The Happiest People
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I think we can conclude two things from this article: The author likes Costa Rica, and he doesn't understand that correlation doesn't equal causation - like many of his peers in journalism.
See this page for a start:
http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/home.htm
Or the opening paragraphs of this:
But.
How can one declare causation if one isn't even sure of one's senses? One's observations? One's data? How can we avoid the possibility of an 'evil daemon' of Cartesian philosophy: who is "as clever and deceitful as he is powerful, who has directed his entire effort to misleading me."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_daemon
Sure, certain patterns patterns of our observations will nudge us one way or the other towards a higher probability of assigning some, possibly specific, causal link. But can we ever be sure of it? This is the sense in which I mean that nothing 'implies' causation. Perhaps it is better to say that some things merely suggest it.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-probabilistic/
(Sorry for being pedantic.)
In situations where we can't freely vary any of the parameters we're always going to have a lot more difficulty. Given a pile of correlations between, say, happiness and the countless other variables in the mere two hundred or so countries which exist (eg "average bovine thigh circumference"), it'd be impossible, in the absence of any good theories about what should make people happy, to determine what does make people happy.
Luckily we have pretty good ideas from our own observations and from those of others about what actually does make people happy: health, wealth, nice weather, absence of civil war, et cetera. But we'll never be able to get anything other than the vaguest confirmation of what we already believed out of statistical methods alone.
Disbanding their military (which I was shocked to read, honestly) and spending the money (presumably) on education, amazingly, seemed to result in a better country? Hell, most countriesd if they disbanded their military and burned the money instead would be better off.
It seems to me, assuming this survey is remotely correct, is people enjoy a life where they are not sticking their noes into other countires business, and having nice weather and a strong social construct is pleasurable.
(I suppose if you really wanted to be paranoid you could suppose that your _own_ actions in flipping the lightswitch might be subconsciously being controlled by someone else, but this is a whole different level of skepticism)
I've always romanticized the Winter ice skating on canals. What's it really like? Or is my geography off and canal skating is done primarily farther North?
When your criteria of happiness is a nice cup of coffee, it is way easier to rate your life as happy than if the criteria is to earn a pile of money, a McMansion, a SUV and having both kids to college. It becomes possible to have a mediocre life (even semi-bad) and still think of yourself as happy.
The maps are quite interesting though in that the continents mostly appear as uniform blocks -- which of course if also due to the selection of group limits but anyway. I'd suspect general cultural factors to be at work.
has a response of 7.3 whereas Costa Rica has 6.9. Beware of newsprints offering statistics.
It seems to me that this particular question seems to have to do more with being able to imagine a better life. That is, despite their happiness, Costa Ricans are able to imagine things getting even better. Despite our unhappiness, we in the U.S. have slightly more trouble imagining our lot improving.
Even if you disagree with my interpretation, you have to admit that it is incredibly open to interpretation, even more so than the question, 'are you happy?' I'd say the more direct measure would be the obvious one to quote.
I think the Romans were amongst the strongest centre nations, as we're still copying them (pythons: "what have the Romans ever done for us?") e.g. democracy, bureaucracy, even details like a senate. Though fallen, the Empire survives.
heads beat arms
Much of the `Roman' stuff comes from the Greek. And they also got a lot from elsewhere, too.
I do find myself agreeing with your assessment of China and Mongolia more.
And Mexico, Jamaica, Honduras, Nicargua, Barbados and the Bahamas all come in at only 0.5% or 0.6% of GDP compared to Costa Rica's 0.4%.
With some minor exceptions (Belize needs a deterrent for historical reasons), almost the whole of central America is poorly armed and barely militarized due to the long arms of Uncle Sam. Whether or not these countries have boasted about complete demilitarization or not is just a formality when they spend so little on what they do have.
As evidence see ::
http://heavylifting.blogspot.com/2006/07/on-happy-planet-ind...
and especially the comment from the NEF itself
sam.thompson@neweconomics.org
"However, I thought your piece was thoughtful and interesting, so I just wanted to make one point, which is that we don't claim that the index measures happiness (we emphasise several times, in fact, that it doesn't). Rather, we claim that it measures well-being efficiency: that is, the relative 'price paid' for experienced well-being by countries as a function of their resource consumption."
"To an extent we asked for this kind of (mis)interpretation by using the word 'happy' in the title of the report - we have wondered, with hindsight, whether this was such a good idea. The trade off is that we got a huge (and 95% positive) press hit - and that's all part of the game too.."
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My wife and I have a dream of starting an international hacker house someday for companies/individuals that want some isolation and focus during crunch mode but also want some exotic locale, and both Costa Rica and Thailand are on our short list.