As we celebrate International Day of Happiness on March 20th, the World Happiness Report releases a new set of international rankings. Dr Michael Plant, Research Director at the Happier Lives Institute, an organisation that connects donors, researchers, and policymakers with the most cost-effective opportunities to increase global wellbeing, questions how much the World Happiness Report tells us about happiness.
Dr Plant argues that while the World Happiness Report may crown the Nordic nations as champions of life satisfaction, it leaves open the question of which countries enjoy their lives the most.
“The World Happiness Report compares countries by their life satisfaction. But life satisfaction isn’t quite the same thing as happiness. ‘Happiness’ generally refers to how good or bad you feel, not how satisfied you are with life,” says Dr Plant. “Research shows that while measures of day-to-day happiness and life satisfaction generally go together, some things matter more for one than the other. For instance, income and employment status affect life satisfaction more than happiness, whereas health problems, loneliness, and personal safety impact happiness more.”
“The World Happiness Report is — with apologies to my colleagues — a bit of a misnomer: ‘World Life Satisfaction Report’ would be more accurate,” Dr Plant remarks. “While it’s a great source of information on life evaluations, it doesn’t have detailed information on how people experience their lives. Unfortunately, there’s no global survey of happiness.”
As a result, Dr Plant also urges caution on thinking that we should imitate the societal structures of the most satisfied nations: “It has almost entered into folklore that the Nordics have the best quality of life. Hence, we should be more like them – have generous welfare states, raise taxes, sport excellent beards, go skiing, be sensible, and learn about ‘hygge’ and ‘lykke’.”
“But, I don’t think it’s clear whose example to follow if we want to have more enjoyable, less miserable lives. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Latin countries, with their salsa and dolce vita, had something to teach their northern neighbours,” he adds.
The World Happiness Report annually surveys around 100,000 people from over 130 countries.1 The main measure it uses, the Cantril Ladder, 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 current lives on the 0 to 10 scale. These scores are averaged to get the country rankings. The World Happiness Report started in 2012 and was published this year by the Wellbeing Research Centre, Oxford University, where Dr Plant is also a researcher.
Some are sceptical that we can compare wellbeing between countries. Dr Plant argues that the World Happiness Report’s rankings – of life satisfaction – are believable. In 2023, Finland and Denmark led the ranking at around 7.5/10, China and Paraguay were around 5.5/10, and Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo were close to 3/10. He concludes from this that people make a similar, global comparison.
However, Dr Plant emphasises the need to supplement life satisfaction scores with more granular data on day-by-day feelings. One way to capture this would be through a measure known as the Day Reconstruction Method, in which people are asked to break the previous day into parts, like scenes from a movie, and then say how good-to-bad they felt in each part. A person’s happiness is the time-weighted average of the parts. The Day Reconstruction Method would give a representative picture of a nation’s happiness.
“The issue is it takes a few minutes for people to provide this sort of information, compared to a few seconds to answer about life satisfaction, which is why the more detailed happiness questions are seldom asked. Yet until and unless we get this sort of data, we’re guessing who is happiest,” he concludes.
To learn more about the Happier Lives Institute and Dr Michael Plant’s work, please visit www.happierlivesinstitute.org.
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References
1 https://worldhappiness.report/faq/
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For media inquiries or interviews with Dr Michael Plant, please contact:
MEDIA CONTACT
Lara Watson
+971 52 899 3216
lara@happierlivesinstitute.org
www.happierlivesinstitute.org
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ABOUT THE HAPPIER LIVES INSTITUTE
The Happier Lives Institute connects donors, researchers, and policymakers with the most cost-effective opportunities to increase global wellbeing.
Using the latest subjective wellbeing data, the organisation identifies the problems that matter most to people and finds evidence-based ways to solve them.
ABOUT DR MICHAEL PLANT
Dr Michael Plant is a moral philosopher who researches whether and how to make people happier. He is the Founder and Research Director of the Happier Lives Institute and a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre, Oxford. He has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Oxford.
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