World Map of Happiness.
Posted on Sep 17th, 2006
by 
Brian
Brian
So this is pretty cool.
A psychologist in the UK has produced the first-ever World Map of Happiness.
"Adrian White, an analytic social psychologist at the University’s School of Psychology, analysed data published by UNESCO, the CIA, the New Economics Foundation, the WHO, the Veenhoven Database, the Latinbarometer, the Afrobarometer, and the UNHDR, to create a global projection of subjective well-being: the first world map of happiness."
Check out the rest of it here.
(But feel free to guess which country is happiest before you click . . . ;) )
It's not the first time national happiness has been measured, though. Bhutan works happiness into government policy. Here's a whole selection of articles of Gross National Happiness.. Pretty amazing stuff.
Access: Public
countries
August 2008 
Thanks Brian! Very useful…
Take great care, Julia
Very cool, Brian! Thanks for sharing! I've been working on an essay assignment exploring the “possibility of happiness” and this may be very interesting to share with my workshop group.
nice. also check out The Happy Planet Index –
“The Happy Planet Index is an innovative new measure that shows the ecological efficiency with which human well-being is delivered around the world. It is the first ever index to combine environmental impact with well-being to measure the environmental efficiency with which country by country, people live long and happy lives. The results are surprising, even shocking, but there is much to learn from what they show.”
and here's the actual Happy Planet Map. according to this map, Vanuatu is the “happiest” :)
I love these sorts of maps/lists too! And the more there are, the better the picture.
A few observations on the WMH primarily(some made in the linked article)..
1) Countries with a high amount of ethnic diversity are not so happy. Except for Canada(yay).
2) Social democracies seem to do quite well
3) Less populated but wealthy countries to well
4) Less religious countries do relative well
5) Japan is surprisingly low at 90. Hmm!
6) China, India and Russia not so surprisingly low given the poverty and in some cases inequality.
5) Many nations that do relatively well on the WMH do much worse on the HPI (especially Canada and other wealthy ones), where the Ecological Footprint plays a much larger role. Not too surprising.
It will be interesting when more information is released on just how rankings for the WMH was calculated.
“5) Japan is surprisingly low at 90. Hmm!”
another proof that riches doesn't equate to happiness. note that Japan is one of the richest countries in the world, but they just work too hard!
countries that are rich are high on the happiness meter too :)
go Ireland! go Canada!
~C (for Celtic Tiger)
Denmark being the happiest place in the world… Hm….
Yes we have an exceptionally high level of health, wealth and education here, but happiness? It doesn't look like it when you live here.
Take a ride with any bus in Denmark, and you will experience that most people here don't look happy at all, that they don't talk with each other, that they often look tired… and then take a bus in one of the countries that are measured to be not so happy and you will experience a lot more immediate happiness / joyfulness there.
I recall there has been a group of visitors from Africa here at some point. The Danish hosts asked “What do you think?” and kind of expected that their guests would marvel at the high living standard, endless supply of water etc. Surprisingly, the Africans' first reaction was: “Why do people look so lonely here?”.
Happiness does not depend on health, wealth and education.
You can be happy without health, wealth and education, you can be happy with health, wealth and education.
You can be happy any place in the world! (Denmark too! ;-))
Halina
Another Brit researcher at Hertford University, Dr. Richard Wiseman (what a serendipidous name) asked what makes people happy and his conclusion was that if people have a certain degree of security, a home, food income ..then beyond that material factors are not relevant but psychological ones, like perspective are.
He also analysed the difference between 'lucky' and 'unlucky' people and found that good and bad luck were self fufilling predictions, that Bill Shakespeare had it spot on when he said, 'Nothing is…but thinking makes it so'. Milton, the English poet wrote, 'The mind in it's own place can make a heaven out of Hell, a Hell of Heaven'.
Professor Richard Wiseman holds Britain's only chair in the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire.
He has published over forty papers in academic journals, and gained an international reputation for research into unusual areas of psychology, including deception, luck and the paranormal.
A passionate advocate for science, Wiseman frequently appears on the media, gives public talks and performances about his work, and has written The Luck Factor - a best selling book exploring the lives and minds of lucky and unlucky people.
Latest news
Contact
Search site
Those Danes…
I guess they know how, “To be or not to be.” They must be able to, “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” better than most. Whatever was, “rotten in Denmark,” composted and grew some happy individuals. Nice. Fine example of the evolution of consciousness. That nut job Hamlet must have helped them to transcend and include. LOL!
It would be interesting to see some SD and integral theory applied to that research, huh?
Okay, I'm off to the nunnery - is that weird? “Give thy thoughts no tongue.” ; )
that's a great news. Theory of happiness. That word has lot of meanings
It's all relative and therefore open to both opinion and interpretation. I've seen a number of these, and they differ widely. Sometimes, for example, the United States is shown as one of the happiest places in the world, and other times it's shown as bordering on miserable. Another example is Thailand. While it's generally shown somewhere in the middle-to-low range in happiness, I can attest that the people we met there were the happiest I've ever met, generally speaking.
Probably much more relevant to think about/examine what happiness is, rather than where (geographically) people appear to be happy, right? I'm a big believer in that people vote with their feet…where do people want to be? Where is the big line? Where do they kill each other to try and get in? We can spend a bunch of time trying to define happiness or just look at the numbers…-. NO OTHER PLACE in the world provides the opportunity for freedom and self-actualization that the US does. Is that accurate? Is that happiness? Who said ignorance is bliss? Is bliss happness? Would you rather be somewhere else.? Is so, I do hope you get there soon! If not, why not? The more comfortable you are, the likelier you are to even be able to think about where you might be happier…right? That's kind of a luxury I would think. Don't worry…be happy. Maybe it's Jamaica?
Take Command!
Kelly