Happiness
26/10/13 05:49
It has been more than a month since the United Nations released the World Happiness Report. The report measured the wellbeing of people in more than 150 countries based on per capita GDP, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, freedom from corruption, and generosity. I’m not sure how they came up with the criteria for their measure of happiness, but it seems suspect to me that they equated financial success with happiness. While there are some very nice things about having enough financial resources to be free from hunger and other obvious problems of poverty, to project that into making wealth one of the measures of happiness seems to me to be a stretch. I haven’t read the entire report and I probably won’t do so, but from the news reports I have read about it, it seems to be a simple case of cultural bias. The people who made up the report measured the things that are important to them and came up with the result that the happiest people are the people most like the authors of the report.
The entire project was probably doomed from the start. Happiness is so subjective that it can’t be quantified. Is a child kicking a soccer ball around with others in a refugee camp inherently less happy than one playing on an organized teem in a U.S. suburb? Is the joy of receiving food when one is really hungry somehow less than the pleasure of fine dining for those who have never known hunger? It is all a matter of perspective.
Among other things that makes the report suspect is the simple fact that all of the report’s top 5 happiest countries are in northern Europe. Three of them are in Scandinavia. The top five are Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Sweden. In all fairness, it is important to note that Canada came in sixth and missed out on the top five by only a few thousands of a point.
The report doesn’t cite any tropical countries as being tops in happiness. Maybe the fact that the report was released in September, at the beginning of the tropical storm season influenced the results. More likely, people who embrace recreation and are less productive financially are somehow judged to be less happy. I’m not too sure that everyone living in Tahiti would see it that way.
My father used to comment that cold weather builds character and when we lived in North Dakota there were several local sayings like, “30 below keeps the crime rate low.” That bias seems to be reflected in the report that ranks Iceland (#9) higher than Costa Rica (#12). Maybe their is just too much good weather in Costa Rica for people to be truly happy. I’m thinking that there are more than a few Ticos who don’t plan to move to Iceland in order to improve their happiness rating.
I guess it doesn’t surprise me that both New Zealand (#13) and Australia (#10) were rated higher than the United States (#17). I’m not sure that I would describe our country as unhappy, but I did encounter plenty of happy people when I visited Australia. Then again if you applied the criteria of the report, you might conclude that the wealthy people in Australia’s coastal cities were some how happier than the Anangu people living in the continent’s center. They certainly have more wealth and a longer life expectancy. But to describe the city-dwellers as happier than the folks who live in the rural and isolate areas seems to me to be a mistake.
I’ve never visited Africa, but I wonder how it feels to the people of Togo to be listed as the least happy of the 156 countries listed in the report. Neighboring Ghana made it to 86. Do you suppose that reading the report will result in the migration of people from Togo to Ghana? Something tells me that the report isn’t going to be taken too seriously in either country.
Israel is ranked number 11 in the report, which makes me wonder who they surveyed. Overall happiness might be judged higher to a landowner in Jerusalem than to a refugee in the occupied territories or Gaza strip.In fairness to the report, it does rank the Palestinian Territories separately at 113. That’s a big difference in happiness depending on which side of the border you occupy. No wonder they are building a wall in an attempt to maintain separation.
The Irish are famous for their sad songs, but at number 18 they ranked higher than their English cousins at 22.
I could go on and on making comments about where individual countries end up in the rankings. Iraq (105) is rated as happier than Afghanistan (143). The list goes on and on. There is even a section in the report that compares happiness in 2010-2012 to that of 2005-2007 by region. IN that report it looks like Latin America and the Caribbean are making the largest improvements in happiness while the Middle East and North Africa are showing declines in their happiness index. That part of the report puts the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand all in the same category, but it shows us as having less happiness in 2012 than in 2005. I’m not experiencing that difference myself. My pension took a pretty good hit in the 2008 economic downturn but since my friends are mostly in the same boat, I don’t seem to be any less happy. And, since I became a grandfather in 2011, I think that I would definitely rate myself as having a higher happiness now than I did before. In fact, if they had me list the criteria for a happiness index, I would definitely include grandchildren as one of the marks of happiness.
The framers of our Declaration of Independence saw the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right. They didn’t mention the attainment of happiness as a guarantee for all citizens. Perhaps it is best not to be at the top of the World Happiness Report. Being ranked a bit lower means that there is still more happiness to pursue.