Happiness

There can be few things less useful than a World Map of Happines. If you live in one of the unhappy places, there is little chance that you will be able to move to one of the happy ones- and anyway, there's no way of knowing wheter immigrants aer happy there. Besides,your personal capacity for happiness is largely hard-wired by your genetic heritage and early childhood experiences. But there are always  under-employed sociologists, psychologists and economist  looking for somthing new to research. There is also a permanent oversupply of journalists at their wits end for something to write about. 

Despite Israel's gallant effort to fill the whole news cycle single-handedly, this has been a slow week for news, so let us consider the global distributions of happiness.

The satisfaction with Life Index, to give the world happiness map its proper  name, does not measure objective conditions like gross domestic product per caita or aberage life expectancy. You can be dirt poor, like Bhutan, and still rank high in happiness. You can also be relatively  prosperous but miserabel, like  Latvians, who are less happy than Ethiopians or Palestinians.  

The old human Development Index, dating back to 1990, tells us who should be happy, if income, lifespan and educational level were really the main determinants of hapapiness. Unsurprisingly, this yields a list that ranks countries pretty much in strct order of GDP per capita.  For those who care about the environment, there is also the Happy Planet Index, launched in 2006, which measures the productions  of human well being per unit  of extraction or imposition upon nature. If your will-being comes at a high environmental cost, you drop down the list.

On this Index, the developed countries do not do so well, for their prosperity comes at a high environmental cost. US drops from No 13 on the Human Development Index to No 150  on the Happy Planet Index. But that index is really measuring the happiness of the ecosphere, as if the planet itself were capable of happiness. 

The most striking result is that all of the top 20 countirs in terms of happiness are relatively  small : the biggest, at number 10 is Canada, which has only 33 million people. All the Scandinavian countries are there, of course, but so are Antigua, Bhutan, Costa Rica and the Seychelles. All 20 are democracies.  

The saddest countries in the list, numbers 176, 177 and 178 are the democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe and Burundi. Indeed, there is not a single country in Africa that counts as happy.

Russia and the other countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union are all mired in the Slough of Despond. Japan surprisingly, ties with Yemen, an almost failed state, in the happiness stakes.  Among the big developed countries, the US places just outside the top 20 at no 23, well ahead of other rich countries like Germany, Britain, Spain, Italy and France. Bangladesh  are happier than Indians and much happier than Pakistanis. Malaysian are the happiest people in Asia, Venezuleans are the happiest people in South America, and the Gulf states from Oman to Kuwait are the happiest countries in the Middle East. Icelanders may be pretty unhappy since their banks and their currency collapsed. Sri Lankans may be cheering up now that their long civil war over. Iranians were not happy even before last year upheavals, but they are probably even less so now. 

Health and wealth make some difference in how happy countries are, but they are certainly not decisive, and some other measures that are normally thougth to matter don't seem to count at all. US has the greatest inequality of income among the bif developed countries, but American are happy people- may be because their national mythology tells them that they all have equality of opportunity.

The size goverment does not  make much difference either, so long as it is competent.