The Pursuit of Happiness
For most people, happiness is the ultimate good in life. The other things we seek like wealth, connections and fame are often means to this end. That is why I thought it was worth exploring what the data says on happiness. I wanted answers to questions like:
- What countries are happy and why?
- Are Americans actually happy?
- If they’re not, why not and what can be done about it?
The answers may help someone looking to increase either their personal happiness or society’s. Or maybe happiness is an internal state of being and treating it as something that can be externally assessed and dialed up is a fool’s errand. Anyway, here are some charts.
Happiness Around the World
The map above shows how countries scored on a happiness index in 2019 (pre-Covid). Respondents in each country were asked to rank their current life on a scale of 1–10. Most countries unsurprisingly fall in the middle with Scandinavia on top and war-torn countries at the bottom. If you happen to live in the United States, there are only a dozen or so countries you’d want to move to increase your chances of happiness. Saudi Arabia scores similarly to the US, which may be unexpected given its reputation as a harsh and rigid theocracy but might make more sense later.
Money and Happiness
Having more money seems to linearly lead to greater happiness when we compare countries’ happiness index scores to their GDP per capita. One wonders whether the effect on happiness is purely due to higher incomes or whether other benefits of living in wealthier countries such as cleaner environments and better social safety nets are as important. If it was purely income you might get more bang for your buck with a high income in an unhappy country. The United States is the richest large country in the world and so scores similarly well for happiness. It would appear that simply being average in the US should ensure a happy life. Yet an important thing to note is the data examined so far indicates the level of happiness in the US but says little about the trend.
Unhappiness and Despair
Fortunately there is data on both Americans’ stated happiness over time and indicators of unhappiness. The graph on the left highlights the rapid rise in “Deaths of Despair” (per 100, 000) since 2000. The term describes deaths caused by suicide, alcohol and drugs and was coined by two economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton. The doubling in such deaths since 2000 has caused life expectancy in the US to decrease each year since 2017. The graph on the right shows a near doubling in the percentage of Americans saying they were “Not too happy” in the General Social Survey. Both graphs indicate at least a subset of Americans are deeply unhappy, so what’s going on?
The Importance of Social Capital
The General Social Survey has some answers. Above you can see how the percentage of respondents saying they’re happy, happily married and they trust others has changed since 2000. Across all indicators there was a large drop in the early 2000s likely due to 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. The similar fluctuations across the three metrics suggests some linkage between them. Trust is the foundation of most relationships and there is substantial evidence that strong interpersonal relationships are the main source of happiness. A person’s marriage is probably their most important relationship and so its quality should play a large role in their overall happiness.
Extending this to a societal level you could expect happiness to be linked to the quality of interconnectedness between people, commonly known as social capital. The political scientist Robert Putnam found that social capital in the US has been declining since the 1960s as Americans have become less likely to join associations, go to church or even go on picnics. Trust has also been in long-term decline and as the graph shows, has been persistently low since 2000. Once you notice the importance of social capital in happiness the more recent rise in despair seems like a natural consequence.
Mapping Social Capital
The map above shows the state of social capital across the United States. It relies on the 2018 Social Capital Index developed by the Congressional Joint Economic Committee. The index is built on subindices for family unity, community health, institutional health and collective efficacy with metrics for each subindex. It appears the closer a state is to Canada, the higher its social capital. The exception is Utah which scores the highest, likely due to the unifying effect of the Mormon Church. Coming back to Saudi Arabia, the country’s strong religious and tribal ties may also lead to higher social capital and hence happiness. On the other end, Louisiana is the lowest ranked state perhaps due to its high incarceration rate and weak social safety net. These measures of social capital may mean little on a personal level or fail to capture new connections like social media, but these data provide a useful window into where more needs to be done to enable the pursuit of happiness.
Conclusion
This is but one story that peels back the curtain on happiness in one country. Each slice of data in each country might contain a new story, like why Scandinavian countries rank highest in happiness but also antidepressant usage. These ideas of happiness and social capital may seem fuzzy and difficult to analyze but that does not make them any less important.
Data and Methodology
The data for this post were obtained from the four sources below:
The 2019 World Happiness Report
The General Social Survey Data Explorer
The Joint Economic Committee: Long-term trends in Deaths of Despair
The Joint Economic Committee: The Geography of Social Capital in America
The datasets were cleaned and converted to csv files in Excel where necessary. All data manipulation and visualization was done using R.
About
Amjad Hamza is a sophomore in The Wharton School studying Behavioral Economics and Business Analytics. This post is for Prasanna Tambe’s class, OIDD 245: Analytics and the Digital Economy.
