Understanding what makes us happy and how we can be happier is important for improving life. This project is to look a little deeper and wider into happiness. The basis for this information is the World Happiness Report. Other related topics are included to expand the topic. Included below is the FAQ page of the World Happiness Report to offer their overview of their effort.
Will the world be happier in 2020? Does the Report offer any information about COVID-19 and its impact on happiness? The World Happiness Reports do not make forecasts about future happiness. The global pandemic poses great risks for some of the main supports for well-being, most especially health and income. The effects on the other main supports could go either way. As revealed by earlier studies of earthquakes, floods, storms, tsunamis, and even economic crises, a high trust society quite naturally looks for and finds co-operative ways to work together to repair the damage and rebuild better lives. This has led sometimes to surprising increases in happiness in the wake of what might otherwise seem to be unmitigated disasters. The most frequent explanation seems to be that people are pleasantly surprised by the willingness of their neighbours and their institutions to work in harness to help each other. This delivers a heightened sense of belonging, and pride in what they have been able to achieve by way of mitigation. These gains are sometimes great enough to compensate for the material losses. But where the social fabric is not strong enough to support co-operative action on the required scale, then fear, disappointment and anger add to the happiness costs of a disaster. The global nature of a pandemic raises especially great challenges, since the readiness of people and their institutions to share goals and to help each other is harder to achieve at a greater geographic and political distance. But the need is obvious. As the Director-General of the World Health Organization reminded the world on March 11th when officially defining COVID 19 as a pandemic: ‘And let’s all look out for each other because we need each other.’ We expect to find, when 2020 is in the past rather than the future, that countries and communities that react according to this advice will be the ones whose happiness is best sustained.
This year’s theme is environments for happiness, with special attention to the social environment, happiness in cities and rural areas, and the natural environment, including links between happiness and sustainable development.
What are the most important happiness-related trends you have discovered in relation to these three environmental themes?
On the social side, as emphasized in several chapters of the report, including one focused on the perennial high happiness rankings of the Nordic countries, the key findings are that people like living in communities and societies with less inequality of well-being, and where trust - of other people, and of public institutions – is high. People in high trust communities are much more resilient in the face of a whole range of challenges to their well-being: illness, discrimination, fear of danger, unemployment, and low income. Just to feel that they can count on others around them, and on their public institutions, makes their hardships less painful, thereby delivering benefits to all, and especially those most in need. On urban life, the Report shows that the happiest cities are those in the happiest countries. City dwellers are on average happier than those in rural areas, especially in less happy countries. Among the happiest countries, this ranking is sometimes reversed. The Report presents some evidence that what may govern whether cities or rural areas are happier is the extent to which people feel a sense of belonging to their local community. As for the natural environment, measures of mood in different locations and circumstances in the UK show that people are happier in green spaces, away from the workplace, and especially when they are accompanied by family or friends. As for the broader natural and social environment, the Report shows that the happiest countries are those which also care about sustainable development, and do more to try to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Social media are becoming more and more important for people around the globe. How do they influence happiness?
There was a special chapter on social media in World Happiness Report 2019, emphasizing the damaging effects of social media use on the happiness and self-image of adolescents, mainly based on data from the United States. This runs parallel to evidence from earlier Reports showing that in-person friendships supporting happiness, while on-line connections do not. COVID 19, and the limitations it puts on in-person meetings, offers a chance for electronic connections to develop their potential for creating and maintaining the social bonds that support happiness.
The rankings in Figure 2.1 of World Happiness Report 2020 use data that come from the Gallup World Poll (for more information see the Gallup World Poll methodology). The rankings are based on answers to the main life evaluation question asked in the poll. This is called the Cantril ladder: it asks respondents to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale. The rankings are from nationally representative samples, for the years 2016-2018. They are based entirely on the survey scores, using the Gallup weights to make the estimates representative. The sub-bars show the estimated extent to which each of six factors - levels of GDP, life expectancy, generosity, social support, freedom, and corruption - contribute to making life evaluations higher in each country than they are in Dystopia, a hypothetical country that has values equal to the world’s lowest national averages for each of the six factors (see FAQs: What is Dystopia?). The sub-bars have no impact on the total score reported for each country, but instead are just a way of explaining for each country the implications of the model estimated in Table 2.1. People often ask why some countries rank higher than others - the sub-bars (including the residuals, which show what is not explained) are an attempt to provide an answer to that question.
We use the most recent years in order to provide an up-to-date measure, and to measure changes over time. We combine data from the years 2017-2019 to make the sample size large enough to reduce the random sampling errors. (The horizontal lines at the right-hand end of each of the main bars show the 95% confidence interval for the estimate.) The typical annual sample is 1,000 people. If a country had surveys in each year, then the sample size would be 3,000 people. However, there are many countries that have not had annual surveys, in which case the sample size is smaller than 3,000. Tables 1-3 of online Statistical Appendix 1 show the sample size for each country in each year.
A sample size of 2,000 to 3,000 is large enough to give a fairly good estimate at the national level. This is confirmed by the 95% confidence intervals shown at the right-hand end of each country bar.
The confidence intervals, as shown by the horizontal lines at the right-hand end of the country bars, show the range of values within which there is a 95% likelihood of the population mean being located. These are useful to readers wishing to see whether countries differ significantly in the average life evaluations.
The sub-bars show, tentatively, what share of a country’s overall score can be explained by each of the six factors in Table 2.1. The sub-bars are calculated by multiplying average national data for the period 2016-2018 for each of the six factors (minus the value of that variable in Dystopia) by the coefficient on this variable in the first equation of Table 2.1. This product then shows the average amount by which the overall happiness score (the life evaluation) is higher in a country because they perform better than Dystopia on that variable. To describe an example, let’s look at the variable of life expectancy in the case of Brazil. First, we calculate the number of years by which healthy life expectancy in Brazil exceeds that of the country with the lowest life expectancy. Then, we multiply this number of years by the estimated Table 2.1 coefficient for life expectancy. This product then shows the average amount by which the overall happiness score (the life evaluation) is higher in Brazil, because life expectancy is higher there than it is in the country with the lowest life expectancy. This process is repeated for each country and for each of the six variables. Because of the way these six bars were constructed, they will in total always be less than each country’s average life evaluation. They also will not alter in any way the width of the overall life evaluation bar on which the rankings are based. The difference between what is attributed to the six factors and the total life evaluations is the sum of two parts. These are the average life evaluations in Dystopia, and each country’s residual. You may find the following FAQs useful: What is Dystopia? What are the residuals?
Dystopia is an imaginary country that has the world’s least-happy people. The purpose in establishing Dystopia is to have a benchmark against which all countries can be favorably compared (no country performs more poorly than Dystopia) in terms of each of the six key variables, thus allowing each sub-bar to be of positive (or zero, in six instances) width. The lowest scores observed for the six key variables, therefore, characterize Dystopia. Since life would be very unpleasant in a country with the world’s lowest incomes, lowest life expectancy, lowest generosity, most corruption, least freedom, and least social support, it is referred to as “Dystopia,” in contrast to Utopia.
The residuals, or unexplained components, differ for each country, reflecting the extent to which the six variables either over- or under-explain average 2017-2019 life evaluations. These residuals have an average value of approximately zero over the whole set of countries. Figure 2.1 shows the average residual for each country if the equation in Table 2.1 is applied to average 2017- 2019 data for the six variables in that country. We combine these residuals with the estimate for life evaluations in Dystopia so that the combined bar will always have positive values. As can be seen in Figure 2.1, although some life evaluation residuals are quite large, occasionally exceeding one point on the scale from 0 to 10, they are always much smaller than the calculated value in Dystopia, where the average life is rated at 1.97 on the 0 to 10 scale. Table 7 of the online Statistical Appendix 1 for Chapter 2 puts the Dystopia plus residual block at the left side, and also draws the Dystopia line, making it easy to compare the signs and sizes of the residuals in different countries.
The variables used reflect what has been broadly found in the research literature to be important in explaining national-level differences in life evaluations. Some important variables, such as unemployment or inequality, do not appear because comparable international data are not yet available for the full sample of countries. The variables are intended to illustrate important lines of correlation rather than to reflect clean causal estimates, since some of the data are drawn from the same survey sources, some are correlated with each other (or with other important factors for which we do not have measures), and in several instances there are likely to be two-way relations between life evaluations and the chosen variables (for example, healthy people are overall happier, but as Chapter 4 in the World Happiness Report 2013 demonstrated, happier people are overall healthier). In Statistical Appendix 1 of World Happiness Report 2018, we assessed the possible importance of using explanatory data from the same people whose life evaluations are being explained. We did this by randomly dividing the samples into two groups, and using the average values for, e.g., freedom gleaned from one group to explain the life evaluations of the other group. This lowered the effects, but only very slightly (e.g. 2% to 3%), assuring us that using data from the same individuals is not seriously affecting the results.
Gallup refers to the surveys in each calendar year as being part of that year’s survey wave. Not every country is surveyed every year, and thus the size of the survey waves also varies from year to year.
Yes. The online data appendices show how the data are constructed, and include the main national and regional averages underlying the figures and tables in Chapter 2. Those wishing access to more detailed data from the Gallup World Poll should contact Gallup directly.