There is something more than a bit pathetic about a country that depends on the United Nations for its sense of self-worth. The UN has just released its latest annual Human Development Index, designed as a broader gauge of a country's qualify of life than mere material wealth, and once again rates Canada as top nation, as it has for the past four years running. And really, who knows more about quality of life than UN bureaucrats?

The report, as always, kicked off no end of fuss in the national media, that peculiar Canadian mix of self-congratulation and self-doubt: yes, yes, the best country on earth, we know all that, but what about child poverty?

"Gender empowerment"? Ah, now there the figures are rather less impressive. So you see, we are in a mess after all. The UN says so.

Why this has become such a news event is a bit of a mystery. It isn't as if the figures aren't already easily available. What the UN has produced is less an objective ranking of living conditions around the world than a statistical compendium. It is only transformed into a league table by the device of combining the statistics into one, catch-all indicator. Yet the more elaborate such attempts to stretch the numbers into significance, the less they really tell us.

Much though it caters to the media's fondness for quantification, the Human Development Index remains little more than a subjective exercise, the more misleading for its pretense of objectivity. Statistics alone can't tell us whether Carl Yazstremski was a better ballplayer than Willie McCovey; they are unlikely to prove any better guide to so ineffable a thing as quality of life.

As with all such exercises, from the "points system" so beloved of immigration bureaucrats to the complex calculations of "pay equity" consultants, the overall score is inevitably the product of a series of arbitrarily selected attributes, arbitrarily weighted. That's after you get past the methodological problems associated with compiling the individual numbers that go into the index. Just measuring them accurately is tough enough, let alone putting them on a comparable basis.

In the present example, the UN has simply taken an average of each country's scores in three areas: life expectancy, educational attainment and per capita incomes. Is this meaningful? Is education to be given the same weight as life expectancy? Less? More?

In order to be able to add these different variables together, one in years, one a percentage, one in dollars, each was placed on a scale of zero to one. What should determine where either end of the scale should be?

These are wholly subjective matters. Yet they are presented as facts. Had the UN merely polled several experts for their opinions, they would have produced a result no less meaningful, and probably more, for the experts would have drawn many more factors into their overall assesssments, more even than they themselves could be aware of. Yet without the patina of statistical precision, they would hardly attract such attention.

In the end, the report tells us little but the preferences of the compilers. By the measures of wellbeing thought important by the UN, Canada is the country that the UN rates highest. Such an index, or more precisely its component parts, is informative of certain aspects of existence, but not others. It can tell us what proportion of the population is in school; it tells us nothing of the quality of those schools. Likewise it omits whole categories of significance to one's quality of life: whether you can find a decent newspaper in the morning, say, or the propensity of the population to bathe.

Even on its own terms, the report is strangely uninformative. Scanning the list of the top twenty or thirty most developed nations on earth offers no resolution whatever to the great debates of the day. There, to be sure, is Sweden, in 10th place (down from the top spot it enjoyed in the 1960s), as if to prove the merits of the Cadillac of welfare states: but there in third is the United States. Big-spending France is in second, but right behind are low- spending Japan and Switzerland.

Which raises an interesting question: If countries like France or Sweden that spend nearly 60 per cent of GDP through the state are no further ahead, in human development terms, than countries like Japan or Switzerland that only spend 30 per cent of GDP, what happened to the other 30 per cent?

What did all those extra taxes pay for? And if you get essentially the same social outcomes, whether the government takes 30 per cent of everything that is produced or whether it takes 60 per cent, why is Canada closer to the latter than the former?