A couple of weeks ago Ipsos published a happiness survey of 28 countries. Indonesia were run-away winners with 51% saying they were very happy, more than double the score for any European nation.
I love these surveys. I was encouraged when David Cameron started a campaign to understand and drive policy towards “gross national happiness” a couple of years ago and am disappointed that it seems to have led nowhere. Probably it has run into the problems of defining and measuring happiness, and also political blocks: who really wants to stake their re-election prospects on something so fickle as a poll?
The Ipsos survey interviewed people from the same 28 countries in 2007, so it is also possible to see trends. There are splits not just by nation, but also by age, gender, marital and work status. I looked at the raw data on the website, but haven’t yet found great surprises or insights from these other categories.
As the surveyors point out, a healthy dose of salt is necessary in drawing too many conclusions, even if we assume that the interviewers managed to find a large enough representative sample from each country. First, there is the language and culture dimension. The basic question can be translated into different languages, but the exact nuance is bound to differ. Anyone with one native language living in a second country knows that subtle changes in text radically change interpretation. Even if the intent of the question is more or less the same, the responses will still reflect culture. Perhaps in Indonesia, if a stranger comes up to you in the street and asking you how happy you are, it would be a monumental insult to them, to your family or to your God to respond anything but positively. For this reason, perhaps the trends over time give better indications than the national scores.
But this leads to another problem. I’m pretty sure that my response to the question would vary day by day, even hour by hour. True, we have an inner sense of contentment or otherwise that remains pretty solid for months or years. But my mood today is buffeted by so many ethereal factors as well. If the sun is shining, I always feel better. If I have slept well. If my football team has won its most recent match. If a friend paid me a compliment, or if I managed to make a friend happier myself. If I am free from a slight headache or backache or whatever ache. If the morning news or something I just read uplifted rather than depressed me. If my most recent family interactions have been happy ones.
Especially since I may respond quickly and without much thought to a random pollster catching me off guard, I have a feeling that my answer s might swing rather more wildly than they should. And while some of these effects are personal and might be expected to balance out in a large enough poll, others might effect a lot of people in the same direction, the weather, news and sport as examples.
Can a poll really mean anything in the midst of all that noise? My suggested answer would be: only if conducted quite frequently. One measurement in 2007 and another in 2011/12 seems to me to be rather like dismissing climate change because it was cool last week.
Still, let us for a minute cast all these quibbles aside and look at the poll results. Most countries at the top of the league in 2007 stayed there in 2012. Behind Indonesia were India, and then Mexico and Brazil, though Brazil dropped back in 2012. Turkey jumped from the bottom half of the table to fifth place. Then all the developed non-Europeans/non-Asians are in a cluster – US, Canada, Australia. South Africa, Argentina and Saudi Arabia are in the top half too. Then we have all the miserable Europeans. The Brits and Swedish are a bit ahead of most continentals, Italy and Spain (especially in 2012) a bit behind, and Hungary and Russia right at the bottom. China does no better than average, and Japan and South Korea do worse. For a table, look (among other places) at the February 25th Economist.
So, what does this all tell us, caveats notwithstanding? Money plainly doesn’t buy you happiness, at least as a nation. The best performers perhaps have simpler lifestyles, and a strong faith-based spirituality. I am sure that Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the excellent “Eat, Pray, Love” would not be surprised to find Indonesia and India at the top, and might attribute it in part to simplicity and spirituality.
While absolute economic development is not an indicator, some sense of progress perhaps is. Life for the leaders probably feels more blessed than a generation before. Turkey is plainly going forwards, and its results improved more than any other nation. Even Australia and the US might benefit from a sense of national youth. In Europe, by contrast, we are often led to believe that our best days are behind us. Perhaps distant former glories afflict the Chinese and Japanese as well?
What about dignity and justice? I argued before that these were stronger drivers of wellbeing than freedom or wealth. This theory is supported by Russia’s lowly position. In the case of Saudi Arabia, there may be multiple forces at work. There is also a case to say that material goodies only start to make us unhappy when we lack them but our neighbours don’t. That is one reason that, unless we are as enlightened as Liz Gilbert, we probably wouldn’t all make ourselves happier by moving to Indonesia.
All in all, the survey is fascinating and makes me beg for more. Surveys are so cheap to administer nowadays – why can’t this one cover 100 countries, with ten times as many people asked ten times as often? We might start to learn more about what truly makes people happy, and be able to do something about it, individually and collectively.
I think it would work. In the part of Shell I worked in, we started a regular staff survey, and used it to track things which were otherwise hard to measure. Questions like: “Does your division value for money for clients?”, or “Is X an innovative company?” are excellent for surveys, since trends in employee perceptions are probably the most reliable (and earliest) indicators of important business drivers. I was always fascinated by the results, and astonished at how consistently they anticipated real change. The work of Reichheld and Bain using customer and employee surveys to measure net promoter score uses a similar method, and I find it one of the most powerful tools available to companies.
Looking at why companies don’t do these things more often offers a clue why governments don’t either. At the time we used these internal surveys, my division was blessed with an enlightened leader. Even so, he was quite sensitive about the questions used, and not always objective in applying the results. His management team hated the surveys, seeing them as a threat. His bosses listened politely and allowed us to use survey scores to influence our self- assessment, but showed no appetite to copy us.
This was all about politics. How many leaders really want to display the truth? How many want to put their bonus in the hands of something so fickle as a survey?
It is the same with politicians, which is why I am cynical whether anything good will come from Cameron in the end. But, in the end, technology will defeat them. Online surveys already proliferate, and will become more pervasive, just like social media. It is not just Putin and Assad who in the long term will truly have to look their people in their eye.
I hope by that stage the Indonesians will still be as happy. But that is the great paradox of development. They probably won’t be, because that same technology might have taught them to value what they lack as well as what they have.
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