So the numbers are in on whether we’re better off than in the George W. Bush years. Take it away, United Nations: “The USA is a story of reduced happiness. In 2007 the USA ranked third among the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries; in 2016 it came 19th.” Thanks, Obama! With numbers like those, “Make America in the top 15 again” would have been a winning slogan.
That’s one tidbit from the World Happiness Report (WHR) produced by the United Nations this week and treated by the (rest of the) press with the same combination of awe and devotion that greeted the average papal bull in the Middle Ages. Yet this report is mostly rubbish.
The UN report averaging self-reported happiness scores from 2014 to 2016 says that the happiest countries on Earth this year are, in order, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, Finland, the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, and, tied for ninth, Australia and Sweden. Let’s just pause here to marvel at the false precision of stating that two countries are exactly equal in happiness. The US finished 14th.
Here’s a problem: Happiness surveys don’t even agree with one another. Surveys are supposed to be reporting news, but how useful would your newspaper be if it gave conflicting reports for the numbers on the stock market, the weather and the Yankees box score? A 2012 Gallup survey on happiest countries had a completely different list, with Panama (!) first, followed by Paraguay, El Salvador, Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, Thailand, Guatemala, the Philippines, Ecuador and Costa Rica.
A Pew survey of 43 countries in 2014 (which excluded most of Europe) had Mexico, Israel and Venezuela finishing first, second and third, with the US in the top 10 but barely beating Vietnam and Colombia. Huh? In that same survey, here are some of the other countries that beat healthy, wealthy Japan: Argentina, Peru, Malaysia, Pakistan, South Africa and Nicaragua. Does anyone seriously think Nicaragua is a happier place than Japan?
These surveys depend on subjective self-reporting, not to mention eliding cultural differences. In Japan there is a cultural bias against boasting of one’s good fortune, and in East Asia the most common response, by far, is to report one’s happiness as average. In Scandinavia, meanwhile, there is immense societal pressure to tell everyone how happy you are, right up to the moment when you’re sticking your head in the oven. Longtime Scandinavian resident Michael Booth observes as much in his book on the subject, in which he points out that Danes and Icelanders ranked fourth and first in the world in use of antidepressants in an OECD survey. Booth, after living in Scandinavia for more than a decade, says that he’s never met a Dane who really believes Danes are among the happiest people.
You’d be wise to ditch the idea that happiness is an objective trait that can be compared across borders. And even measuring happiness within a single country over time may not yield much: China, according to the new WHR, is less happy today than it was in 1990.
So as China’s ascended from a peasant nation to the second-largest economy in the world, with a GDP growth of 500 percent, it lost happiness.
Maybe the Chinese were too afraid of the authorities in 1990 to complain or maybe the Chinese happiness needle can’t be budged forward much, but there is no question that the average Chinese person is far better off today than he was in 1990.
No matter how carefully parsed the data may be, a survey based on unreliable answers isn’t worth a lot. You might as well run a survey based on asking the dudes of the world, “Who’s best in bed?”