The World Happiness Report
On the 10th anniversary of the World Happiness Report, the report again looks at how the global population evaluates their own lives.
Source - Larm Rmah via Unsplash
The year 2022 celebrates the 10th anniversary of the World Happiness Report, which uses global survey data to report how people evaluate their own lives in more than 150 countries worldwide. The report indicated that over the last ten years, there has been a metamorphosis of public interest in happiness. Data indicate that at national policy level worldwide, countries are increasingly seeing happiness as an essential and central objective of public policy. In fact, nearly all OECD member countries now measure the happiness of their people annually, where the European Union has also asked its member countries to put well-being at the center of policy design.
How happiness is measured
The measurement of subjective well-being is based on three main well-being indicators: life evaluations, positive emotions, and negative emotions.
- Life Evaluations: the Gallup World Poll, which asks respondents to evaluate their current life as a whole using the mental image of a ladder, with the best possible life as a 10 and worst possible as a 0. Each respondent provides a numerical response on this scale, referred to as the Cantril ladder. Typically, around 1,000 responses are gathered annually for each country.
- Positive emotions: positive affect is given by the average of individual yes or no answers for three questions about emotions experienced or not on the previous day: laughter, enjoyment, and learning or doing something interesting.
- Negative emotions: negative affect is given by the average of individual yes or no answers about three emotions experienced on the previous day: worry, sadness, and anger.
The results
The following table indicates the countries with the highest happiness score and the countries with the least score. Finland continues to dominate the top spot, one of five Nordic countries in the top ten.
Key findings
- The 2022 reports illustrate that there is still a lot of year-to-year consistency in the way people rate their lives in different countries. Yet, there continues to be a significant gap between the top and bottom countries. Within the top group, national life evaluation scores have a gap of 0.40 between the 1st and 5th positions while the bottom ten countries have a much wider range of scores, covering almost 1.4 points.
- Three measures of prosocial behavior: donations, volunteering, and helping strangers all showed increases in 2021 in every global region.
- Overall levels of life evaluations have been fairly stable during the two years of COVID-19, matched by minor changes in the global ranking. Yet, individual-level data for emotions and life evaluations reveal that COVID-19 has worsened the well-being costs of unemployment and ill health.
- Individuals with high social and institutional trust levels were happier than those living in less trusting and trustworthy environments.
- Well-being inequality has generally grown since 2011, especially in Sub Saharan Africa, Middle East/North Africa (MENA), Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia
- That gap between positive and negative emotions has been narrowing over the past ten years, with enjoyment and laughter on a negative trend in most regions and worry and sadness on rising trends.
- Over the past decade, the trend growth in worry and sadness has been greatest in South Asia, Latin America, Middle East/North Africa (MENA), and Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Anger has remained low and stable in the global average, with large increases in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa offset by trend declines elsewhere.
- There have been trend increases in national average stress levels in all ten global regions
Why measure happiness?
Since the turn of the 21st century, the academic field of happiness studies has emerged as a credible science with its own research centres and academic journals. In this regard, in 2009, France’s Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, led by Nobel-prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, argued that that the promotion of well-being should be an explicit aim of government. They recommended that data should be collected in the field of societal well being just as how nations focus on economic, environmental, and social sustainability.
When a country’s social fabric is strong, feelings of well-being can grow because people work together to solve problems and appreciate the social support they have. The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster is an example of this. Japan’s happiness and trust increased after the crisis brought out the mutual support and cooperation of its people. On the other hand, if social institutions fail to meet the challenges of a crisis, individuals can become even unhappier, because they lose social trust.
According to Ed Diener, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and the University of Utah and a leading scientist in this field, his research has persistently found that happy people are the ones who function more effectively and also help society more. He uses the term sustainable happiness, which describes the deep and long-lasting sources of happiness. Specifically, Dr. Diener’s many years of study indicate that when people are happy they:
- live longer and experience better health.
- have superior work performance, especially organizational citizenship.
- have more supportive social relationships—for example, being less likely to get divorced.
- exhibit better citizenship and more “prosocial” behaviors—for example, being more likely to help others, volunteer, or donate money to charity.
- have better mental health and resilience when confronted by stressful events—for example, being less likely to suffer from mental health problems such as depression, and more likely to bounce back after something bad happens.
He further adds that the benefits of sustainable happiness are broad and important and cannot be ignored. Put simply, happy people not only feel better, but they function better in achieving the things a society values. They help those around them to also lead high-quality lives. Happy people are not uncaring, selfish people. They have the energy and desire to work on societal problems as much as or more than others.
Two cases – two nations
Nation states have begun to compete in global happiness rankings and plan policy according to statistics of well-being. In 2019, New Zealand announced that the country will report on how national spending impacts on well-being. City authorities are developing “smart” approaches to measuring happiness, mobilizing an ever-increasing array of mobile apps and behavioral data that aim to sense, map, and explain our daily happiness. Similarly, the Smart Dubai Office launched their Smart Happiness Index in 2018, which promises to assess the performance of their city managers based on happiness gain per funds spent.
The future; Is happiness taking over GDP?
The relationship between wealth and well-being is complex: put simply, poverty makes people miserable, but wealth doesn’t necessarily make people happy. One widely held approach to measuring the success of a nation is to add up its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Despite the momentum of happiness as an indicator, measuring GDP is likely to remain a vital marker for economists. As GDP cannot capture everything that is important to people, happiness and GDP could be two markers which complement and augment each other at a national level. In fact, 2001 Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs, Director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, argued for decades that hard economic indicators do not adequately reflect the happiness and well-being of a nation.
Some of the factors that determine quality of life cannot be measured in terms of monetary value. For instance, health, family and relationships, the quality and nature of work, the environment and education are all-important contributors to a sense of satisfaction with citizen’s lives. If we are to measure what really matters to people, then we need to measure these factors, as well.
