Mapping Global Happiness

Yet another entrant in the genre of happiness cartography, this time courtesy of Gallup:



The survey of 155 countries describes respondents as "thriving," "struggling," or "suffering" according to the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale. The scale is very straightforward - it simply asks people to locate themselves on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is the worst possible life for themselves and 10 is the best. The three categories break out as follows:

Thriving -- wellbeing that is strong, consistent, and progressing. These respondents have positive views of their present life situation (7+) and have positive views of the next five years (8+). They report significantly fewer health problems, fewer sick days, less worry, stress, sadness, anger, and more happiness, enjoyment, interest, and respect.

Struggling -- wellbeing that is moderate or inconsistent. These respondents have moderate views of their present life situation OR moderate OR negative views of their future. They are either struggling in the present, or expect to struggle in the future. They report more daily stress and worry about money than the "thriving" respondents, and more than double the amount of sick days. They are more likely to smoke, and are less likely to eat healthy.

Suffering -- wellbeing that is at high risk. These respondents have poor ratings of their current life situation (4 and below) AND negative views of the next five years (4 and below). They are more likely to report lacking the basics of food and shelter, more likely to have physical pain, a lot of stress, worry, sadness, and anger. They have less access to health insurance and care, and more than double the disease burden, in comparison to "thriving" respondents.

The patterns are familiar from other similar surveys: overall the Americas tend to be happiest (a median of 42% of respondents are thriving), followed by Europe (29%), Asia (17%), and Africa (8%).

The five most satisfied countries in the world are - say it with me now - the Scandinavian countries of Denmark (82% thriving), Finland (75%), Norway (69%), and Sweden (68%), plus the Netherlands (68%). The highest in the Western Hemisphere is Costa Rica (63%), followed by Canada (62%), Panama (62%), Brazil (58%), and the United States (57%). Asia is led by New Zealand (63%), Israel (62%), and Australia (62%). The least satisfied are mostly in Africa - Togo (1%), Burundi (2%), and Comoros (2%) are the least satisfied countries in the world. Meanwhile, the big Asian countries are surprisingly low on the scale: Japan comes in at just 19% thriving, India at 10%, and China at 9%.

Satisfaction

Gallup asked some people how satisfied they were with their standard of living, which yielded this result:



Says Gallup:

The 2009 satisfaction results are based on combined data for Gallup Daily tracking from Jan. 2 through Dec. 30, 2009, including more than 350,000 interviews for the entire year. The state sample sizes range from 632 in the District of Columbia and 878 in Wyoming to 37,203 in California. Forty-one states had more than 2,000 respondents...

Overall, 31 states showed an increase in satisfaction of at least one percentage point between 2008 and 2009, whereas 5 showed a decrease of at least one point (the greatest decrease, Hawaii's, was less than four points.) The remaining 14 states plus the District of Columbia changed by less than one point.

Now that just doesn't make any sense. Obviously things went downhill from 2008 to '09. Don't people know that? Don't they realize they must be less satisfied now than they were a year ago? Or is it that lean times make people feel more fortunate about their relative prosperity? After all, even now more than four-fifths of people who want jobs have them. That's 80% of the country that probably realizes they could be worse off than they are.

At any rate, it's interesting that the most satisfied states seem to be those that have been least affected by the recession, rather than the ones that have the highest standard of living. And for the least satisfied states it's the same deal: they don't have the lowest objective standards of living, but they have been hard hit by the current recession. I take this to mean that satisfaction, in this context, correlates with perceptions of change in economic conditions, rather than economic conditions as such. (Which makes some sense: if you have a net worth of $1,000, and you find a hundred dollar bill on the street, you'll probably feel a lot more satisfied than someone who's got $10,000 in the bank, but just lost $50,000 at the craps table in Vegas (Nevada, by the way, is the least satisfied state in the country).)

But overall there's not a real huge range from least to most satisfied. Nevada, like I say, is the least satisfied, but 69% there still express satisfaction with their standard of living. The most satisfied is North Dakota, at 82.3%, followed by South Dakots, at 80.8%. (The Dakotas, by the way, are the two ugliest states in the country as well. The reader may make of that what she will.)

BONUS FUN FACT: Did you know the Rolling Stones' (Can't Get No) Satisfation is only the third-best version of that song? It's true! Here's the best:

States of Happiness

Ladies and gentleman, your latest state-by-state quantification of human feeling:



This map is based on a new study that finds correlations between subjectively reported happiness and certain objective factors like air quality, cost of living, and climate:

The new research published in the elite journal Science on 17th December 2009 is by Professor Andrew Oswald of the UK’s University of Warwick and Stephen Wu of Hamilton College in the US. It provides the first external validation of people’s self-reported levels of happiness. “We would like to think this is a breakthrough. It provides an justification for the use of subjective well-being surveys in the design of government policies, and will be of value to future economic and clinical researchers across a variety of fields in science and social science” said Professor Oswald.

The researchers examined a 2005- 2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System random sample of 1.3 million United States citizens in which life-satisfaction in each U.S. state was measured. This provided a league table of happiness by US State reproduced below. The researchers decided to use the data to try to resolve one of the most significant issues facing economists and clinical scientists carrying out research into human well-being.

That issue: whether subjective reports of well-being (like those portrayed here) can be trusted. Seems that they can.

The study used subjective reports of well-being, but then checked those reports against a number of other variables for each state, including "precipitation; temperature; wind speed; sunshine; coastal land; inland water; public land; National Parks; hazardous waste sites; environmental ‘greenness’; commuting time; violent crime; air quality; student-teacher ratio; local taxes; local spending on education and highways; [and] cost of living." It turned out that the objective factors which would be expected to correlate with subjective happiness - nice climate, affordability, short commutes and all that - actually do correlate to the reported happiness of those 1.3 million surveyees. According to Professor Andrew Oswald, the lead author of the study:

“The state-by-state pattern is of interest in itself. But it also matters scientifically. We wanted to study whether people's feelings of satisfaction with their own lives are reliable, that is, whether they match up to reality -- of sunshine hours, congestion, air quality, etc -- in their own state. And they do match. When human beings give you an answer on a numerical scale about how satisfied they are with their lives, you should pay attention.

People’s happiness answers are true, you might say. This suggests that life-satisfaction survey data might be tremendously useful for governments to use in the design of economic and social policies,” said Oswald.

The happiest state is Louisiana (!), followed by Hawaii, Florida, Tennessee, and Arizona. The South does well in general, and the Northeast and Rust Belt not so much, which is interesting: happiness levels seem to be in strikingly inverse proportion to levels of economic and social development. The unhappiest state, it thrills me to report, is New York, followed by Connecticut and New Jersey - a trifecta for the tri-state!

The rest of the unhappiest quintile of states form a Bleak Belt from southern New England to the Great Lakes, with California thrown in for good measure. California can't blame it on the climate, of course, so their other factors must have been really brutal. On the other hand, Montana and Maine managed to sneak into the top tier despite their godforsaken climes.

Via the NY Times.

The Happy Planet Index Redux

Not long ago, I did a post about the Happy Planet Index, a quantification of 'ecological efficiency' from the New Economics Foundation. Roughly speaking, it measures the satisfaction of basic human needs per unit of resource consumption, so that the "happiest" countries are those that achieve higher standards of living while minimizing environmental impacts.

Well, now the NEF has come out with a rather souped-up HPI 2.0, complete with think-tanky 64-page report. Here's the new map:




The NEF regards the equivocation of economic growth with human progress as a foolish fallacy, a position The Map Scroll heartily endorses. They make this observation in their report (pdf), which includes this fascinating paragraph:

For most of human history, economic growth was a minor phenomenon: a side effect, where it existed, of the pursuit of other goals. It only attained its quasi-mystical role when GDP was placed atop the podium of indicators with the development of the United Nations system of National Accounts in 1947. At that time, focusing on productivity growth made sense. Much of the world needed to be rebuilt following the war, and that required growing economies. Furthermore, economic growth helped avoid distributional debates. The rising voice of the working classes demanded more of the material cake. The only way elites could respond to that voice without having to give up anything themselves was by growing the cake.

Our needs have changed since then, but "systems carry their own momentum, and even the wealthiest countries still pursue economic growth as if they were still struggling to recover from the war."

And the report notes this: "once our basic material needs are met, more concumption tends to make little difference to our well-being." This should be obvious and common-sensical; the marginal utility of consumption or wealth decreases dramatically once our basic physiological and safety needs are met. But the negative environmental externalities of consumption only become very onerous when we're talking about further consumption; the man compensating for his low self-esteem and need for acceptance by driving his Hummer does far more damage to the planet than the Malian woman getting inoculations for her infant, though the latter's actions do much, much more to increase happiness and limit suffering. But of course, buying a Hummer contributes orders of magnitude more to economic growth than does getting inoculations. On one hand, this is tragic: all our Hummer-driving and cheeseburger-eating is destroying the planet, and at the same time isn't even contributing much to our collective well-being. On the other hand, it also represents an enormous opportunity: if we could just see this fact, and re-order our priorities in accordance with it, we have a lot of room to limit our negative impacts on the environment while maintaining, or even improving, our level of well-being.

So that's the insight behind the HPI, and it's reinforced by some of their findings. Life expectancy correlates with higher GDP/capita, but not perfectly; Cuba, which is much poorer than the US, has a life expectancy that's nearly as high. And, the report says, "the most important gains in terms of both life expectancy and life satisfaction occur over the first 10,000 pounds of GDP distribution - beyond that there is little systemic difference between nations." This is evident in the map of life satisfaction by country:



The country with the greatest value of "happy life years" (a combination of life expectancy and satisfaction) is Costa Rica, with a GDP/capita about one-fourth that of the wealthiest countries. Even countries like Vietnam and China do better than the fairly wealthy Portugal.

The measures are set against the ecological footprint, a measure of resources used per capita. This is measured in terms of global hectares; the world average is 2.1 global hectares per person. The poorest countries have the lowest gha consumption; the largest ecological footprint is Luxembourg's, at 10.2 gha. The US is third, at 9.4. Here's the map of ecological footprints:



There's a broad correlation between wealth and ecological footprint, but it's not like all wealthy countries are interchangeable on this metric. South Korea uses only 3.7 gha, and the Netherlands uses only 4.4.

The map at the top of this post assigns countries a valuation of 'good,' 'middling,' or 'bad' for each of the three components of the index: life expectancy, life satisfaction, and ecological footprint, with a further very bad category for countries with exceptionally large ecological footprints. Countries that score poorly on life ecpectancy and satisfaction, like many of the poorest countries in Africa, show up as red even though they have small footprints. Coutries with high life expectancy and satisfaction, but very large footprints, are also red.

Comparing happy life years to ecological footprint yields some interesting regional patterns:



Where you want to be on this chart is in the upper left-hand corner: high on the happy life years scale and low on the ecological footprint scale. Most of the countries that come closest to that ideal are Latin American, with a few East Asian and Middle Eastern countries in that group as well. Sub-Saharan Africa tends to be low on both scales, and Western nations tend to be high on both.

Overall, the report says, the world has a life expectancy of 68.3 years, a life satisfaction of 6.1, and an ecological footprint of 2.4, for an overall HPI score of 49 out of 100. In other words, as a global society we're overshooting our resource limits, and we're not even all that happy. Hopefully we'll learn to look to places like Costa Rica to see how to find a balance between our desire to lead happy and fulfilling lives and our need to preserve that same opportunity for future generations, rather than blithely drive our SUVs over the precipice of catastrophe. And when you frame it that way, the choice we ought to make seems obvious. If only we weren't humans, I'd feel pretty confident that we'd make the right one.

The Happy Planet Index

The New Economics Foundation has come up with something called the Happy Planet Index that categorizes countries based on their relative ecological efficiency. It doesn't actually have much to do with happiness, per se, and it's not to be confused with this map, but it's a snappy enough title. Here it is:



So what do they mean by ecological efficiency? And what do those colors indicate? Well, here's some of what they have to say:

The Happy Planet Index (HPI) is an innovative new measure that shows the ecological efficiency with which human well-being is delivered around the world. It is the first ever index to combine environmental impact with well-being to measure the environmental efficiency with which country by country, people live long and happy lives.

The Index doesn’t reveal the ‘happiest’ country in the world. It shows the relative efficiency with which nations convert the planet’s natural resources into long and happy lives for their citizens. The nations that top the Index aren’t the happiest places in the world, but the nations that score well show that achieving, long, happy lives without over-stretching the planet’s resources is possible. The HPI shows that around the world, high levels of resource consumption do not reliably produce high levels of well-being (life-satisfaction), and that it is possible to produce high levels of well-being without excessive consumption of the Earth’s resources. It also reveals that there are different routes to achieving comparable levels of well-being. The model followed by the West can provide widespread longevity and variable life satisfaction, but it does so only at a vast and ultimately counter-productive cost in terms of resource consumption.

Sound a bit vague to you? Here's the HPI described in somewhat more concrete terms:

The HPI reflects the average years of happy life produced by a given society, nation or group of nations, per unit of planetary resources consumed. Put another way, it represents the efficiency with which countries convert the earth’s finite resources into well-being experienced by their citizens.

Still dubious? Try this:



There: variables expressed in Greek. So you know it's serious.

Actually, the principle here seems like a good one to me; I'll have a bit more to say about it later. For now I only ask: could Guatemala and Honduras really be among the most "ecologically efficient" countries in the world? I don't know - I'm really just asking. But it does surprise me a bit.

Depression in England and Wales

From Mark Easton, another interesting social map of the UK. This one shows the number of anti-depressant prescriptions per 1000 patients for January of this year.



Anti-depressant demand is especially booming in Wales and northern England. Says Easton:

The top seven [districts for anti-depressant prescription] are all Welsh Local Health Boards (LHBs) in a small area in the south of the country. Of the top thirty prescribers, 12 are in Wales and 10 are Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) in the north-east of England.

We even see a local health authority prescribing at a rate greater than one prescription for 10 patients. In Torfaen, the area around Pontypool in south Wales, GPs handed out 104 prescriptions per 1,000 patients during January. This appears to be an astonishing level of anti-depressant use. GPs we have contacted blame a shortage of counselling for the high prescribing levels.

Those two areas have relatively high rates of unemployment. Easton also points out, though, that London, which has lots of poor folks, has some of the lowest rates of anti-depressant use; so a simple correlation to economic factors can't explain away all the trends. Beyond that: is it too trite to say that northern England is just a more depressing place to live than London? There's the bad economy, but there's also the erosion of infrastructure, the past-their-primeness of cities and institutions, and the general sense of malaise of a region whose industrial might peaked during some century other than the one we're in. If, as in my imagined picture of the place (which I have never visited), the actual north ofEngland is like the Michigan or Upstate New York of The UK, I think that maybe no great exegesis is needed to explain the region's higher anti-depressant use.

Regarding Wales, though, I don't have any overly simplistic and ignorant opinions to offer. Commenters on Easton's blog variously suggest the availability of free scrips in Wales; decrepit housing; unaffordable housing; oldness of the population; poor whiteness of the population; the social history of the region; the fecklessness of Labour politicians; Thatcher's anti-union policies; and average annual rainfall. I will go out on a limb and say: some or all of those factors may or may not be involved.

The Geography of Personality

A fascinating study (pdf link) by Peter J. Rentfrow, Samuel D. Gosling, and Jeff Potter looks at the geographical variation of "the big five" personality traits: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness. From the abstract:

Volumes of research show that people in different geographic regions differ psychologically. Most of that work converges on the conclusion that there are geographic differences in personality and values, but little attention has been paid to developing an integrative account of how those differences emerge, persist, and become expressed at the geographic level... We present a theoretical account of the mechanisms through which geographic variation in psychological characteristics emerge and persist within regions... Results provided preliminary support for the model, revealing clear patterns of regional variation across the U.S. and strong relationships between state-level personality and geographic indicators of crime, social capital, religiosity, political values, employment, and health.

So by looking at the distribution of personality traits, we may be able to discover something about broad social factors like health, crime, and economic development. The authors place their work in the context of the long history in anthropology of describing personality differences among nations, but their work is focused on regions within the United States. The paper includes five maps of their results, clsasifying states by quintile, and I can't resist posting all five of them. The first shows extraversion:



Extraversion is generally associated, as the authors say, with "sociability, energy, and health." And the study found that states with higher levels of extraversion tended to be the states with higher levels of social involvement, such as participating in clubs and hanging out at bars. (They note, though, that it didn't correlate with the amount of time spent with friends; thus, "individuals appear to spend more time socializing in states where E is high than they do in low-E states, but their socializing is apparently somewhat indiscriminate and is not restricted to close friends.") You can clearly see the most extraverted states are in the Upper Midwest and northern Plains and parts of the South - and, a bit to my surprise, in the mid-Atlantic region. (And does anyone have a good explanation for Maine?) Another interesting note: state-level extraversion is positively correlated with robbery and murder rates.



Agreeableness "reflects warmth, compassion, cooperativeness, and friendliness." The authors found that high levels of agreeableness in states correlated with social involvement and religiosity. It was also positively correlated with spending time with friends and having guests over, but negatively with going to bars and joining clubs. Highly agreeable states also had fewer deaths from cancer and heart disease. Among the researchers' unpredicted findings was that these states also have a disproportionate number of artists and entertainers (which is a bit surprising just looking at the map).




Conscientiousness at the individual level "reflects dutifulness, responsibility, and self-discipline [and] it is positively associated with religiosity" and health-promoting behavior. The study found that conscientiousness had a positive correlation with religiosity at the state level and a slight correlation with the amount of exercise people did. Conscientiousness was also negatively correlated with going to bars and, for some reason, with frequency of having guests over. You can see that high-conscientiousness states tend to cluster in the Plains, the Southwest, and parts of the Southeast; the northeast is very unconscientious, evidently.



Neuroticism is characterized by "anxiety, stress, impulsivity, and emotional instability and is related to antisocial behavior, poor coping, and poor health." Unsurprisingly, the study found that highly neurotic states had lower rates of exercise, higher rates of disease, and a shorter life expectancy. In these states, people are less likely to join clubs and spend time with friends. The geographic clustering of neuroticism is strong: it's prevalent in the Northeast and much of Appalachia, and, for some reason, in the states of the lower Mississippi Valley. The West is decidedly less neurotic than the East, you may be unsurprised to hear.



Openness "reflects curiosity, intellect, and creativity at the individual level." The researchers predicted that highly open states would have high levels of liberal values, and a disproportionate number of people in the "artistic and investigative professions," and that is indeed what they found. People in these states are more tolerant of homosexuality, more likely to support legalization of marijuana, and more likely to be pro-choice. However, more open states tend to have lower rates of social involvement. and are considerably less religious. These states cluster on the West Coast and in the Bos-ny-wash megaregion, with a more scattered distribution elsewhere.

But why do these regional differences exist in the first place? The paper proposes a number of possible reasons, including selective migration (e.g., an open personality type moves from their dull Kentucky town to a "creative capital" like New York City or the Bay Area); social influence (a certain personality trait becomes more predominant in a given region simply be re-inforcing itself through repeated exposure to individuals, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of reinforcement); and environmental influence (people in cold, dreary climates like the Pacific Northwest or New England might be more prone to depression, or less aggressive).

It's fascinating stuff, and there's lots more in the (rather long) paper. The topic could be the subject of just about endless study and debate. And a natural next step would be to extend this study across countries - wouldn't maps like this of Europe or Asia be fascinating?

The Well-Being of America

First, apologies right off the bat for these maps having the ugliest color scheme in the history of the world. (The color spectrum is right there in nature, people - you just have to use it.) The maps come from a poll done by Gallup for AHIP (America's Health Insurance Plans, which could perhaps explain the colors (insurance analysts not being known, generally, for their refined sense of design)).

The maps show well-being by state and congressional district based on interviews with 350,000 people during 2008. Says Gallup:

The Well-Being Index score for the nation and for each state is an average of six sub-indexes, which individually examine life evaluation, healthy behaviors, work environment, physical health, emotional health, and access to basic necessities. The questions in each sub-index are asked nightly of 1,000 national adults, aged 18 and older.

So the ratings of well-being are inferred rather than derived from self-reporting. That's good.

The Western states tend to rate the highest, along with a couple eastern states with more post-industrial economies. The being is most well in Utah, followed by Hawaii, Wyoming, Colorado, and Minnesota. The unhappiest states tend to be the poorer ones, and the ones with more manufacturing-based economies; no surprises there. The least well state in the union is West Virginia, with Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio, and Arkansas rounding out the bottom five.

As for the wellest congressional district? Honors go to California's 14th, which runs along the Pacific coast between San Francisco and San Jose and contains part of Silicon Valley. And the least well district is Kentucky's 5th, in the eastern part of the state, deep in the heart of darkest Appalachia.

New York: New York

Another typically excellent interactive map from the New York Times; this one reveals New Yorker's attitudes about their city across a number of dimensions.



Overall, according to the accompanying article, 51% of the 25,000 New York households surveyed rated quality of life good or excellent, but that obviously varies considerably across neighborhoods.

The article discusses one of the "happy" neighborhoods, Greenwich Village and environs:

There are more street fairs in the square bordered by the Hudson River and the Bowery, from Canal Street to West 14th Street, than in any other place in the city. The area has the highest concentration of civic organizations in the five boroughs, and among the highest number of sidewalk cafes. Sixty percent of the buildings here have landmark status, according to Bob Gormley, district manager at the local community board.

The neighborhoods within this square — SoHo, Greenwich Village, the West Village and Little Italy — are among the city’s most visited and photographed, and their names are virtual synonyms for New York.

“This is probably the best part of Manhattan to live in,” Daryl Wein, 25, a filmmaker, said as he savored a burrito from the back of an empty U-Haul truck parked on Hudson Street, not far from his apartment. “It’s the prettiest and most relaxed, and it’s cool. You have restaurants. You have the river and the jogging path that runs along it. You have everything.”

Thirty-seven percent rated the area an excellent place to live (though you sort of have to wonder about those other 63% - where, exactly, do they believe would be a better place to live? And why don't they live there?) The article also discusses one of the least satisfied neighborhoods, which is rated poor by 43% of residents:

This swath of the Bronx — roughly bordered by the Cross Bronx Expressway to the north, East 159th Street to the south, the Sheridan Expressway to the east and Webster Avenue to the west — has endured the fires of the 1970s, the crack epidemic of the 1980s and the crime wave that accompanied it. It survived the recession of the early 1990s and now faces another one, with the borough now posting the city’s highest unemployment rate.

Atayla Suazo, 21, a math and reading tutor who lives on East 164th Street, said that the police chase away bands of youths who go around making noise and causing mischief in the summertime. But what she does not understand, she said as she folded her clothes at the Laundry Day Superstore on Boston Road, “is why the city doesn’t give these kids something to do.”

The area has no malls, no bowling alleys, no movie theaters and only a handful of community organizations that offer summer programs, she lamented. There used to be a skating rink nearby, but it closed “because there were too many fights,” Ms. Suazo said.

The streets offer a mix of hope and despondency: newly built homes across from fenced-in lots sprinkled with garbage and roamed by rats. At the intersection of Union Avenue and Freeman Street, prostitutes walked the sidewalks on a recent frigid afternoon as mothers passed by escorting their children home from school.

To paraphrase Frank Sinatra, New York is a commendable locale. But then, he was rich.

Anomie in the UK

(h/t to the Sex Pistols for the title, natch)



According to the BBC's Mark Easton, these twinned maps provide "a measure of people's sense of - or lack of - belonging to where they live." Since the early 1970's, it would seem, people's sense of connection to their physical homes has been deteriorating, at least in the UK. It would be fascinating to see how this data compared to other countries: I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if a similar phenomenon were evident in the US. And what about other countries? Is it a Continental affliction, as well? What about the developing world?

Now, I don't doubt that this is a bad thing. But as with so much in the way of modern social change, it seems to me that we've traded one very large good for another very large good. That is, we've exchanged communities defined by geographical proximity (and the sense of place, history, tradition, safety, security, and stability that they connote) for communities defined by interests and personal identity (and all the freedom to define one's own social experience that they connote). So it's true that a disaffected or socially isolated Liverpudlian may have less of a local community in which to root her sense of self (that is, she would report a high level of anomie); but she surely has more opportunities to escape whatever stultifying or socially arid conditions are responsible for her disaffection in the first place.

It's a real dilemma, with probably no certain answer. Still, those maps are a reminder that one of the characteristic sensations of being alive in the post-industrial Western world is a subtle but inescapable feeling of loss.

Or, to quote a keen observer of contemporary social conditions:

Every time I think of her
It brings back memories
I remember how it used to be
Oh baby, can't you see?
Oh baby, come back to me.

I'm a lonely boy
I'm a lonely boy
I'm a lonely boy
I'm a lonely boy

Happiness

Speaking of national happiness...



This map shows levels of "subjective well-being" around the world - i.e., how happy people say they are. A couple of thoughts on this:

First, just from eyeballing this map, it looks like there is a correlation between national wealth and general happiness, but not an exceptionally strong one. Most developed countries rate quite happy, while many poor countries, especially in Africa, rate relatively unhappy. But still - Guatemalans are happier than the French; Mongolians are happier than the Japanese; Kyrgyzstanis are happier than Russians. (And notice our Bhutanese friends seem pretty content - their GNH policy must be working.)

Second, I've long felt that once an individual (or a society) reaches a certain degree of wealth at which their basic needs - food, shelter, medical care, maybe education (i.e., everything that's fairly low on Maslow's hierarchy of needs) - that all further wealth has relatively low marginal utility. That is, if your basic needs are taken care of and you don't have to worry about them much, then non-wealth factors will have a much greater effect on your overall level of happiness. I think this map bears that out. While some regions, such as much of Africa and South Asia, are clearly unhappier than others, these are regions where basic needs are oftentimes not being met. (Most of the former Soviet Union also appears to be in a grim mood, as well, though this might be attributable to their particular sociohistorical legacy.) But if you look only at middle- and upper-income nations, I don't really see a discernible difference. Countries like Malaysia, Costa Rica, and Saudi Arabia are among the happiest in the world; Thailand and Colombia are comparable to France and Germany; etc. So if I were a nation, what I'd be trying to do is encourage economic growth to the point of achieving middle-income status, and once that goal is achieved, devoting additional resources to ensuring that the basic needs of all my citizens are met. (Of course, the premise of such a policy would be that happiness is inherently more valuable than pure economic power, and some might disagree with that.)

Third, though: I wonder how seriously any of this ought to be taken. People are not necessarily entirely reliable when it comes to reporting their own mental states. Depending on the methodology by which this data was compiled, it seems possible that cultural conditions or expectations influenced the way people reported their own feelings, regardless of what their actual feelings were. For instance, Anglophone countries all reported fairly high levels of happiness. Is this because Anglophone people are happier - or did the wording of the question have a particular connotation in English which was different from other languages? Or is there a legacy of the peculiarly Anglo "stiff upper lip" such that Anglophone peoples felt they ought to say they were happy, regardless of how they actually felt? Similarly, most Buddhist countries scored relatively high (again, including Bhutan). This could be because Buddhists tend to be happier - or it could be because Buddhists feel it's more important to report that they're happy. Because I think it's impossible to know which it is for sure, I would take this map with a medium-large grain of salt.

On the other hand - the French are the grumpiest people in Western Europe? Sounds about right to me.

UPDATE: Here's a snippet from a BBC article on the map:

Adrian White, from the UK's University of Leicester, used the responses of 80,000 people worldwide to map out subjective wellbeing.

Denmark came top, followed closely by Switzerland and Austria. The UK ranked 41st. Zimbabwe and Burundi came bottom.

A nation's level of happiness was most closely associated with health levels.

Prosperity and education were the next strongest determinants of national happiness.

Bhutan: World's Most Economically Sophisticated Nation

Bhutan - a cuddly little egg of a Buddhist kingdom tucked obscurely into the Himalayan Mountains - makes for a rather exciting topographical map, no?

But I bring it up here to raise a point: Bhutan is the most economically sophisticated country in the world. Oh, I don't mean they're wealthy - suited men in lower Manhattan have been known to sneeze out more than their GDP of about $1.3 billion. But the thing is, Bhutan has a policy of promoting Gross National Happiness:

Gross National Happiness (GNH) is an attempt to define quality of life in more holistic and psychological terms than Gross National Product.

The term was coined by Bhutan's former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck in 1972 soon after the demise of his father King Jigme Dorji Wangchuk who has opened up Bhutan to the age of modernization. It signaled his commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan's unique culture based on Buddhist spiritual values. Like many moral goals, it is somewhat easier to state than to define. Nonetheless, it serves as a unifying vision for the Five Year planning process and all the derived planning documents that guide the economic and development plans of the country.

While conventional development models stress economic growth as the ultimate objective, the concept of GNH claims to be based on the premise that true development of human society takes place when material and spiritual development occur side by side to complement and reinforce each other. The four pillars of GNH are the promotion of equitable and sustainable socio-economic development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment, and establishment of good governance.

Now compare this to the 'developed' world's GDP, which is purely a measure of economic activity. The goal of any economy, we all are told, ad infinitum by our political leaders, the media, and the vast majority of economists, is to promote growth. This is how economic health is defined. So: a child breaks her arm? Good! More money going into the health care system. An enormous flood of toxic coal ash obliterates the Tennessee countryside? Good! Much economic activity will result from the clean-up and possible civilian population relocations. We drain the last drops of oil from our nation's bedrock? Good! Oil can be sold for money. (Never mind that a deduction from one's nation's resources ought to be considered by any reasonable measure a reduction of national wealth.) And war? Well...

But consdier the most intractable problems we face: poverty; malnutrition; deforestation; climate change. In all these cases, simple economic calculation doesn't provide the incentives to solve the problems. But the economic growth paradigm is sacrosanct - no politician dares to challenge it.

But Bhutan has. And here's the thing: until we start thinking in terms of GNH, rather than GDP, we're not going to be able to solve any of those problems. We're just not.