The Global Happiness Report

 Every year the UN convenes a group of experts to publish a report about happiness in the world. The exercise started around 2005 so by now there is a wealth of data available. There survey is built around a single question asking people how happy they feel using a scale from zero to ten, undertaken in most of the countries of the world. The same survey captures some objective statistics, including about demographics, and asks some secondary questions to enable the researchers to form statistical links between happiness and its potential drivers.

 

For several years the analysis has yielded the same six key drivers of happiness. They seem to apply consistently over time to individuals within a country and between countries, so that the regression analysis model parameters change very little from year to year. What does change over time is how the different countries rank overall and according to the model, although that happens more slowly than one might expect. The model explains more than half of the variation in declared happiness, and by now the researchers can be rather sure that they have not failed to spot other important drivers, and that the remaining variation is probably accounted for by ephemeral things such as mood or even weather on the survey day, or by cultural differences.

 

Each year I remind myself of the six categories. They are a mixture of social and economic factors. Income is one variable, and healthy life expectancy is another. A third is a feeling of freedom to make life choices and a fourth is an experience or perception of corruption. The fifth factor is a feeling that a friend or society at large will arrive in case of need. The last factor is the least intuitive: people who claim to have recently helped somebody or a cause tend also to declare themselves happier. It makes for a fascinating list, one that suggests public policies that might be effective in improving wellbeing.

 

The country ranking is rather stable by now as well. Finland have been top of the table for five years, and the top eight comprise the five Nordic countries, Switzerland, Luxembourg and The Netherlands. The rich anglosphere cluster between 10 and 20, but Southern Europe languish between 20 and 60, with my chosen future residence Portugal ranking a disappointing 56. The bottom of the table is filled with African and south Asian nations.

 

Climbers and fallers are interesting to note, but here the stability in the study can become frustrating, because trends take so long to emerge. The researchers are inherently cautious and loth to draw conclusions without overwhelming evidence, and a three-year rolling average is used for their main indicator, which imposes a further time lag to the fact that it takes over a year to carry out surveys and collate the report. I spent the Trump years searching in vain for evidence of the US falling in the charts; clearly the smoothing of the data means that shorter-term swings from such things as political changes rarely show up.

 

Still, 15 years is long enough for trends to emerge. On the slow but sustained upswing are south-eastern European states such as Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia. This makes sense intuitively as these countries took longer to benefit from the fall of the Soviet empire and were slower to shake off corruption. The EU can take some credit, but Serbia’s inclusion on the list (as well as recidivist Hungary) shows that the EU does not offer the only recipe for success. On the downswing are crisis states such as Venezuela, Lebanon and Afghanistan, but it is also notable how both Mexico and Canada have gradually moved down in the rankings.

 

Covid tells an interesting story in the report. Already last year the researchers were surprised that the global happiness average did not seem to be dipping during the pandemic, and that absence of an expected trend persists this year. But now, after more analysis, the report can use its own model to start to explain this. It is evident that healthy life expectancy and income took a hit owing to the pandemic, and the study links a decline in happiness in some to terms such as poverty, unemployment and illness. But this applies only to a cohort of those surveyed, and often a small cohort, especially in more equal societies. The surprise comes from upswings in happiness owing to the social support and especially the generosity indicators. The pandemic has brought out the good in a lot of us, and that has made both givers and recipients happier.

 

The report this year cannot resist the allure of blowing its own trumpet. They point out how the report has become widely quoted as it has become more robust and established and how it has spawned other valuable research threads. The trend is for happiness and related topics to be quoted more and GDP and similar terms to be quoted less. This is indeed evidence of human progress. On the same topic, the gradual positive trend line of human happiness supports optimistic writes such as Steven Pinker who believe that litanies of bad news obscure the positive underlying maturation of our race.

 

Then the report follows some lines of research of its own. It investigates how social media can further expand its wealth of usable data points. It devotes a section to genetic traits that predispose happiness or its opposite. And it offers some initial analysis of low intensity happiness triggers such as balance, harmony and peace, finding that, while culturally these are associated with the east, they are indeed indicators of happiness everywhere.

 

I love this sort of report and look out for this particular one every year. At a time when the UN is once again being pilloried for its impotence over Ukraine – usually by those whose own actions have ensured that same impotence – the report is an example of the quiet, dignified long-term work that the UN supports day after day. I find it sad that this sort of work is so rarely quoted in political or media circles. Political campaigns based on a goal of happiness need not be merely utopian dreams these days, but can be linked to real policies and real measures. If the Democrats are looking for arguments to support Build Back Better or similar programmes, relating the measures to their impacts on happiness could be a useful hook. Of course the fact that it takes 15 years to reliably measure results is a mixed blessing, enabling opponents to mock claims but also giving some space to proponents to stick to their guns despite setbacks.

 

The age of a more mature policy debate and a better-informed politics has the potential to arrive very soon. Reports such as the UN global happiness report are leading us in the right direction. Intelligent publications like The Economist should follow the lead. At a time of sickening war, it is good to remind ourselves both of human progress already secured and the vast remaining potential to make human lives better.