Part of the honest US→Netherlands report. This page reads one axis; the full report reads all eight.
Netherlands
78
United States
60
0–100, higher is better · netherlands ahead by 18. Confidence: Netherlands Moderate, United States Moderate—the weaker band governs the read, so this axis reads at Moderate. The gap clears it, which is why the report calls a lead here instead of a tie.
Two things in one axis
The quiz asks it plainly: when you think ‘safe’, is it more the institutions—rule of law, low corruption—or day-to-day street safety? Those are different worries, and the axis carries both. Personal safety comes from exposure to violent crime; institutional quality comes from rule of law, control of corruption, political stability, and civil liberties. In v1 they share a single blended weight, so the 78 you see is the two folded together.
That folding matters because the two can diverge—a place can have low street crime and eroding institutions, or the reverse. On this pairing they point the same way: the Netherlands leads on the governance signals and on personal-safety exposure both, which is why the composite gap is wide enough to clear the band. When the two signals disagree, a blended axis is exactly the kind of number to read with the confidence caption open.
Why this gap counts as a lead
Most axes on this pairing are ties—the two countries land close enough that calling a winner would be reading noise. Safety and governance is different: the 18-point spread is larger than the confidence band around either number, so the lead survives the uncertainty. That is the whole test the report applies—a difference is only a lead when it clears the wider of the two bands—and here it does, at Moderate confidence.
What a country number can’t promise
Personal safety varies more within a country than between most countries. A national score cannot see your specific neighbourhood, your commute, or the block you’d actually live on—it reads the whole system and averages the rest away. The institutional half of the axis travels better across a country than the street-safety half does, so treat the governance signal as the more portable of the two. Read the lead as a defensible read on the system, then do your own homework on the specific place.
How this was built
The governance signals come from the World Bank’s worldwide governance indicators and a civil-liberties reading; personal safety from published crime exposure—all read from the same registry that powers the live scores, as of 13 July 2026, over underlying data from 2022–2025. Nothing is collected by us, and no gap is filled with a guess. See the full sources & licenses and how a score is built.
Common questions
- Is the Netherlands safer than the United States?
- On Atlas Resolve’s safety & governance axis the Netherlands reads 78 to the US’s 60—an 18-point gap that clears the Moderate confidence band, so we call it a genuine lead rather than noise. It’s one of the few axes on this pairing where the difference is large enough to survive the uncertainty.
- What does the safety & governance axis include?
- Two things a household usually keeps separate: personal safety (exposure to violent crime) and the quality of institutions (rule of law, control of corruption, political stability, civil liberties). v1 carries one blended weight, so the axis reads both signals together—the Netherlands is ahead on both in the sources we use.
- Does a high safety score mean my street will be safe?
- No—the axis reads the country, not your block. Personal safety varies enormously within any nation, and a national number can’t see your specific neighbourhood. Read the 78-to-60 gap as a defensible read on the whole system at Moderate confidence, not a promise about where you’d actually live.