World Happiness Report 2019

The annual World Happiness Report is out again and March 20th is the International Day of Happiness. The report measures six key variables supporting well-being: GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and absence of corruption. I first saw this in the news in 2016 and have checked it out every year for Happiness Day. It's interesting to see how the rankings change for the countries I've lived in.

World Happiness Report 2018

The annual World Happiness Report is out again and March 20th is the International Day of Happiness. The report measures six key variables supporting well-being: income, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom, trust, and generosity. I first saw this in the news in 2016 and wrote about it then. It's interesting to see how the rankings change for the countries I've lived in and will live in next.

The top 10 is dominated by Nordic countries. Sweden is #9 and about the same as the previous 2 years I've looked at this since I lived there. The U.S. slipped from #13 to #14 last year and slid further to #18 this year. It's not a good trend so we definitely need to work on those key variables contributing to everyone's well-being instead of mostly benefiting the rich and well-connected. We could learn a few things from the countries above us on the list. That's assuming happiness is a shared goal in American society and the metrics for this report are the right ones. Wasn't there something about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness at one time in our history? It's worth looking at more deeply.

Top 20

1 - Finland, 2 - Norway, 3 - Denmark, 4 - Iceland, 5 - Switzerland

6 - Netherlands, 7 - Canada, 8 - New Zealand, 9 - Sweden, 10 - Australia

11 - Israel, 12 - Austria, 13 - Costa Rica, 14 - Ireland, 15 - Germany

16 - Belgium, 17 - Luxembourg, 18 - U.S., 19 - U.K., 20 - United Arab Emirates

Happiness Is The Road

Marillion is an awesome band and this song speaks well for the journey down many more roads... happiness is the road.

live version

World Happiness Report

The World Happiness Report 2016 Update is published. The editors argue that happiness provides a better indicator of human welfare than income, poverty, education, health and good government measured separately. Roughly 3,000 respondents in more than 150 countries were asked to evaluate their lives on a ladder where 0 represents the worst possible life and 10 represents the best. For the world as a whole, the distribution is very normally distributed about the median answer of 5, with a population-weighted mean of 5.4. It's a simple concept of being higher or lower on a happiness ladder but it needs to be simple to measure people of so many different nationalities and mindsets.

I'm from the United States which is ranked #13 with a score of 7.104. I currently live at my first foreign service post in Sweden which ranks a little higher (#10/7.291). Supposedly I improved my happiness environment by moving to one of the top 10 countries but it wasn't a huge jump in position. It doesn't feel like a drastic change but I do think people here seem a little happier. It also depends a bit on the seasons here. The top 10 is dominated by Nordic countries despite their cold and dark winters. Maybe the survey is taken in the summer when everyone is enjoying the long days filled with sunshine and pleasant weather.