Slovenia (Photo credit: phault)
I bet you’re instinctive answer was yes. how cynical of you. it seems everyone’s favorite sport last two years in Slovenia has been complaining about life and politics, without having any broad perspective on the state of the world.
Slovenians seem to live in a mental bubble, where they compare their own poor fates and lives with the imaginary paradise.
Foreign Policy actually does a proper analysis of all countries in the world every year, and ranks them from most failing to least. they even create a color-coded interactive map of failing states for all the cynics and others, who like to complain a lot.
Short answer to the question from the headline is no, Slovenia is 16th least failing in the world, based on indicators like quality of living and such. read the methodology if you care.
I love datasets like this one, if you assemble them with care and if you actually make them complete, they have the power to perform reality-check.
Image via Wikipedia
A friend of mine mentioned a while ago, that after listening to tv news about fishing disputes with Croatia, she went and checked how many fishermen there are actually. She is from the coastal region, so she suspected there might be something wrong with the facts.
she found out, that there is in fact, just over 100 people in this “sector”. to quote the “National strategic plan  for development of fishing in Slovenia“:
StatistiÄni podatki kažejo pomembno poveÄanje v Å¡tevilu delovno aktivnih oseb v gospodarskem ribolovu in akvakulturi skupaj za obdobje 1996-2004. Å tevilo delovno aktivnih oseb v ribiÅ¡ki predelavi se je v istem obdobju rahlo zmanjÅ¡alo. Vendar je bilo v letu 2005 okoli 142 zaposlenih v morskem ribiÅ¡tvu, kar je 2 manj kot leta 2004
from: Ministry of Agriculture
The document i’m quoting here is 38 pages of dense text about the status and the plans to develop a commercial sector of 150 people. Fishing has it special place in our national budget, with 10,740,533 EUR allocated for it’s development in 2012. Yes, that’s 10 and 6 zeros following it.
I like fishing, I like the sea, I like fishermen.
But for crying out loud, how can our country survive the financial crisis if the Ministries are spending time, resources and energy on, I’m sorry, projects with no impact on national level?!?!?!
