Trying to understand what the Happiness Index tells us takes us deeper into the whole idea of what happiness really is.
Perhaps back in March when, you were holed-up under lock-down you overlooked publication of the UN’s 2020 World Happiness Report. Or maybe, as the strange contours of the new Covid-reality took shape around you, you took some comfort from your country’s standing in the annual happiness stakes. For if you were reading in Europe or North America you will have been reassured to know that you are, relatively speaking, sitting pretty. For the record, a clutch of Scandinavian countries, headed by Finland, grabbed the top places but Canada came in at 9th, the UK at 15th and the US at 19th. Some other big European countries scored well too – Germany gained 17th place – but the French, despite the affluence, beauty and cultural riches of their country, confirmed their reputation for pessimism by not making the Top 20 (they came in at 24).
I have lost count, as I am sure have you, the number of times you have read commentaries suggesting that these two countries [the US and the UK] are divided as never before.
All this is quite fun in a nerdy, Eurovision Song Contest kind of way; it’s a sort of Olympics of Contentedness and it’s worth noting that the margins which separate the top countries are relatively small. So for instance Finland, in the No1 spot scored 7.769, the UK scored 7.094 and the US scored 6.892. War-ravaged South Sudan, at 156th the lowest ranked country of all, scored 2.853 – thus officially becoming the unhappiest place on the planet. As to how those scores are calculated, the report relies on worldwide polling carried out by Gallup (an American analytics company) that puts the same questions to representative population samples in every country. Respondents are asked questions about six areas of national life: wealth, social support, health, personal freedom, generosity of the population and corruption. Aggregate the answers and – bingo! – there’s your happiness score.
It is tempting to be sceptical, in a smartypants kind of way, about the earnest endeavour of this global army of pollsters and sociologists (just how, one wonders, do you go about polling a country like South Sudan and how reliable are your results?). One imagines them solemnly compiling their statistics about a subject which has about it an ephemerality; after all “happiness” is both subjective and an often fleeting emotion. What does it mean, anyway, to say that China (93rd) is a less happy place than Morocco (89th) but better off than Bulgaria (97th)? And one wonders if these differences are visible to the naked eye: for instance, I have always found Greece (82nd) to be a happy place whilst Japan (58th) I found melancholy; but then I was just a tourist in these countries – and what do tourists ever know?
A host of questions fly up from these statistics which the methodology cannot answer. Take Finland, for instance; a country famed for its lack of talkativeness. I know an experienced TEFL teacher who says that getting a classroom full of Finns to engage in conversation is just about the toughest thing she ever had to do. Finns just don’t do small-talk, they find it unnatural; does their reticence, the lack of phatic jabber, increase their happiness? Who knows?
How can a country with deep, unhealed divisions, be seemingly getting happier?
But there are deeper and more substantial questions. For instance the dominant political narrative in both the US and the UK in recent years has been one of polarisation and broken politics. I have lost count, as I am sure have you, the number of times you have read commentaries suggesting that these two countries are divided as never before. In America it is the Man in the White House who divides opinion and politics has become bitter and increasingly vicious and yet for, all its recent difficulties, the US scores well.
In Britain, the great political psychodrama of Brexit has supposedly left us divided into two irreconcilable camps and yet the rankings do not reflect this; in fact in recent years, during the actual time when the Brexit debate was most bitter, the UK has been going up the table. What is going on here? How can a country with deep, unhealed divisions, be seemingly getting happier? If you went out into the streets of Britain and asked people “is this a happy country?” what sort of response do you think you would get? Many people, especially perhaps the Europhile middle class, still resentful and bruised by recent events, would answer, emphatically “no”. And certainly the current tenor of political debate in the UK is sour, carping and spiteful. Venturing the opinion that the UK is a “happy country” would mark you down in certain quarters as extremely gullible.
Trying to understand what the Happiness Index tells us takes us deeper into the whole idea of what happiness really is. The Index is a worthy, but somewhat blunt research tool; of necessity it confines its questioning to things it believes can be accurately measured. So Gross Domestic Product per capita is a straightforward enough thing to calculate, as is life-expectancy while the social support on offer to individuals can also be fairly easily discovered and compared. Corruption and personal freedom under the law can also be measured whilst “generosity” seems a more subjective thing. But the point is that there seems very little in the Happiness Index that tells us anything about real happiness as it is understood by people with a religious or philosophical bent.
It is this dimension that goes missing in the dry statistical “happiness” tables . What the UN is measuring, I think, is something we might more accurately term “well-being”. It is a measure of how comfortable life is in any particular society and thereby a measure also of human development. It has the virtue, at least, of not making monetary wealth the be-all and end-all measure of human satisfaction – but it shouldn’t be taken too seriously. For what is left out is that thing that the Christian religion has always set as the personal goal of the believer “the peace of God which surpasses all understanding”. That is something that is not tethered to physical, financial or societal factors – and no opinion poll will ever capture or reveal its true extent.
Robin Aitken was a BBC reporter for 25 years and is now a freelance writer and journalist; his latest book The Noble Liar (Biteback) is now out, in a new edition.
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