictures, De Botton makes us question what it means to be a real winner, and at what cost.
