Look at the three primary factors.

Start with GDP per capita. In purchasing power, not actual. An arbitrary maximum was set at 40,000 (see footnote). Three nations exceed this: The U.S. at 41,890, Norway at 41,420, and Luxembourg at 60,288. Without this "tweak," the problem of using PPP per capita GDP as an overall measure of the success of a nation would become obvious.

For most Western nations and all of the top 19, an adult literacy rate of 99 percent was simply assumed. This statistic is meaningless here.

The other education statistic is gross enrollment ratio. What this actually has to do with how well-educated a population is, is anybody's guess. Nations with a higher rating than the U.S. include Libya, Kazakhstan, and Slovenia.

We end up with life expectancy. It's hard to say where they got their numbers from, and this takes us to a whole different subject in statistics and causes, but we'll just assume their number is okay because I don't want to go to the work of tracking it down and cross-checking it. I've seen numbers that put the U.S. as low as #40 or so. But is that all there is to a nation's prosperity?

If socialism was so great, the more socialist a nation becomes, the more prosperous it should be. And vice-versa. What's the overall history look like? You can't build an entire thesis around just Sweden.

The U.K. paper is based on direct per-capita GDP in current U.S. dollars, not the PPP version that the Human Development people use. I suspect the change in the value of the dollar has more to do with this than anything else.