How is Happiness Defined? Part 1

GUEST COLUMN

BY ANTON KAISER

The Perspectives on Psychological Science journal recently published the World Values Survey (WVS) results. “Researchers measured happiness [in 97 nations] by simply asking people how happy they were, and how satisfied they were with their lives as a whole.”

The top three countries with “smiley face” awards were Denmark, Puerto Rico, and Colombia. The U.S. ranked 16th, which is about the same “relative position” as the year 2000 when Clinton was president. Interestingly, according to WVS data, the U.S. happiness trend had decreased from 1945 to1980 but has consistently increased since 1981, the year Carter left us with a fat economic turkey, heavily smothered in that thick gravy of stagflation.

But contrast this WVS happiness data with that of the Pew Research Center survey which says that 81% of Americans believe their country is on the wrong track. (We have all heard about the Pew survey results from the mainstream media but how about the WVS survey?) Can it really be that Americans are actually happy even though we are going in the wrong direction? Or is somebody wrong? Or are polls and surveys simply subject to the whims and intent of their designers? All good questions but not really the subject of my interest.

Most fascinating to me was the idea that Denmark, Puerto Rico, and Colombia are the happiest countries in the world, yet with amazingly disparate governments, geographies, economies, climates, and daily lives.

Denmark is small, has a low birth rate, is virtually ethnically pure, has high taxes, universal health care, is at peace, and is rich. Colombia is large, has a high birth rate, is ethnically diverse, has low taxes, has a mix of health care programs that cover about two-thirds of the people, is at war constantly with guerrillas and drug cartels, and is relatively poor. And Puerto Rico falls neatly in between. But somehow all these people are rated equally happy?

And so I began my research into the WVS data. Surely the “happiness” answer must reside in something these three countries have in common.

By fact, in my research, I found that Denmark, Puerto Rico, and Colombia are highly literate democracies (98%, 94%, and 93% literacy, respectively), whose people speak primarily one language (Danish, Spanish, and Spanish, respectively), and who are overwhelmingly Christian (Lutheran 90%, Catholic 85%, and Catholic 85%, respectively) My initial thoughts, therefore, were that free people of whatever democratic persuasion, educated in the same language and reinforced in their beliefs by Christian values, must be the happiest people in the world - at least as it concerns these three countries.

So imagine my surprise when I found that the researchers at WVS somehow decided that freedom, wealth, and social tolerance (as opposed to freedom, education, language, and religion), were the defining factors for national happiness. I am willing to give them the freedom factor, but obviously they were ignoring Denmark’s ethnic purity and controversial strict immigration laws as concerns tolerance, and were equally ignoring Colombia’s $7,565 per capita annual income as concerns wealth. So there had to be other common factors between these countries that were somehow influencing the rankings.

Unfortunately, going to the WVS website doesn’t help. “Happiness” data for Denmark exists from 1945 to present, but no such lengthy data exists for Colombia or Puerto Rico. What is more, the 60 year Denmark data, on a happiness scale of 1.0 to 4.0 (with 4.0 the happiest), rose only slightly from 3.2 to a high of 3.4 in 1999. (By contrast, the U.S. equaled or exceeded a 3.4 rating - the highest of any country - in 1952 thru 1957, 1966 thru 69, 1995, 2000, and, yes, even 2006). Find the happiness trends for 24 countries here: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/.

Thus, something was being added to the "mean happiness" data that was bringing the U.S. down to 16th and bringing the other countries up to the top. Further, the answer had to be in either “wealth” or “tolerance.” Obviously, Colombia isn’t wealthier than most other highly ranked countries, so the answer had to be in tolerance. And so my quest began. What tolerances do these countries have in common?

Part 2 tomorrow...

Anton Kaiser was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and retired in Rapid City after serving twenty-seven years as a U.S. Army infantry officer. He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy, West Point, and holds Masters Degrees in Business and in Public Administration from Webster College, St. Louis, MO. He is also a veteran of Vietnam, Berlin, Operation Just Cause (Panama) and an honor graduate of the Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, KS.