How happy are we?

The tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan long ago dispensed with the notion of Gross National Product as a gauge of well-being. The king decreed that his people would aspire to Gross National Happiness instead.\nThat kernel of Buddhist wisdom is increasingly echoed in international policy and development models, which seek to establish scientific methods for finding out what makes us happy and why.\nNew research institutes are being created at venerable universities like Oxford and Cambridge to establish methods of judging individual and national well-being. Governments are putting ever greater emphasis on promoting mental well-being, not just treating mental illness.\n“In much the same way that research of consumer unions helps you to make the best buy, happiness research can help you make the best choices,” said Ruut Veenhoven, who created the World Database of Happiness in 1999.\nWhen he started studying happiness in the 1960s, Veenhoven used data from social researchers who simply asked people how satisfied they were with their lives, on a scale of zero to 10. But as the discipline has matured and gained popularity in the past decade, self-reporting has been found lacking.\nBy their own estimates, “drug addicts would measure happy all the time,” said Sabina Alkire of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Institute, which began work May 30.\nNew studies add more objective questions into a mix of feel-good factors: education, nutrition, freedom from fear and violence, gender equality and perhaps most importantly, having choices.\n“People’s ability to be an agent, to act on behalf of what matters to them, is fundamental,” Alkire said.\nBut if people say money can’t buy happiness, they’re only partially right.\nVeenhoven’s database, which includes statistics from 95 countries, is headed by Denmark with a rating of 8.2, followed by Switzerland, Austria, Iceland and Finland, all countries with high per capita income. At the other end of the scale are poorer countries: Tanzania rated 3.2, behind Zimbabwe, Moldova, Ukraine and Armenia. \nThe United States just makes it into the top 15 with a 7.4 rating. While choices are abundant in America, nutrition and violence issues helped drag its rating down.\nWealth counts, but most studies of individuals show income disparities count more. Surprisingly, however, citizens are no happier in welfare states, which strive to mitigate the distortions of capitalism, in contrast to other countries with purer free-market economies.\n“In the beginning, I didn’t believe my eyes,” said Veenhoven of his data. “Icelanders are just as happy as Swedes, yet their country spends half what Sweden does (per capita) on social welfare.”