A new ranking names Luxembourg as the world's top country for quality of life, but the finding is clouded by a methodology that relies on unverified, user-submitted opinions rather than official data.

A new index from the database Numbeo has ranked Luxembourg first in the world for quality of life, placing it ahead of countries like the Netherlands and Denmark. This result stands in contrast to other well-known benchmarks, such as the UN-sponsored World Happiness Report, which placed the Grand Duchy in ninth place.

According to Numbeo, which describes itself as the world's largest database of user-contributed data about cities and countries, Luxembourg achieved a top score of 218.2. Its neighbours on the list trail significantly, with Germany in 10th place, Belgium in 26th, and France in 29th.

However, a closer examination of the methodology reveals significant caveats. The Quality of Life Index is not based on official government statistics but is derived from an empirical formula that aggregates a wide range of metrics. These include purchasing power, pollution, safety, healthcare, cost of living, property prices, commute times, and even climate.

A rough guess?

The core of the issue lies in the source of the data. Numbeo's rankings are compiled from the subjective opinions of internet users who voluntarily submit information through a short form on the website. While the site, founded in 2009 by a Serbian software engineer, bills itself as a massive cost-of-living resource, its data collection method means the contributors do not constitute a scientifically representative sample of the general population.

A site already called out by AFP

The Numbeo database is no stranger to controversy, having faced previous criticism for its rankings. In 2022, its data was cited in viral social media posts claiming that eleven French cities, led by Nantes and Marseille, were among the top 15 "most criminal cities in Europe." These claims were widely circulated, including by several far-right political candidates.

However, as with the current quality-of-life index, that criminality ranking was not based on official crime statistics. Instead, it was compiled from the subjective perceptions of internet users who responded to an online questionnaire. A key methodological flaw is that individuals can submit their perception of crime in a city without ever having visited it.

At the time, Agence France-Presse (AFP) published a Fact Check article to set the record straight. The agency clarified that Numbeo's data is neither official nor representative of the actual populations studied, a point corroborated by several researchers.

David Weinberger, director of the IRIS International Crime Observatory, explained the distinction to AFP: "It's misleading to claim to derive a representation of the most criminal cities from it: what is presented are cities that are perceived as having the most crime, by a certain number of internet users. But for social science studies, this approach is worthless."

A single person can change the ranking

The potential for manipulation within Numbeo's user-driven model has been publicly demonstrated. In 2017, Swedish media and the French outlet TF1 Info reported that a single internet user in Sweden, by repeatedly submitting negative ratings for the small university town of Lund, managed to artificially inflate its crime perception score. This coordinated effort successfully pushed Lund to the top of Numbeo's list of the "most dangerous" cities globally, an act intended to expose the credibility issues of such crowd-sourced data.

While Luxembourg's high standard of living is widely acknowledged, experts point to other indices with more robust methodologies for reliable international comparison. The "World Happiness Report," published annually since 2012 with UN support, is often cited as a more credible benchmark.

Its approach relies primarily on Gallup World Poll surveys that directly ask residents to evaluate their own lives. Crucially, these subjective well-being scores are then cross-referenced with objective national data, including GDP per capita, social support systems, levels of corruption, and freedom to make life choices. This multi-faceted methodology, which balances personal perception with hard metrics, is generally considered by researchers to provide a more nuanced and reliable assessment of a country's overall well-being.