Happiness around the world

I’m still waiting for warmer weather, so I’m not too happy at the moment, but Bob has some good observations to share about the subject of happiness. Here’s his input 🙂

Recently, I attended a lecture about the distribution and causes of happiness around the world. The speaker was Ed Diener, a psychologist who has devoted his career to the  study of well being. More specifically he is interested in subjective well being – peoples’ own perception of their happiness, which is measured along two dimensions: overall satisfaction with one’s life, and the balance of positive and negative feeling on a day to day basis.  This gets aggregated to assign a “happiness”  number to whole countries. He has teamed up with the Gallup organization to gather vast quantities of data.    

It turns out that the happiest country in the world is Denmark and all the other Scandinavian countries are right up there.  The unhappiest is country is Togo in Sub-Saharan Africa.  Denmark is a rich country and Togo is really poor. But that isn’t the whole story. In Denmark, there is enormous social trust. Danes think that if they lose their wallet, there is over a 90 percent chance that a stranger will return it . There is an even better chance that a policeman will do that.  In Togo, the perception is that  there is virtually no chance of getting your wallet back from a neighbor, much less strangers or the police. 

It is often true that if a country scores high along one dimension – satisfaction with life, it also does on the other – feeling good on a day to day basis. But that is not always true. Singaporeans score high in life satisfaction but feel crummy day to day because life is often a pressure cooker.  In the Philippines, it is just the reverse.

Countries with progressive taxation are happier than countries where everyone pays at the same rate. Latin American countries are significantly happier than “Confucian ” countries. South Korea is much unhappier than one might predict given its level of prosperity.

Diener didn’t talk too much about the USA, though he has done plenty of research on it. It’s more happy than not – no surprise  – but my very fallible impression is that it gets around a 6 out of ten on a happiness scale compared to almost 8 in Denmark. 

Governments (such as China) are beginning  to think about happiness as a matter of public policy. They want to know how happy their country is, what social and cultural characteristics are markers for happiness with an eye to possibly promoting these. 

We should be happy. A brave new world awaits.   

Bob