Worldwide Happiness: Causes and Correlates

The World Happiness Report 2018 has been published today (but no e-copy is available yet), so I will wait for the e-copy to became available. Meanwhile, as I was anticipating the report and was in an analytical mood, I reread the World Happiness Report 2017 and want to share some of my thoughts and observation based around that while we get ready for the new report to take the conversation forward.   GDP (PPP) Per Capita based on 2008 estimates http://www.imf.org/ (Photo credit: Wikipedia)   The World Happiness reports are  based around measuring life satisfaction using a Cantril ladder and this is used as a proxy for happiness/ subjective well-being in most of the analysis. Sometimes, positive and negative affect, as experienced the day before, is also used as a measure of experiential happiness.   The world happiness report measures happiness of more than 150 countries, sampling about 1000 respondents in each country and uses data from Gallup World Poll. The Cantril ladder measures national happiness on a  scale form 0 to 10 and the top 10 happiest nations have an average national happiness level of about 7.4, while the most miserable, bottom 10 nations had an average national happiness of only about 3.4 , thus there being around 4 point gap of happiness that if bridged can make the world more happier.   The report measures six other correlates viz GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, social freedom, generosity, and absence of corru...
Source: The Mouse Trap - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: happiness world happiness report Source Type: podcasts