[A-List] What You Think You Know about Happiness ...

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

... and Why You're Wrong

Some number-crunching to accompany Bill McKibben's Reversal of Fortune 
in the March/April 2007 issue of Mother Jones.

by April Rabkin

MotherJones.com (February 28 2007)


You might think that richer countries are happier. But there's actually no
correlation beyond about $10,000 per capita income. See how each country
compares on this scatter chart:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2005/10/03/science/20051004_HAPP_GRAPHIC.html

One surprise is that Vietnam, with a per capita income of less than $5,000, has
been just as happy as France, with a per capita income of about $22,000. The
happiest country surveyed was Puerto Rico. The unhappiest were Indonesia, the
Ukraine, and Zimbabwe. Within Europe, the happiest countries were Denmark,
Ireland, and Iceland.



All that data comes from the World Values Survey:
http://www.worldvaluessurvey.com/

You can play around with the dataset online. (Great for a class project, kids.)
And definitely check out the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World and the
other graphs that cluster cultural values by nation, all to be found by clicking
the "Findings" tab. See how life satisfaction correlates with democracy and
other ideologies. North America, for example, is more traditional than Northern
Europe. Relatively speaking, the miserable former Soviet bloc focuses more on
survival than on self-expression.



For those with a longer attention span, it's worth reading Beyond Money, the
most authoritative scholarly summary; 300 academic studies on happiness packed
into 25 pages.
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/pspi/pspi5_1.pdf  

To see how the "satisfaction index" has changed over your lifetime, check out
the graph on page three. Though the GDP has tripled, the average person is no
more contented with life now than the average person was in 1950.

____

This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, 
the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

(c) 2007 The Foundation for National Progress

http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2007/03/happiness_extra.html


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