World Happiness Report: Should We Trust It?
It was a Wednesday morning like any other. As I kept snoozing my alarm and postponing the inevitable, I bundled up in my duvet hoping to soak up some of its heat, while distractingly glancing out the window. It was sleeting outside. The street looked icy and little piles of snow lay on both its sides. Spring would start in a few days – well, I’m talking in astronomical terms. But I’d heard tails about the infamous Scandinavian winter and I wasn’t expecting anything different. It took me all of my will power to get out of bed and, as I do every morning, I immediately sought comfort in a hot cup of coffee. As I was heading down the chilly hallway that leads to my kitchen, it hit me. I soon would have to ride my malfunctioning bike across the hilly university campus in that horrible weather. Since everyone bikes everywhere in Denmark, there is not much of a reason to develop a public transport system, which leaves me with no other option than to ride my bike to class and everywhere else, no matter what the weather is like.
As I was making my coffee, my Danish flatmate came into the kitchen and, as usual, distantly mumbled an unidentifiable form of greeting. Once again during the course of that interminable winter, I regretted not having had the luxury of choosing my own flatmate. As soon as I could, I retreated to my room to enjoy my coffee in peace while catching up on the news. And there it was, in the front page of every major newspaper. Denmark, with its unforgiving winter and hard-to-relate-to people, was the world’s happiest country. Or at least, the World Happiness Report 2016 Update said so. Looking at geared-up bikers battling the sleet in the morning darkness, I started to wonder, how is it possible that Denmark is the happiest of all the 195 countries in the world? How can a country even be happy?
Everyone wants to be happy. No doubt there. But what makes people happy? There’s no universal answer to this question. What makes me happy might be different from what makes you happy. And what makes you happy now might be different from what made you happy five years ago and what will make you happy 10 years from now. Happiness is subjective, and it fluctuates. It cannot be standardized and assessed in empirical ways, with questionnaires and ladder scales. And it certainly cannot be measured across entire populations, which is precisely what the World Happiness Report claims to do. What the report actually does is rank countries according to their citizens’ level of life satisfaction. And it does so mostly based on Western beliefs of what a satisfying life consists of, while completely neglecting non-Western cultures.
How do you measure happiness?
The UN released its first ever World Happiness Report in 2012. One of the stated reasons for the release of the report was that happiness is the best indicator of human welfare and its measurement should be used to assess the progress of nations. Since then, three more reports have been published, the last one being the World Happiness Report 2016 Update. Each report consists of an analysis of Gallup World Poll data generated from surveys of 1,000 people in each country every year for three years. In the Gallup World Poll, respondents are asked to evaluate the quality of their lives on a ladder scale running from 0 to 10, with 0 being the worst possible life for them and 10 the best.
The World Happiness Report, in particular, focuses on the analysis of six key categories: per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP), personal freedom, perceived corruption, healthy-life expectancy, charitable giving, and social support. Jeffrey Sachs, co-author of the report and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, justifies the choice of these six domains arguing that rather than taking a narrow approach focused solely on economic growth, human wellbeing should be nurtured through a more comprehensive approach that combines economic, social and environmental objectives. High incomes, political freedom, the absence of corruption, the availability of medical care, charity work, and community feelings are thought to be enough to make entire countries happy.
Who’s happy and who’s not
Now that you’re familiar with the criteria of the World Happiness Report… Does it still sound strange that Denmark was voted the world’s happiest country? Probably not. Denmark doesn’t have the highest per capita GDP – Luxemburg has that honor – but it’s in the top 10, with a per capita income of 400,000 Danish Krone (€ 55,000). It has an enviable social welfare system, with free universal health care, free university education, and generous unemployment benefits. And it boasts one of the least corrupt governments in the world – it earned a ‘very clean’ rating on the Corruption Perceptions Index in 2015.
I personally had a chance to experience all of this when I moved to Denmark for my Master’s program, which is free. I was immediately provided with a Central Person Register (CPR) card, a somewhat magical piece of plastic that grants you access to ‘everything Danish’, including free medical care. I was also promptly informed that as a EU student enrolled full-time in a Danish university, I was eligible to apply for the State Educational Grant and Loan Scheme (SU) – a governmental monthly grant of 5,753 Danish Krone (€ 750) to support students during their studies. At the same time, during a crush course of introduction to Danish culture, I was warned to never try to bribe an officer of the law. “Danish people are simply not susceptible to bribes,” I was told. “Never do that – it will end badly.”
If you follow the rules then, life in Denmark is pretty easy. As is life in Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, and Sweden – at least according to the World Happiness Report 2016 Update. On the other end of the spectrum, you can find: Burundi (the ‘least happy’ country), Syria, Togo, Afghanistan, Benin, Rwanda, Guinea, Liberia, Tanzania, and Madagascar.
After reading the report, you are left with the impression that happiness is only for Westerners. When you then go back to the front page, which depicts several, ethically diverse smiling faces, you cannot help but wonder… Why is that old black man with a tribal hat smiling at the camera? What is that black female dancer laughing about? What reason do those two young Asian girls have to smile?
Rethinking the measurement of happiness
The problem is, it’s simply not possible that a portion of the world population is happier than the rest. Happiness is in fact determined by individual emotional reactions to events, as well as cognitive judgments of satisfaction and fulfillment. First of all, life events are bound to influence your happiness level. Studies show that in general, if you get divorced, become unemployed, or suddenly have to deal with a physical debilitation, you’ll be less happy than you were before. The same studies also show, however, that there’s a lot of individual variation in the degree to which people adapt to what life throws at them. This, in turn, means that some people are more prone to be happy than others.
According to the Five Factor Model, there are five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Scientists have managed to establish a positive correlation between extraversion and happiness, as well as a negative correlation between neuroticism and happiness. They have also observed that the three other personality traits do correlate with happiness, but less consistently. It’s good to be an extraverted non-neurotic then, as those personality traits give you a head start in achieving happiness, although other factors, such as life circumstances, matter as well.
Unsurprisingly, the emotional component of happiness – determined by the combination of life circumstances and personality traits – is difficult to measure. Because of the short-lived, changeable nature of circumstances, if you’re asked, ‘How happy are you now?’ twice in a day, your first answer is likely to differ from your second answer. This shows that such studies do not have validity across time – if there’s variation in a day, how much variation should be expected in a year? Moreover, personality traits influence people’s attitudes towards adverse circumstances. Two people in the exact same situation but with different personalities may answer the “How happy are you now?” question in totally different ways.
Happiness vs. life satisfaction
What can be measured, to some extent, is life satisfaction. And that is what the World Happiness Report actually does. Life satisfaction is the first, cognitive part of happiness. It’s your own assessment of your life – you’re satisfied when there’s little or no discrepancy between your present and what you believe to be an ideal situation. If you find your life satisfying, no unfortunate event has recently happened to you, and you don’t have a neurotic personality, then you must be on the road to happiness!
“You may have heard Danes are the happiest people in the world. The truth is, they score the highest in terms of ‘eudaimonic’ happiness, that is long-term satisfaction, how generally satisfied they are with their lives. But they score very low, comparatively, in terms of ‘hedonistic’ happiness, that is when you’re asked if you’re happy in this very moment”, says Michael Booth, author of The Almost Nearly Perfect People and expert in ‘all things Scandinavian’. He adds, “When I’ve spoken to the people involved in happiness research, they admit to me that they use the word ‘happy’ because it grabs headlines, it’s easy to understand.”
There’s another problem, however. There’s a certain degree of cultural relativism in the definition of a good life – your culture partly determines your understanding of life satisfaction. Booth, for example, attributes Danes’ satisfactory attitude towards life to their low expectations, and the fulfillment of those expectations. Not even the World Happiness Report is an exception. Being put together by North American and British economists at the request of the UN’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), it does not escape the influence of Western ideas of what makes a good life.
Western theories of wellbeing are established on a highly individuated conceptualization of the self. Psychological characteristics commonly associated with mental health are: independence, self-reliance, and individuality – hence, the criteria of per capita GDP, personal freedom, and corruption. But such ideals are, to borrow the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “rather peculiar ideas within the context of the world’s cultures.”
East Asian notions of self-hood, for example, start with the Confucian assumption that the person exists in relationship to others. One interesting study of a farming village in the Chinese province of Hunan shows that its inhabitants, despite their poor economic conditions, seem content with their living standards, as their main goal in life is to have successful children and grandchildren. China is in fact a collectivist country, and correlations of income and life satisfaction that are typical of individualist countries do no longer hold true when the individualism component is removed.
Similarly, it is hard to reconcile human rights, meant to elevate individual claims over communitarian values, with ‘communitarian’ religions like Islam, which insist that individuals are defined by their adherence to the community and not vice versa. During the UN debate on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, for instance, the Saudi Arabian delegate argued against the declaration, stating that it was based on Western cultural patterns, which frequently clash with the cultural patterns of Islamic states.
Finally, corruption – always negatively connoted in the West, and thought to be a major cause of life dissatisfaction – may be viewed differently elsewhere. Nepotism and cronyism, for example, are considered corrupting practices in the rule-based cultures of the West. They are, however, simply deemed functional in relationship-based cultures, which are the majority. In these cultures, business is organized around human relationships cemented by personal honor, filial duty, or friendship, and nepotism and cronyism are seen as foundations for trust.
What ought to be done
Western understandings of life satisfaction are therefore not valid on a global scale. And the World Happiness Report is not accurate when it comes to non-Western countries. If we want to truly measure life satisfaction levels globally, we need to stop being universalist in our outlook, believing that every society works – or should work – essentially like ours. We need to be more culturally sensitive in the selection of life satisfaction criteria, and we need to use different criteria for different societies.
Summer has now come to Denmark at last, and with it, the chance for me to discover the hidden beauty of this small, flat country. On a particularly hot afternoon, I decided to go to one of the many beaches near the center of Aarhus, the second biggest city in Denmark and my residence for a year. The temperature was perfect, the sun kissing my skin. The water bluer than the sky. Although it was before 4pm on a weekday, the beach was packed. There were kids playing at the seashore, families having picnics, and groups of friends hanging out. Everyone aged 16 and above holding a beer in their hands, the Danish way.
In that moment, it didn’t feel that crazy that Danes, with their high salaries and 35-hour workweeks, might be the most satisfied people in the world. But then I think about Italy, my home country, which was only 50th in the last World Happiness Report ranking. We might not have the best economic situation at the moment, or the least corrupt government. But we get joy from other things in life. You must have heard of Italian family gatherings, with their incredible amounts of delicious homemade food and fruity wine...
