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I would put Australia as a serious contender for #2 country to live in, but I'm curious what the rest of your list looks like?
Who's your #1?
NZ I'd probably put on par with Australia or maybe a hair below due to marginally-greater levels of SJ.
Outside the Anglosphere it gets more complicated (and where I'd personally prefer to live starts to diverge from where I think would be objectively good places to live, as I'm decent at French and have a foggy idea about other Romance languages/Mandarin/Japanese but am only fluent in English). I've also a less clear idea of what's going on there. But of the five main Anglosphere countries I'd say only the UK is having enough trouble to potentially lose top-5 status, because Western Continental Europe is clearly worse in terms of SJ/ethnic conflict issues than anywhere else in the Anglosphere, Free Asia aside from the rather-uptight Singapore is also known as "ground zero bait for WWIII", and basically everywhere else is notably poorer.
I haven't the foggiest idea which African/South American/non-East Asian countries are better/worse than their neighbours. Russia clearly beats China but I'd take the First World over either, and obviously North Korea is terrible.
USA is my #1. Australia rivals Costa Rica(where English speakers are almost automatically middle class or higher) and Japan(which is at least stable, cohesive, and very safe). I'd put France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland as my top three western European countries and Poland as my top Eastern European country. Russia and Iran both over China, but even the shitty parts of the first world over any of three. Botswana, Kenya, and South Africa as top African picks, but none of them near the top overall.
As for South America, Northern Mexico, Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica, and Southern Brazil are developed countries with right-here-right-now decent economies, but very high crime for two of them and the levels of income inequality one comes to expect from Latin America. Still, the upper middle class in those places have good living standards. Argentina is a developed country that might be on the economic upswing; its welfare state is probably too expansive to achieve the labor force participation rate necessary to truly achieve an economic breakout. Paraguay and Panama are relatively safe and steadily improving, but they're still poor even for Latin America. Venezuela, Haiti, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Cuba are the real shitholes.
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