I’m only bringing this up because I remember some “happiness research” which showed Ghana coming out quite high and the US low — and the explanation that was given about how it’s equality in income rather than size of income that was driving differences in happiness seemed promising, from a left-wing perspective. That was years ago, though, so I have no link and no guarantee I’m remembering it correctly.

Some Googling, however, led me to the “World Database of Happiness”, compiled by the pioneering Dutch happiness researcher Ruut Veenhoven for the years 2000-2009 (and sadly presented in web design from before that). It shows the highest mean levels of happiness being reached in some Northern countries (Denmark, Iceland and Finland) but also, interspersed with them, Costa Rica and Mexico. Sweden ranked below Panama, and the US below Venezuela. Another (more recent?) iteration of the same database, data of which were included as appendix in a paper on “Income inequality and happiness in 119 nations”, has Colombia and again Mexico ranking at the top, right alongside Switzerland and Denmark. Those data seem to contradict what this post is saying, which is why links to representative examples would have been useful to verify the author’s claim.

If the results of “happiness research” do indeed suggest that it might be income equality as well as prosperity that plays a determinant role, it might actually make this discipline a potentially useful line of research for leftist academics. My quick bit of Googling also threw up a piece by American psychologists which found a correlation between the growth of income disparity in the U.S. and “a marked drop in life satisfaction and happiness.” It also lead to a paper called “Inequality and Happiness: A Survey”, in which the authors reviewed “the papers that estimate or examine the relationship between inequality and self-reported happiness” and found that “inequality reduces happiness in Western societies,” at least, though “the evidence for non-Western societies is more mixed and less reliable”.

This note about how income inequality may depress people’s happiness in some parts of the world but not in others seems to recur elsewhere too. “in the Western world, [..] we found a strong negative relationship between income inequality and happiness, even after controlling for wealth,” wrote Berg and Veenhoven, but “in Eastern Europe the picture is quite different: after controlling for wealth, there is a slight positive relationship between income inequality and wealth. The same applied for Asia and Latin America”. They actually seem to end up concluding that “for the average person the benefits of income inequality seem to somewhat outweigh the downsides,” which is not a helpful finding if you’re an advocate of increased equality. As the authors point out, however, that conclusion concerns inequality on a national, rather than on a more viscerally visible regional or local scale – and it’s about the average person.

The latter is important because, as another paper by Tomi Ovaska and Ryo Takashima concludes (just judging on the abstract, mind you), there can be great inequalities in happiness that are hidden by such an average, and such “inequalities of well-being” are highly correlated with “inequalities in individual incomes and quality of health, and the level of institutional qualities”. Another article by John Ifcher and Homa Zarghamee about 26 countries, judging on the abstract, also found that inequalities in well-being within a country (which might undermine the interpretative value of the country’s average result), decreases as economic growth increases. Results of research by Néstor Gandelman and Rafael Porzecanski, meanwhile, were on the one hand “in line with earlier studies that found only a modest correlation between income and happiness” overall — but did find that greater income inequality within a country leads to greater inequality in happiness as well.

All in all, it seems that “the very exercise of measuring and classifying happiness,” which this post so criticizes, might have more to offer than the kind of whitewashing of a hegemonic Northern perspective this post seems to make it out to be. In fact, not to be too critical, but I’m thinking that the post would have benefited from a somewhat greater curiosity about what happiness researchers have already said themselves about the questions it raises. The post asks a series of questions starting with: “What are these happiness statistics fundamentally about? What does it mean to measure happiness? Happiness how [..]?” — but I feel like I’ve read pieces from and about happiness research that queried and discussed all these questions quite diligently, as you’d expect in a relatively new and growing discipline.

For example, the post specifically raises the question of how Finland can come out near the top, arguing that “Clearly these studies are not accounting for the experiences of all the people who regrettably [..] suffer from alcoholism, depression or violent behavior” in the country. But is that really all that clear? The post goes as far as saying that those who deviate from the “neat national averages” in “the pre-existing standardized parameters” are “erased from view” and “rendered insignificant and non-existent.” But as the above shows, a bit of Googling at least appears to reveal that happiness researchers have in fact questioned the problems concerning findings about averages, and the substantial divergences from the average that exist within countries, quite extensively.