Andres Oppenheimer: World’s
happiest countries — in Latin America?
MIAMI
Reading a Gallup Poll about the
happiest countries on earth, I couldn’t help being surprised that nine out of
the 10 happiest countries — led by Paraguay — turned out to be in Latin
America.
According to Gallup’s Positive
Emotions Index, one of several such worldwide studies that aim to measure
people’s levels of happiness, Paraguay was for the third year in a row the
country in which people said they experienced the most positive emotions.
The poll asked people in 138
countries whether they experienced positive emotions — such as lots of
enjoyment, laughter, smiling a lot, feeling well rested, and being treated with
respect — on the previous day.
In Paraguay, 87 percent of respondents
reported having positive experiences on the previous day, followed by Panama
(86 percent), Guatemala, Nicaragua and Ecuador (all 83 percent), Costa Rica,
Colombia and Denmark (82 percent), Honduras, Venezuela and El Salvador (81
percent).
Further down the list are the
United States, Sweden, Argentina, Chile and several other countries with 78
percent of the people reporting positive emotions, and Mexico, China and France
with 76 percent. At the bottom of the list is Syria, with 36 percent.
Other studies, such as the
United Nations’ World Happiness Report, asked questions that placed a greater
emphasis on people’s well-being, and came to different conclusions. The World
Happiness Report identifies the countries with the highest levels of happiness
as Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Netherlands and Sweden.
So which of these studies
should we believe? It turns out that it depends on whether you measure positive
emotions, or well-being, Gallup pollsters say. Positive emotions mostly reflect
a mood, while well-being mostly reflects a general satisfaction with one’s
standard of living, they say.
A few days ago, I had a chance
to interview Daniel Kahneman, one of the world’s foremost experts in behavioral
economics, and to ask him extensively about these rankings of the world’s
happiest countries.
Kahneman, 80, an
Israeli-American psychologist and professor emeritus at Princeton University,
is one of the few non-economists ever to win a Nobel in economics. He was not
surprised at all by the results of Gallup’s Positive Emotions Index.
Kahneman told me that Latin
Americans “are more emotional, not necessarily happier.” He added, “When you
look at how Latin Americans answer questions about how unhappy they are, you
sometimes find that they are unhappier than other people. So they are (both)
happier than other people, and unhappier than other people.
“The point I’m making with
Latin Americans is that they maybe express emotions more than other cultures,
so that would be true both for good emotions and for less good emotions.”
According to Kahneman, money
buys happiness, but only to a point. His studies have found that, in the United
States, income only makes a significant impact on people’s positive emotions
when they make more than $75,000 a year. After that threshold, there is not
much of a difference in how happy people feel.
“Money does not buy
experiential happiness, but lack of money buys you misery. It’s not so much
that being rich is good, but that being poor can be very bad,” he told me.
But what I found most
interesting of what Kahneman said about these happiness polls is that they are
focusing on the wrong question.
“I don’t think that it’s so
important to measure how happy people are. People keep talking about measuring
happiness and well-being, but what is really important is measuring misery,”
Kahneman said. “It is much more important for a society to reduce the misery of
its population.”
I fully agree. The rankings for
world happiness are not only very subjective, but can lead to an illusion of
happiness that leads to complacency, and to a false sense of achievement. If
Gallup’s Positive Emotions Index had added a question asking Paraguayans
whether they are satisfied with their standard of living, or the public
services they receive, or if they are as happy as the Scandinavians, the results
might have been different.
The bottom line is that, as
Kahneman said, rather than ask questions about happiness, we should ask
questions about misery — and do something about it.
Andres Oppenheimer
(aoppenheimer@miamiherald.com) is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami
Herald.
