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How to tell a good nation? Nation achievements? Or general welfare? [4]
Some people claim that you can tell whether a nation is great by looking at the achievements of its rulers, artists, or scientists. Others argue that the surest indicator of a great nation is, in fact, the general welfare of all its people.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
government's good policy
In ancient era, a so called "great" emperor is defined by how much he had done for all his people. For example, if he launched lots of public facilities with most of the wealth he has, which is usually spent for the emperor himself making his palace and life more luxury, he would be considered as a good leader of the country because he takes general welfare as priority. In most of the cases, those empires are memorized by people for its prosperity due to the gentle leader.
However, in modern days, living in a democratic society, I don't think that those efforts made by the government are sympathetic or generous but somehow normal. For the reason that the consistent of government nowadays is by groups of people, and how the society work is not as simple as it was before. Therefore, establishing a good policy can't be simply contributed to a certain person. In fact, people are able to control the way they are willing to live in modern days by voting for specific policy or selecting candidates. As the reasons above, what we call as "general welfare" is too obscure because everyone has their own thought of good living and that affect people's own definition of the general welfare.
Despite that the general welfare is too hard to define, you must say that the achievements of rulers, artists, scientists, specialists or people have tributes to the society, in a country are the best indicator of how great a nation is. I agree that those achievements are critical of demonstrating the prosperity of a country, while I don't think that people's welfare have much connection with it.
Take a look at the people in North Korea, who are always considered suffering from bad living environment and a long term famine because of the lack of food and support from central authority. How come people can suffer from having no food in 21st century? Putting all these civil problems aside, their athletes are famous for well trained and always can get medals on most of internationally sports competition they attend. Moreover, they are pioneers of nuclear weapons. Their actual achievements in nuclear knowledge are unknown, but the fact that they are a treat to the world's leader, USA, is apparent. However, there are still many people escape from North Korea every years despite all the achievements mentioned above.
Not only North Korea but China has achieved a lots to some degree in both science and art fields. However, their general living standard is evidently quite different from their performance level in those professional fields. In conclusion, neither general welfare nor the achievements from whichever fields are proper to be the only indicator of how good a nation is, and I believe that it should be scaled by not only specific factors but more comprehensive and various ones.