Jul 7 2009, 11:57AM
Daily Chart: The World In Happiness
Via Catherine Rampell, I see the new economics foundation (hip lowercase in the original) has released its second Happy Planet Index.
The index attempts to rank the world on the basis of how efficiently
countries produce happy lives -- that is, lifespan and level of
satisfaction divided by rate of resource consumption. Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica come out on top.
Whether this is a meaningful measure is an open question. Measuring happiness raises philosophical and practical questions
that are perhaps best handled with a dorm room and a bong, not a think
tank. Nonetheless, I sympathize with the NEF"s -- excuse me, the nef's
-- impulse. Gross Domestic Product is in many ways an unsatisfying
measure of national wellbeing, and it seems intuitively true to me that
a very high level of consumption is neither a necessary nor a
sufficient condition for happiness (whatever it is).
On the
other hand, what the Happy Planet Index makes clear is that some basic
level of development is necessary to have a satifying life. Here, for
example, is there map of the world based on the level of self-reported
happiness. (The self-reporting is done on a 1-10 scale, in response to
the question, "All things considered, how satisfied are you with your
life as a whole these days?")
I think it's prretty impressive how well this would line up with most basic human development indices, at least at the lower end of the scale.
It might be academically interesting that the United States falls into
the same happiness category as Brazil or Saudi Arabia, but it's sad and
not at all surprising that Sudan, Chad and Zimbabwe are just incredibly
miserable and unhappy places to spend a life. It turns out that being
dirt poor does not make people happy.
Photo: The name of this is "Free Sad Dirty Abandoned Child Creative Commons." Really!
The idea of an efficiency measure is interesting, if it gets to a real gauge of the correlation between resource consumption and well-being. But is the gauge of level of satisfaction really just simple self-reporting? And based on a single question? I wonder if there were any efforts to control for cultural variations, not to mention the unreliability of self-reporting on psychological states. If not, oughtn't nef tie its interesting economic analysis to the more rigorous (emphasis on the qualifier) other happiness surveys out there?