So Norway and maybe Monaco are more successful than the US?

there are multiple success metrics

also, to answer the original question: yes they are

well that really depends on the metric right?

do you care about quality of life? literacy? about social justice? about women's rights?

or about who has the most richest billionaires or the strongest military?

or who has the best american football teams?

Not every people care about the same things. Some people would rather live in a country that treats others as shit, and take pride in that and absolutely don't see the point why other other countries have some better metrics on some they may consider useless stuff like education.

EDIT: I mean, I know it sounds silly, but failure to understand that there are so many people who literally don't give a shit about why education matters, or why empathy matters is the reason we are in this situation. We took for granted that there are universal values, and organized our societies around goals oriented towards those universal values and in the meantime we got this resentment brewing in part of the population that got exploited by populist forces

In improving the lives of their people?

Yes, absolutely.

Norway, probably yes. Their population is more educated, and their civil society much better functioning than the UK. Their society is less unequal and (I’m pretty sure) their quality of life figures would be higher. Monaco is just a tax wheeze and playground.

Norway's GDP is driven by their nationalized petroleum business (20 - 35% of GDP)