Happiness: Location, location, location

“It is time we admitted that there is more to life than money, and it is time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB, that is, general well-being.” These words came not from a hippie throwback or a leftist intellectual, but from David Cameron, leader of the Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition and of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party. Of all the things David Cameron has said in the last years, no one has met as much public approval as this one. Measuring and explaining the happiness of nations is not anymore just the subject of social science research and journalistic interest. It has entered the realm of policy. Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century utilitarian philosopher that argued that the purpose of politics should be about bringing the most happiness to the greatest number of people, would be proud. The United States may be the only country -that I know of- with a constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness, but in Bhutan they take it seriously enough for the king to proclaim Gross National Happiness as the prism that should guide rulings and policy.

It may appear to some as epistemologically flawed, if not utterly bogus, but thousands of psychologists, sociologists, economists and political scientists are in the business of finding the happiness quotient of a given country, comparing it, and unbundling it in search of explanations and, possibly, policy prescriptions. The World Database of Happiness lists almost 8,000 names in its Directory of Happiness Investigators. Apart from a database of happiness research, there is a map of global happiness, competing surveys and indexes ranking the happiness of nations, and passionate debate over their findings.

Interestingly, most try to prove the old adage that money does not buy happiness. The World Values Survey made headlines when it established that the countries with the greatest percentage of people satisfied with their lives were Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela, and El Salvador. Although counter-intuitive, this seemed to reinforce conventional wisdom, which long ago accepted that warmer countries are poorer but happier. Scandinavian countries top almost every ranking that matters, uniquely excelling at both creating wealth and distributing it, and finding the balance between efficiency and fairness that big-government advocates long for. But one also associates those societies with alcoholism, wife battery, weather-induced depression, and suicide. Tropical countries, despite poverty and malaria, are often thought of as happy places where people dance and mate on empty stomachs. Other studies point out that the happiness quotient of industrialized countries has not varied much since World War Two, despite a dramatic rise in income. Western nations do not get happier as they get richer. This has important policy implications. If better education, health care, and prosperity do not contribute to the overall level of well-being, why should governments even bother? Why should rich, sad countries help poor, happy countries?

The truth is that most surveys indicate that Swedes, Danes, Swiss, Norwegians, Austrians and Icelanders actually top the overwhelming majority of the rankings. The United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, despite the bad reputation of its gastronomy and climate, do quite well too. In studies that measure SWB (subjective well-being), the effect of poverty and conflict is immediately apparent. Allowing for exceptions, the map of global happiness correlates very strongly with UN data on health and wealth. Whether one looks at happiness surveys or at the United Nations' Human Development Index -which combines GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, life expectancy at birth, and rates of literacy and enrollment in higher education- you will find almost the same countries at the top of the list, and the same countries at the bottom. Romania, Moldova, and other legendary sad places in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, are only rock bottom when poorer, African countries are left out of the picture. Italy is romanticized by tourists and movies as an ideal place, with ideal weather, food, and people, but Italians, appalled by economic under-performance and third-worldly levels of government corruption and instability, are reportedly very gloomy these days. Suicide is not just something that happens to Japanese or Scandinavians for whom material well-being is not enough. It happens, in much larger numbers, to poor cotton farmers in India unable to pay back loans used to buy pesticide.

The happiness debate is not immune to the geography versus culture dilemma. And one can quibble endlessly over how to define and measure well-being or satisfaction, or how to distinguish correlation from causation, but those Scandinavians, at sub-zero temperatures and taxation above fifty percent of income, are actually very happy people after all. I suspect good governance has something to do with it. It has to be either that or the alcohol.

Superdelegates: Waiting for the Un-Democratic Convention

A modern-day Alexis de Tocqueville diagnosing the health of American democracy would probably criticize the outsize influence of special interests and powerful lobbies. He might rant against an apathetic and uninformed public, and scorn the 80 million people of voting age that decided to stay at home in the last presidential election. He would probably write about the hundreds of millions of dollars in funds raised to buy 30-second television ads, and how money has become a better indicator of electoral success than a well-reasoned argument or a good debate. The media, the military-industrial complex, the electoral college, the Florida recount, the butterfly ballot, would all be included along with the usual suspects to be blamed for the bad shape of the world's first modern liberal democracy. And yet the now famous superdelegates, which will supposedly decide the Democratic primary this summer, could become the last straw for many, and the most embarrassing chapter for most.

Superdelegates, which account for one-fifth of the Democratic Party Convention, are members of Congress, governors, former presidents and vice presidents, party insiders, and members of the Democratic National Committee, including city council members and union leaders. These are not chosen by primary voters, nor are obligated to give their vote to the candidate preferred by a majority of the people. Thus, as it is often mentioned these days, one could envision a scenario where Barack Obama ends up winning twice as many state primaries and caucuses as its opponent, obtains more delegates and more votes, and still loses the nomination because party insiders prefer Hillary Clinton. Until now, very few knew those superdelegates even existed. As a matter of fact, most people that volunteered their time, donated their money, spent hours in a caucus somewhere, or simply went to the voting booth, believed they were participating in a beautiful exercise of democracy at its finest.

The party's primaries were a largely undemocratic affair for most of its history, and were dominated by big-city bosses and party machines. After the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, in passionate contest for primaries with Eugene McCarthy, the DNC gave the nomination to Hubert Humphrey, who supported the Vietnam war and had not won a single primary. As a reaction to the public outrage -the convention itself was mobbed by protesters who were tear-gassed-, the party revised the primary process to make it more democratic and ensure that the will of the people decided the nominee. However, after the consecutive nomination of mavericks like George McGovern or Jimmy Carter, the party introduced the superdelegates to control the fervor of activists and the momentum of insurgent campaigns and non-establishment candidates. Party insiders and elected officials, or so it was argued, would be better judges of a candidate's potential electoral success. They did not, however, get off to a good start. Superdelegates propelled the nomination of Walter Mondale, who lost 49 states to Reagan in the 1984 general election. Since then, people forgot about them. Each time, a clear front-runner emerged early in the race, and superdelegates simply crowned him en masse at the convention. Over the last years, the closest thing to a brokered convention took place in a fictional election, in the last season of the American television serial drama The West Wing.

It is not at all clear that Clinton would get a majority of superdelegates, or that Obama will reach the convention with a lead in states, delegates, and votes. It should also be noted that many Obama supporters welcomed the idea of a brokered convention when they thought Clinton would lead in votes and delegates. They knew the rules of the game. But most voters didn't, and many will feel understandably disillusioned, if not enraged. Watching so many of these party insiders relish at their role as king makers and boast about receiving calls from Bill, Hillary, Chelsea, and the Obama campaign is unsettling enough. The political system of the United States allows for someone to lose the popular vote but win the electoral college and the presidency, and for thirteen state legislatures in the smallest states representing 4 percent of the population to block any amendment to the constitution, among other notoriously anti-democratic features. But you can chalk these up to the federal structure of the United States. The power of superdelegates in the Democratic party, however, has no other explanation than the desire to control and tame democracy. After getting so many people involved and excited, breaking records of political participation in each contest, the will of the majority should determine the nominee, whether this is Hillary or Barack. Otherwise, they should skip the balloons, the confetti, and all the happy talk about the power of democracy at work.