World Happiness Report, 2019 | Hacker News Reader

World Happiness Report, 2019

kyso.io

94 pointseoinmurray9260 comments

The World Happiness Report numbers are based only on the Cantril ladder. I don't get why they don't use an average of the Cantril ladder, positive affect, and negative affect.

The Cantril ladder asks respondents the following question:

"Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?"

Is this what people typically associate with "happiness"? This is more like "life satisfaction" to me. [1]

[1]https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/who-happiest-people-world-jon...

These are just timepass surveys. Also it depends on who they ask the question to.

I think you are right, but these studies are still generally interesting I think the dynamics between GDP per capita, GINI and happiness/satisfaction are pretty interesting

If the “happiness/satisfaction” metric is rubbish though, then all the correlations are fairly meaningless, and are of interest only to the extent that they do or do not back up one’s own political opinions.

Applying this scale cross-culturally, you just wind up measuring some weird convolution between actual subjective well-being and some kind of “what range of values is it culturally acceptable to answer this personal question about my wellbeing from a stranger with?” effect.

My question is: how temporary is happiness? Is it an emotion or a personality trait or a mixture of the two?

Considering some hypotheticals: Is it possible to both be living your best 10/10 life and be unhappy at times? Is it possible to be living your worst 0/10 life and be happy at times?

If happiness is an emotion, then it is by its nature fleeting and you couldn't maintain a 10/10 or 0/10 happiness as your biochemistry/environment changes constantly, indeed much faster than you'd change the ladder-steps of Cantril. If happiness is more of a personality trait, a semi-permanent descriptor, then it seems more closely associated with the Cantril ladder and life satisfaction.

Personally, I believe happiness results from genetic, short, and long term causes. Every person has a genetic baseline happiness proclivity, then a medium-term multiplier based on their life circumstances (job, relationships, meaning, etc), then a short-term mood-multiplier (I'm happier exercising, playing music, etc. than sitting in traffic or filing paperwork).

Perhaps they used this question in previous surveys, and they can't change the question because it would complicate the interpretation of time-series data (?)

I worry about the phrase "possible" in there. If you're in a place with no opportunity, you may genuinely believe that the best possible life for you isn't a very good one, and thus rate yourself near the top even though you're unhappy.

Thank you for that! The results make so much more sense to me now. I've lived in Canada, the US, the UK and Japan. One of the reasons I choose to remain in Japan is that people seem a lot happier here. This is in complete contrast with the results (which ranks Canada up near the top).

I'm Canadian and while this is a completely subjective point of view, one of the things I don't like about living there is that people seem perpetually pissed off about one thing or another. The world is just wrong. It's all going to hell in a hand basket. It shouldn't be like this. You can't have a conversation on any topic without people complaining about one thing or another (perhaps it's just the people I hung out with :-) ).

In Japan, people seem happy with their lot. However, it would be completely ingenuous to say that they think they have life easy. They've got stupid bosses and long hours and really low pay and nothing they can do about it other than to go to the enkai, drink a lot and hope that their stupid boss remembers the drunken rant that will save the company. Women and children barely see the father in the family except on public holidays. If women work, they have to put in stupid hours and also do all the house work. Children have lots of stress because your entire career is practically mapped out when you take your entrance exam for high school. If you goofed off when you were 14 or 15, then cut your salary in half for the rest of your life.

But the big difference is that they don't complain about it. It's all "Yeah, it's difficult, but what are you going to do? You can only do your best" and soldier on. And I think that's a common theme in Asia. In the west people seem to act like spoiled brats in comparison -- always in a funk about something, even though by comparison they have it dramatically better than anybody else in the world.

But the key thing is that people in the west do actually realise that they have it pretty good and are very proud of it. While in Asia people are embarrassed about their situation even though they have accepted it.

Anyway, the above contained a lot of very general (and basically outrageous) statements. It was not meant to constrain anyone based on where they are from or what culture they enjoy. I was simply trying to communicate my prejudices and why I was left scratching my head at this report.

Based on your paragraph on children never seeing their fathers etc. Japan does seem terrible - perhaps Canadians, underneath all that complaining, are in fact happier; whereas Japanese don't complain but suffer silently? The scores may in fact be accurate..

There have been 2 million immigrants from Venezuela to Colombia last 4 years escaping from lack of food, money, toilet paper among many other issues but despite that this data shows Venezuela to be happier than Colombia; it doesn't add up; maybe the people wrongly assumed the quiz was a government initiative and decided to save face saying they are happy.

maybe the unhappy ones are those who left the country.

No, with the record-breaking 2.30 million percent inflation almost nobody is happy there.

Not to mention water and food shortages...

Tu no eres venezolano pana por eso escribes sin saber. Tipico de este sitio por cierto.

No I'm not Venezuelan, but I have talked with many and when I ask them if the situation is as bad as TV says they tell me is even worse; there isn't a single day I don't cross paths with a homeless Venezuelan asking for money here in Colombia.

So you really think venezuelans are super happy with hyperinflation, totally destroyed public services,etc?

This seems to be a bug. I downloaded the raw data from here

http://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019/#read

"Chapter 2: Online Data"

Also here: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019/changing-world-happine... (fig 2.7)

Venezuela scores a 4.7 and Colombia scores 6.125. Or they're using a completely different metric, no idea.

It looks like they only look at numbers from 2008. Not sure why...which was well before the current economic issues there started.

The number is wrong. They're using data from 2008. It's fallen to 5.00 in 2018 according to the report.

Do you have any details on the US driven sanctions regime in effect on Venezuela and its impact? Here is the official UN release [1] on the results of illegal US sanctions on Venezuela and an interview with the UN rapporteur for Venezuela.[2]

So these conditions are being artificially created by the US and its allies in another brazen regime change operation. How can commentators talk about 'suffering' without mentioning the sanctions? It's absurd to claim to care about 'suffering' while actively implementing sanctions at the same time.

Here is the latest UN resolution on the sanctions and their impact on the people of Venezuela. [3] And here is US National security advisor Michael Bolton openly orchestrating regime change and admitting its about oil. [4]

The same regime change playbook driven by greed cannot be executed everytime with the same results of millions of people suffering and entire countries destroyed and people playing 'innocent' everytime affecting 'concern' for ordinary people.

[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?N...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii5MlQgGXyk

[3] https://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/Pages/NewsDetail.aspx?...

[4] http://time.com/5516920/inside-john-boltons-month-long-p-r-c...

Interesting that GINI coefficient doesn't seem to be correlated with happiness (except in Europe, for some reason). Reminds me of Taleb's assertion that people don't resent the rich simply for being rich, they resent rich people who have no skin in the game. Perhaps rich Europeans are perceived as having less skin in the game?

I think increasing GINI might be correlated with GDP growth in most countries (including, Europe, but much let so).

So increasing GINI would correlate with increasing happiness, until you hit the GDP per capita ceiling, and then it becomes anti-correlated.

I thought the same - that inequality isn't having more of an effect on happiness. It seems that the 3 strongest predictors are actually GDP per cap, social support and the freedom to make life choices.

The idea that people resent inequality always seemed incredibly sketchy to me. Imagine a super-wealthy country where 99% of population has a yearly income of $200k, and the 1% has an income of $200m. This society would be very unequal, and yet somehow I can't imagine the 99% there being resentful of the rich, voting for populists etc. So, I think that people resent the rich only if they themselves are struggling to get by - but, as soon as their needs would be met, they would stop caring about other people's bank accounts.

You’re describing it as income differences of 1000x. Right now it’s more like 25x although the 1% does hold about 90% of the existing wealth.

The problem is that this kind of thing can’t last long. For many reasons. Affording things means you can pay for the materials, labor, and markup that went into it. If everyone makes $200k, you can’t afford labor costs for anything produced domestically. You can import foreign workers, but then you’ve broken the constraints of the system and suddenly people are poor.

Your example would look a bit like this:

The 1% own all of the property in the country, because their purchasing power is so enormous.

One of them earns ten times more than 99 of the others put together.

The 1% turn the screws on the 99% such that $200K actually isn't a high income any more. For example, monopolising land.

Money is just a number. What really matters is the share of resources; there's some sort of Schwarzchild radius beyond which the wealthy turn into black holes.

Isn't this essentially the case already, just that most don't get the $200k? (only partly joking).

The idea that people resent inequality might seem sketchy to some or self evident to others.

A better way is to actually ask them how they feel and correlate with gini. Which is what the study did.

Correlation is not causation though.

Sweden is, or used to be, sort of like that. Sweden has high wealth inequality and more billionaires per capita than many other countries. But the whole thing is probably imploding now anyway.

I think people misunderstand a bit. It isn't wealth that is the problem as such. It is that wealth is a symptom of inequality. If you for example have good accessible schools for much of the population where having a privileged background doesn't matter much then naturally it will be relatively hard to get rich because there is so much competition.

>then naturally it will be relatively hard to get rich because there is so much competition.

This doesn't follow. The economy is not a zero-sum game. edit: presuming a sufficiently elastic money supply.

In this scenario $200k/year becomes the minimum income, since nobody earns less than that. It certainly wouldn't have the same purchasing power in that society as $200k has in the USA for instance, unless you take some kind of globalization effect into account, in which poorer foreign countries accredit this super-wealthy country purchasing power. Wealth is relative.

It was interesting to me noticing that Saudi Arabia was pretty high on the list for happiness, but they're also known to be pretty unequal and the royalty has an immense amount of wealth.

This ignores the social implications of status. So long as having status means exclusive access to certain things (Events, vehicles, housing, mates...) people will compete with eachother to be wealthier. When someone fails to compete they often blame the game instead of their own results.

I strongly disagree. People will always find something to complain about, and something so quantifiably "unfair" as income/wealth inequality will always be among them.

Even if 99% of people earned 200k and 1% earned 250k, there would be talk about how unfair the elite class is and how we need to tax those rich people so much more.

See my other comment but I've made a new graph where the markers are scaled by GDP per cap: https://kyso.io/eoin/world-happiness-gdp-per-capita-scaled

As the poll question was to rate how high you are in the space of best/worst possible life for you, maybe the scale of imagined possibilities is just narrower in countries with lower social mobility? This hypothesis could be tested, I wonder if someone has done it.

Related, I've been fascinated by this plot of 'social thresholds achieved' at the cost of 'biophysical boundaries transgressed' - https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk . I find it a more level-headed analysis to frame arguments around what resource usage it takes to be a 'happy' country, rather than just aggregating various happiness metrics alone.

"No country in the world currently meets the basic needs of its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use."

(summary article: https://theconversation.com/is-it-possible-for-everyone-to-l... )

Here is the full report:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/happiness-report/2019/WHR19.pdf

The visualization is good, IMHO there's a lot of room for improvement though. There's a big issue which undermines the credibility of the whole report:

- Venezuela has a Cantril Ladder value of 6.2577.

That's very strange to say the least, and it's hard to believe to be honest. Venezuelans are one of the most unhappy, miserable people in the world.

to be clear, is that first-hand experience from venezuela or some other survey?

They lack the basic necessities on Maslow's hierarchy of needs right now, with the state of their ruined economy.

yes but happiness perception is subjective and depends on what information they get

I took a quick look at the full report (linked in the comments), and I think the data shown in the visualization might not be 100% accurate.

I think they're using data from 2008.

Is this using the correct data? The happiness measure for the US of 7.28 seems to be the 2008 value. The 2018 Cantril score according to the report was 6.88.

Interesting that Australia is so high up, while SE Asia so low. My experience of both (specifically Cambodia) is exactly the reverse.

But I suspect the cultural factors are at play here. Ask an Aussie if they're living the best life and they'll say yes, proud in their Lucky Country and the best beaches in the world (whichever city an Aussie inhabits has the "best beaches in the world").

While in Cambodia they're more humble. Obviously this is to certain extent about poverty. But it's also about the cultural tendency against boasting. And an acknowledgement that life isn't perfect, there are things that need to change and improve.

Yet, in my experience, obviously a limited sample of anecdata, the average Cambodian is happier, quick to find the joy in life, with strong supportive family connections. While Aussies are comparing ourselves to each other, disconnected from our families, suiciding in record numbers, and angry at the world.

I'm guessing you live in sydney :-)

Perth... but I see the same everywhere. Currently in Port Macquarie and the same strange subdued anger is here.

Not sure if anyone saw this...

"Is Finland Really The Happiest Country In The World? (HBO)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FPU4F-Ajh8

There was a recent video by VICE/VOX on Finland where it was noticed that people didn't look visibly happy but were more satisfied with their life.

To that effect, I am interested to read some study on, like a satisfaction index.

https://kyso.io/eoin/world-happiness-gdp-per-capita-scaled

I forked OP's study and graphed out how Happiness vs GINI looks when you scale the markers by GDP per capita, there is a clear trend of increasing happiness with increasing GINI, but it snaps back for the highest GDP per capita countries

(disclaimer - I founded Kyso - the company these studies are hosted on)

I wonder in what month the survey itself was answered. Because if it was in the spring, I wouldn't be surprised if the Finns were above average happy at that time. The harsh winter will sure lead to a more extreme sine-wave like happiness pattern than in other countries.

Other problems may involve social signaling, because the Gallup world poll, on which this report is based, is conducted via telephone.

Obviously the poor people in the US were too busy working multiple jobs and riding the bus to vote.

I feel like I’ve always led myself astray trying to pursue happiness. Meaning & purpose seem to give me more “contentment” than optimizing my life for constant ecstasy-like highs.

You may be leading yourself astray by improperly defining happiness...

we're likely all aware this is an incredibly difficult thing to quantify; indeed this represents a respectable effort.

it's not that i am not interested in raw data over interpretation. usually we don't have access to such data, or we don't know exactly what said data should be.

so this to me is a sort of data pornography that i enjoy with a grain of ky jelly.

Surprising that the US consider themselves to have better social support than Canada and many other european countries.

How about the hedonic trademill?

Doesn't that relate only to life changes or specific events, so that shouldn't apply no? The report looks at relatively constant factors in peoples' lives, such as social support GDP per capita, corruption, life expectancy (unless you move), etc. Maybe I'm wrong?

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