DANES ARE AN 8.2 HAPPY; AMERICANS ONLY A 7.4
Casa Grande Valley Newspapers
September 18, 2007
AZ
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) – 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.
That kernel of Buddhist wisdom is increasingly finding an echo in
international policy and development models, which seek to establish
scientific methods for finding out what makes us happy and why.
New 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.
"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.
When 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.
By their own estimate, "drug addicts would measure happy all the
time," said Sabina Alkire, of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development
Institute, which began work May 30.
New 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.
Veenhoven’s database, which lists 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 much poorer countries: Tanzania rated 3.2, behind
Zimbabwe, Moldova, Ukraine and Armenia.
The United States just makes it into the top 15 with a 7.4.