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Jun 27, 2016 · For those moments, it can help to fall back on the wisdom of history's greatest thinkers: Kierkegaard, Socrates, Thoreau, and the Buddha. Here's what philosophers discovered about happiness long before orange became the new black. "There is no path to happiness: happiness is the path" — Gautama Buddha, alive around 500 BC.
- Happiness Across The World Today
- Happiness Over Time
- The Distribution of Life Satisfaction
- The Link Between Happiness and Income
- Health and Life Satisfaction
- Life Satisfaction Through Life Events
- Life Satisfaction and Society
- Data Quality and Measurement
The World Happiness Report is a well-known source of cross-country data and research on self-reported life satisfaction. The map here shows, country by country, the ‘happiness scores’ published this report. The underlying source of the happiness scores in the World Happiness Report is the Gallup World Poll—a set of nationally representative surveys...
Findings from the Integrated Values Surveys
In addition to the Gallup World Poll (discussed above), the Integrated Values Surveysprovides cross-country data on self-reported life satisfaction. These are the longest available time series of cross-country happiness estimates that include non-European nations. The Integrated Values Surveys collect data from a series of representative national surveys covering almost 100 countries, with the earliest estimates dating back to 1981. In these surveys, respondents are asked: “Taking all things...
Findings from Eurobarometer
The Eurobarometersurvey collects data on life satisfaction as part of their public opinion surveys. For several countries, these surveys have been conducted at least annually for more than 40 years. The visualization here shows the share of people who report being ‘very satisfied’ or ‘fairly satisfied’ with their standards of living. Two points are worth emphasizing. First, estimates of life satisfaction often fluctuate around trends. In France, for example, we can see that the overall trend...
More than averages — the distribution of life satisfaction scores
Most of the studies comparing happiness and life satisfaction among countries focus on averages. However, distributional differences are also important. Life satisfaction is often reported on a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 representing the highest possible level of satisfaction. This is the so-called ‘Cantril Ladder’. This visualization shows how responses are distributed across steps in this ladder. In each case, the height of the bars is proportional to the fraction of answers at each score....
Economic growth and happiness
In the charts above, we show that there is robust evidence of a strong correlation between income and happiness across and within countries at fixed points in time. Here, we want to show that, while less strong, there is also a correlation between income and happiness across time. Or, put differently, as countries get richer, the population tends to report higher average life satisfaction. The chart shown here uses data from the World Values Survey to plot the evolution of national average in...
Life expectancy and life satisfaction
Health is an important predictor of life satisfaction, both within and among countries. In this visualization, we provide evidence of the cross-country relationship. Each dot in the scatterplot represents one country. The vertical position of the dots shows national life expectancy at birth, and the horizontal position shows the national average self-reported life satisfaction in the Cantril Ladder (a scale ranging from 0-10, where 10 is the highest possible life satisfaction). As we can see,...
How do common life events affect happiness?
Do people tend to adapt to common life events by converging back to a baseline level of happiness? Clark et al. (2008)12use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to identify groups of people experiencing significant life and labor market events and trace how these events affect the evolution of their life satisfaction. The visualization here shows an overview of their main findings. In each individual chart, the red lines mark the estimated effect of a different event at a given point in...
Does disability correlate with life satisfaction?
A number of papers have noted that long-term paraplegics do not report themselves as particularly unhappy when compared to non-paraplegics (see, for example, the much-cited paper by Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman, 1978).13 This assertion has received attention because it tells us something about the very meaning of well-being and has important consequences for policy. It is, for example, considered in courts of law with respect to compensation for disability. However, comparing differenc...
Culture and life satisfaction
Comparisons of happiness among countries suggest that culture and history shared by people in a given society matter for self-reported life satisfaction. For example, as the chart here shows, culturally and historically similar Latin American countries have a higher subjective well-being than other countries with comparable levels of economic development. (This chart plots self-reported life satisfaction as measured in the 10-point Cantril ladder on the vertical axis against GDP per capita on...
Sense of freedom and life satisfaction
A particular channel through which social environment may affect happiness is freedom: the society we live in may crucially affect the availability of options that we have to shape our own life. This visualization shows the relationship between self-reported sense of freedom and self-reported life satisfaction using data from the Gallup World Poll. The variable measuring life satisfaction corresponds to country-level averages of survey responses to the Cantril Ladder question (a 0-10 scale, w...
The link between media and gloominess
A number of studies have found that there is a link between emotional exposure to negative content in news and changes in mood. Johnston and Davey (1997),18, for example, conducted an experiment in which they edited short TV news to display positive, neutral, or negative material and then showed them to three different groups of people. The authors found that people who watched the ‘negative’ clip were more likely to report a sad mood. This link between emotional content in news and changes i...
Can ‘happiness’ really be measured?
The most natural way to attempt to measure subjective well-being is to ask people what they think and feel. Indeed, this is the most common approach. In practice, social scientists tend to rely on questions inquiring directly about happiness or on questions inquiring about life satisfaction. The former tends to measure the experiential or emotional aspects of well-being (e.g., “I feel very happy”), while the latter tends to measure the evaluative or cognitive aspects of well-being (e.g., “I t...
Is ‘life satisfaction’ the same as ‘happiness’?
In this topic page, we discuss data and empirical research on happiness and life satisfaction. However, it is important to bear in mind that “life satisfaction” and “happiness” are not really synonyms. This is, of course, reflected in the data since self-reported measures of these two variables come from asking different kinds of questions. The Integrated Values Surveys asks directly about happiness: “Taking all things together, would you say you are (i) Very happy, (ii) Rather happy, (iii) N...
Are happiness averages really meaningful?
The most common way to analyze data on happiness consists of taking averages across groups of people. Indeed, cross-country comparisons of self-reported life satisfaction, such as those presented in ‘happiness rankings’, rely on national averages of reports on a scale from 0 to 10 (the Cantril Ladder). Is it reasonable to take averages of life satisfaction scores? Or, in more technical terms, are self-reports of Cantril scores really a cardinal measure of well-being? The evidence tells us tha...
- Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Max Roser
- 2013
Apr 14, 2022 · The survey finds that, across the world, people most look to their health and well-being (both physical and mental), their family (partner/spouse and children), a nd having a sense of purpose as what gives them “the greatest happiness.”. Next come their living conditions, feeling safe and in control, being in nature, having a meaningful job ...
Our role in research on World Happiness is a natural fit with our longstanding mission: providing leaders with the right information about what people say makes life worthwhile.” The World Happiness Report 2024 also features curated submissions on the theme of happiness across different age groups from experts at the forefront of wellbeing ...
Mar 20, 2024 · Our role in research on World Happiness is a natural fit with our longstanding mission: providing leaders with the right information about what people say makes life worthwhile.' The World Happiness Report 2024 also features curated submissions on the theme of happiness across different age groups from experts at the forefront of wellbeing science.
Mar 20, 2019 · Healthy life expectancy is 73 years in the top 10, compared to 55 years in the bottom 10. 93% of the top 10 respondents think they have sufficient freedom to make key life choices, compared to 63% in the bottom 10. Average perceptions of corruption are 35% in the top 10, compared to 72% in the bottom 10. ↩︎.
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The World Happiness Report describes happiness across countries as an indicator of societal progress, explores the factors of happiness, and goes beyond traditional measures by providing in-depth ...
