How happy are you? How happy is a society or a country? Happiness is difficult to measure, because the definition of happiness varies from person to person. However, Western scholars have developed a template in terms of which they measure the level of happiness in a country.
The Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), an international panel of social scientists that includes economists, psychologists and public health experts convened by the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, annually publishes a World Happiness Report ranking countries on a scale of 1 to 10. The United Nations published the first such study in 2012. The happiness ranking is based on individual responses to a global poll conducted by Gallup. The poll includes a question, known as the Cantril Ladder: “Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?” According to SDSN, the level of happiness across countries can be explained by six variables: gross domestic product per capita; healthy years of life expectancy; social support; trust (as measured by perceived absence of corruption in government and business); perceived freedom to make life choices; and generosity (as measured by donations).The 2016 World Happiness Report reveals that Denmark is the happiest country in the world, while crisis-torn Syria and Burundi are the most miserable. Switzerland is in the 2nd place. As last year, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Canada, Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia and Sweden are among the top 10. Denmark, which was ranked first in the 2013 version of the report but lost that honour to Switzerland in 2015, now reclaims its title as the happiest country on Earth.
Burundi is the most unhappy country, followed by war-ravaged Syria, Togo, Afghanistan and six other countries in sub-Saharan Africa – Benin, Rwanda, Guinea, Liberia, Tanzania and Madagascar as the least happy of 157 countries. They are also among the poorest in the world. The report compares data from 2005 to 2015, showing that Greece, which suffered enormously from the global recession and now faces a crippling migrant crisis, has seen the highest drop in happiness.
The United States is ahead of several Western European countries to be 13th most happy nation, up two spots from last year. Germany is 16th, Britain 23rd and France 32nd. The group of Middle Eastern kingdoms – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain – out-ranked Italy, which came in at number 50, and Japan, which took the 53rd spot. China, the world's most populous country, is ranked 83rd and India, the world's largest democracy, came in at 118. Both are among the world’s largest economies.
The report has compared levels of happiness in 2005-2007, before the onset of the global recession, with 2013-2015, the most recent three-year period for which data from a Gallup World Poll is available. Of the 126 countries for which comparable data is available, 55 have had significant increases in happiness and 45 have seen decreases. Among the top 20 gainers are Thailand and China, eight countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States and Eastern Europe, seven in Latin America, two in sub-Saharan Africa and Macedonia in the Balkans. The 20 largest losers of happiness include Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East; Japan and India in Asia; and Cyprus, Spain, Italy and Greece in Europe. Ukraine, which has been devastated by a pro-Russian insurgency since 2014, has also fallen into the group of 10 largest happiness declines. Iceland and Ireland offer the best examples of maintaining happiness in the face of economic crisis due to high degrees of social support.
According to the Happiness Report, Pakistan is a more happy country than India. The report says that Pakistan enjoys a better position of 92 in the list that puts Sri Lanka at 117th place, a position ahead of India. India's happiness quotient has witnessed a fall as compared to last year, with its rank on a global happiness index falling to 118 among 157 nations. While the differences between countries where people are happy and those where they are not cannot be scientifically measured, one thing is clear: the richest countries are not the happiest. When countries single-mindedly pursue individual objectives, such as economic development to the neglect of social and environmental objectives, the results can be highly adverse for human well-being, This is proved by the fact that many countries in recent years have achieved high economic growth but this has been at the cost of sharply rising inequality, social exclusion and grave damage to the natural environment. Significantly, five countries - Bhutan, Ecuador, Scotland, United Arab Emirates and Venezuela - now have appointed Ministers of Happiness charged with promoting it as a goal of public policy. Pakistan should do the same.
The field of happiness research has expanded rapidly in recent years, but there is a great deal of disagreement about how to measure happiness. Some scholars find people’s subjective assessments of their well-being to be unreliable, and they prefer objective indicators like economic and health data. The scholars behind the World Happiness Report say they have tried to take both types of data into account. However, many well known economists have referred to research findings showing that people’s evaluations of their lives “differ significantly and systematically among countries”; that within countries, subgroups differ widely in their levels of happiness; that unemployment and major disabilities have lasting influences on well-being; and that the happiness of migrants approximates that of their new country, instead of their country of origin.
It has also been noted that crises can prompt vastly different responses based on the underlying social fabric. In Greece, where the economy began to decline in 2007, setting off a crisis in the euro zone that has resulted in three financial bailouts, widespread corruption and mistrust are associated with the diminishing sense of happiness over the past decade. By contrast, trust and “social capital” are so high in Japan that scholars found, to their surprise, that happiness actually increased in Fukushima, which was devastated by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, because an outpouring of generosity and cooperation contributed to the community’s resilience and rebuilding.
In this context, the argument that economic freedom should be championed above all other values fails the happiness test: There is no evidence that economic freedom per se is a major direct contributor of human well-being above and beyond what it might contribute towards per-capita income and employment. Individual freedom matters for happiness, but among many objectives and values, not to the exclusion of other considerations.
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