How to choose happiness? Part 6: What the UN's World Happiness Report says
data! finally!
Note: This is a 6-part series. See the introduction to the series for links to other posts in this series.
I really thought I would have gotten a chance to move on from writing about happiness, but then the 10th World Happiness Report (WHR) came out last Friday! So I thought it would be pertinent to write include it in this series.
The WHR is a publication of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and grew out of a 2011 UN General Assembly resolution 65/309 “Happiness: Towards a Holistic Definition of Development,” which suggested countries should measure happiness to help guide public policy. This in turn follows a much longer history of trying to come up with better indicators of societal well-being, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator that tries to address the many defects of using GDP to measure societal progress.
Methodology-wise, it is interesting to see how the WHR's correlates and measures of happiness differ from the psychological accounts (e.g. Seligman's PERMA, or the older SWB measure). The WHR uses what is called the Cantril ladder. The ladder asks respondents to think of the worst and best possible lives for them, and then rank their own current lives. This is notable for several reasons: 1) it asks people to take a more holistic, world wide view, which 2) may or may not actually correlate with “how-we-feel” psychology measures like PERMA.1
This brings up a familiar tension, namely the tension one feels when getting admonished, "You should be happier that your life isn't X!" I.e. while we oftentimes recognize our life isn't objectively bad, oftentimes it doesn't feel that way. Whereas a measure like PERMA gets us to focus on our subjective assessment relative to where we want to go, Cantril's ladder asks us to be more holistic and objective. I think this is the right measure for the UN to target, although the word "happiness" may not be the best choice of wording. The WHR does measure more conventional notions of positive and negative emotions, and they collect it for evaluation purposes, but they note that it is much more subjective and less stable of a metric for comparing across countries and cultures.2 A lot of the nuances between the Cantril life evaluations and experienced emotions were covered in an academic paper by the Nobel Laureate David Kahneman in this 2010 paper.3
Secondly, the WHR tries to understand correlates or explanations of the Cantril rankings, and see the sources of happiness of each country. The top six variables identified by the WHR are (in rough order of correlation): GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, perception of corruption, and generosity, and together they explain roughly 75% of the average Cantril scores each country. The WHR also performed correlations for predicting individual level life evaluations. Some of the most significant factors include:4 friends and family, health problems, freedom, college, and employment, followed by institutional trust, perceptions of corruption, youth, and donation. However, there is definitely a lot more hiding under the picture, as the coefficient of determination on predicting individual-level life evaluations is only around 0.25!5
Finally, the WHR explored the importance of measuring the idea of “balance and harmony” in measures of happiness and well-being. There are many motivations for this, interestingly including a “survey of lay perceptions of happiness across seven Western nations found participants primarily defined happiness as a condition of "psychological balance and harmony," while a more extensive follow-up study similarly observed that the most prominent psychological definition was one of “inner harmony” (featuring themes of inner peace, contentment, and balance).”6 However, there has been a lack of empirical data on correlating balance with happiness, and the WHR sought to address this shortcoming, using data Gallup collected in 2020 on balance and well-being, the first worldwide assessment of its kind.7
The WHR did a lot of really interesting analyses and comparative studies across countries. For instance, “balance” seemed to have a higher correlation with life evaluation in the East, while “peace” had a higher correlation with life evaluation in the West. Another interesting case study is documented in Table 6.2 in their report. In short, balance and peace can be fairly large factors of happiness! Not as high as "counting on friends," but on par with freedom, generosity, youth, among other factors. And of course, there are definite correlations between balance, peace and feelings freedom, generosity, youth.
More research would be needed to tease out causation from correlation. Indeed, the surveyed countries who valued peace and balance the most were not Asian countries, as hypothesized, but rather mostly African countries. Also, improved survey metrics of “balance and peace” are needed, in particular teasing out how balance and peace can both refer to inner states of mind and external life circumstances, much like how a lot of the work in positive psychology has revolved around teasing apart internal evaluations from more external circumstances of happiness and well-being. And of course, there are also a lot of details to be worked out regarding how questions and words are interpreted in different languages and cultures.
Seligman argues that PERMA is still better than more temporally-focused metrics like the SWB (subjective-well-being) psychological measure, which overemphasize how happy we feel in the moment of answering, and is known to correlate ~70% with one’s mood at the moment of answering.
More precisely, the analysis found that including positive emotions as a variable did not improve predictions (i.e. was not more explanatory) relative to models that did not account for positive emotions at all!
This paper essentially established the methodology of the WHR! It draws upon the distinction between life evaluation and “emotional well being.” Based on their prior research into memory and experience, Kahneman and Deaton defined “emotional well being” as daily emotions over the past day, and this should in effect be akin to the SWB (subjective-well-being) measure in psychology (see footnote 1 above). On one hand, this “emotional well being” captures the highs and lows of life — while asking one person how they feel that day may feel weird, when averaged over a population it could conceivably be interpreted as what proportion of people spend their days in “happy emotions.” If you are still suspicious at using “subjective well being” as a reasonable measure of that elusive happiness we are after, Kahneman (and Seligman from positive psychology) agree with you! This is why the WHR uses the Cantril life evaluation rather than “emotional well being” as their indicator of happiness. However! The latter notion of “emotional well being” became widely marketed as “happiness” and led to that famous pop-claim that “money beyond 75k can’t buy happiness.” What all of those claims fail to miss is that Cantril life evaluations actually do increase with increasing income (albeit on a log scale, i.e. with diminishing returns).
I’ll end this long footnote with a quote from Kahneman and Deaton’s paper: “The Cantril ladder is a serious contender for the best tool for measuring the degree to which individuals view themselves as achieving their goals, both material and other. But emotional well-being also is clearly important for individuals and for policy, and here there are choices as well. Not everyone will agree that enhancing the happiness experienced by those who are already quite happy is a legitimate policy objective. The policy goal of reducing suffering is likely to raise fewer objections, and measures of emotional pain may be useful for that purpose. This topic merits serious debate.”
The WHR also studied the role of income, but it works on a different scale and is hard to tell from the report how to compare the effect of income to the aforementioned factors.
I.e. 75% of the variance in a population is unexplained by their simple linear regression model.
There has also been critique that, thus far, psychology research has historically been "WEIRD" (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic), potentially accounting for neglected research into the importance of balance and harmony (which maybe sound like more Asian values? The WHR cited Taoism, Buddhism, etc. as part of the cultural backdrop). The Gallup data, first reported in 2020, sought to correct for this imbalance and itself is the product of a partnership with the Japan-based policy foundation Wellbeing for Planet Earth.