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.