By Lauryn Bailey
Everyone wants to be happy. Humans focus on striving to be the happiest version of themselves every single day.
Thanks to the World Happiness Report, there is a chart that ranks 155 countries by their happiness levels. It’s a landmark survey of the state of global happiness. The chart ranks countries based on factors including healthy life expectancy, social support, GDP per capita, the happiness of a country’s children, social capital, the civil economy, the absence of corruption and subjective well-being. The top ten countries rank highly on all six of those factors.
The first World Happiness Report was published in April, 2012. Now, every year on March 20, International Day of Happiness, they release the Report.
The report was prepared by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, an international panel of social scientists convened by the United Nations. It was edited by Dr. Helliwell; Jeffrey D. Sachs, a Columbia University economist; and Richard Layard, of the London School of Economics.
This year was the fifth World Happiness Report released. Next year’s report will focus on the issue of migration.
The factors they use to examine the report are income, education, unemployment, partnership, physical health, and mental health.
In all three Western countries, diagnosed mental illness is more important than income, employment or physical illness. In every country physical health is important, but in no country is it more important than mental health.
According to Jeffrey D. Sachs, Happiness is increasingly considered a proper measure of social progress and a goal of public policy.
Norway ranked number one on this year’s World Happiness Report. Denmark, Iceland, and Switzerland follow behind closely in a tightly packed bunch. According to the Report, these countries ranked highly on all the main factors found to contribute to happiness: caring, freedom, generosity, honesty, health, income and good governance.
Norway moved to the very top even with their weaker oil prices. By choosing to produce its oil slowly, Norway has helped itself from the boom and bust cycle of many other resource-rich economies. They choose to invest the proceeds for the future rather than spending them in the present. They did this successfully because Norway has high levels of mutual trust, shared purpose, and good governance. All these factors keep the country where they are in the happiness ranking.
The Central African Republic was the least happy of 155 countries. The Report states, “Well-being may reflect the history of a region. This may especially be the case for Africa that has a short history of self-rule. Low levels of subjective well-being are likely not to be a recent development in Africa. The first international studies of happiness already found that evaluations of life were less positive in African countries south of the Sahara than elsewhere
This year’s report focuses on how important the social foundations of happiness is. It is seen by comparing the life experience between the top and bottom ten countries. There is a four-point happiness gap between the two groups of countries.
According to the World Happiness Report the US showed less social support, less sense of personal freedom, lower donations, and a loss of trust with the government and business.
The United States is looking for happiness in all the wrong places. According to Chapter 7 of the World Happiness Report, “Restoring American Happiness,” To rebuild the country, we need to focus on five main factors: campaign finance reform, create a set of policies aiming at reducing income and wealth inequality, improving the social relations between native-born and immigrant populations, acknowledge and move past the fear created by 9/11, and improving educational quality. The chapter concludes that falling American happiness is due primarily to social rather than to economic causes.