Advertisement
Advertisement
In the village of Tsentralne, Ukrainian family members meet for the first time since Russian troops withdrew from the Kherson region, southern Ukraine, on November 13 last year. Despite the war, the World Happiness Report survey found “remarkably resilient” happiness levels in Ukraine, supported by a stronger sense of common purpose, benevolence and people’s trust in their leadership. Photo: AP
Opinion
Outside In
by David Dodwell
Outside In
by David Dodwell

World Happiness Day: how should we measure contentment in times of war and crisis?

  • While happiness might seem hard to come by amid geopolitical, economic and climate uncertainty, recent polls have found that levels remain resilient
  • This suggests that factors like a sense of community, goodwill and trust in leadership contribute more to well-being than individual prosperity
In case you missed it, as banks crashed, war raged on Ukraine, mortgage rates continued to rise, scientists released yet graver warnings about a looming climate Armageddon, and both Donald Trump and Boris Johnson faced inquisitions on their past sins, last Monday was World Happiness Day.

The day attracted at least two global surveys on the state of world happiness in this most unhappy of weeks. They were fascinating not just because of their counter-intuitive findings, but because they were clearly looking at very different worlds.

Ipsos, in a poll last December of 22,000 people across 32 countries, discovered that China was the world’s happiest country, with 91 per cent of respondents claiming contentment. If I recall correctly, China was around that time experiencing street protests over still-extensive Covid-19 lockdowns. Saudi Arabia ranked second (with 86 per cent claiming to be very happy) and, more plausibly, the Netherlands was third with 85 per cent. India (84 per cent) and Brazil (83 per cent) came in fourth and fifth.
The report found a big jump in happiness across Latin America and a colossal 11 per cent fall in happiness in the UK. Given the political and economic chaos in the UK over the past couple of years, this may come as no great surprise.
But perhaps most surprising was how different Ipsos’ findings were to the much more comprehensive World Happiness Report (known to many simply as the WHR), underpinned by polling from Gallup, and now in its 11th year. This polled over 100,000 people across 134 countries, and placed five Nordic countries, led by Finland, among the top 10 happiest countries.

Part of the difference was certainly due to the smaller number of countries polled by Ipsos. Eight of the top 10 happy countries in the WHR – Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Israel, Norway, Switzerland, Luxembourg and New Zealand – were not included in the Ipsos poll.

But with the exception of the Netherlands, the leaders of the Ipsos poll were recorded as deeply in the dumps in the WHR: China came in at 64th place, Saudi Arabia at 30th, Brazil at 49th, and India close to the miserable bottom at 126th.

A girl sitting on a bicycle carries peach blossoms in front of a street food stall along a road in Beijing on March 17. China came in first in one poll on happiness, and 64th in a more comprehensive survey. Photo: AFP

Difference also arose because the two surveys asked different questions. Ipsos simply asked if respondents were “very happy, rather happy, not very happy, not happy at all”. The WHR asked “how satisfied are you with your life?”. They asked respondents to think about lots of factors, ranging from health and human relationships to income, social support, personal freedom, lack of corruption and effective government.

Not least, the authors of the WHR were looking for much more than individual happiness. As Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs, one of the report’s founding authors, noted, they were keen to see evidence of widely-distributed happiness, and low levels of absolute misery. They were also looking for evidence of what Aristotle almost 1,600 years ago called “eudaemonia”, in which both individuals and communities nurture and demonstrate “virtue”.

For a country to be deemed “happy”, it needed to provide evidence of effective government – ease in raising taxes, a good legal system, and strong delivery of civic services, particularly in health and education. It needed to be good at avoiding war, and without onerous repression.

To be “happy”, a community needed its citizens to show “pro-social behaviour” – moderation, fortitude, a sense of justice, consideration for others – rather than just be individually happy. Unlike the simplistic Ipsos poll, the WHR explores the key drivers of well-being. This is perhaps why its top-ranked list of “happy” countries is so odd.

Out of the top 10, only one has a population over 10 million (the Netherlands), while two (Iceland and Luxembourg) have just a few hundred thousand. Only four contain a city of over 1 million people. All are racially homogeneous, made up of tiny communities where everyone knows everyone else, and has a strong sense of being able to influence decision-making.

A shopping street in Amsterdam on July 25, 2020. The Netherlands proved an exception in the Ipsos and WHR happiness reports by ranking highly in both. Photo: Getty Images

The WHR’s rigorous and valuably well-meaning methodology, identifying stable and prosperous “common-interest states”, works better with small communities, but is a doubtful guide for populous countries like China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Bangladesh and Brazil which are geographically huge, ethnically diverse, with massive urban agglomerations and in which anonymous government officials are far, far away.

Putting quibbles aside, the WHR addressed head-on the key question of whether the pandemic led to a fall in happiness, with a surprising result: it didn’t. Apparently, a massive surge in people helping each other – “pro-social behaviour” – kept overall happiness levels undimmed through the deaths and hardships of the pandemic.

Helping others improves our mental, physical, emotional health. Why is that?

Also counter-intuitively, the poll found “remarkably resilient” happiness levels in Ukraine: “Despite the magnitude of the suffering and damage in Ukraine, life evaluations remained higher than in the aftermath of the 2014 annexation, supported by a much stronger sense of common purpose, benevolence and trust in their leadership.”

Perhaps the final, and most important, takeaway from the WHR is the clear accumulated evidence that our social progress should not primarily be measured by economic factors like GDP. It is far more important to measure well-being in our communities, and to encourage the fortitude – the “eudaemonia” – that can help us survive today’s dangerous and challenging times.

David Dodwell is CEO of the trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access, focused on developments and challenges facing the Asia-Pacific over the past four decades

Post