Happiness of low expectations
Happiness, at least its rankings among countries, is not all that it's cracked up to be.
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| You think this group of people is happy because they are doing something they love with people they love? Is it because the guy on the right telling the world's best knock-knock joke? No, no. It must be because they are super stoked that they have great child care benefits and the highest taxes in an OECD country. Yup. No other possible reason. //photo by Helena Lopes |
We love rankings. We rank universities and hold it up like a Bible in a small town in the South when we seek out universities for our children, despite staggering evidence that these rankings are highly misleading. I'm guilty of looking it up once in a while just to see where schools line up, even knowing the idiocy of it all. We rank the Top 500 songs of all time as if this was some objective list. I'm guilty of listening to every single one of them. Every Sunday, college football fans refresh ESPN incessantly, waiting for the new AP and Coaches Poll rankings to be released. I am certainly guilty of this, even after week 1, where it means absolutely nothing. We rank the top American Presidents of all time, which are maybe the dumbest rankings ever done, with many ranking the most bloodthirsty, warmongering, racists highly every time. Okay, I'm not guilty of ever having seriously perused these rankings, though I just made myself curious.
Rankings are fine, as long as it's understood what the rankings actually mean and what the methodologies are. Unfortunately, most people don't consider methodologies. They just see a number and think there was a whole lot of science and math behind it. That's just not typically the case.
There is one ranking making the political rounds that make no sense whatsoever.
Pretty much by definition, there is absolutely no way this can be in any way objective or even close to being more accurate than a blindfolded person throwing a dart in a typhoon. It's not like we can measure happiness like we would distance or volume. I have never heard of a happiness unit. But if there was, we'd call it the Pharrell Williams Coefficient, measured by how much your body moves to the song.
Maybe one day, neuroscience will be able to tell us exactly how happy we are at any given time (which still does not necessarily relate it to politics). Until then, all we've got is the PWC.
It's just not possible to even figure out the happiness level of even one person, let alone an entire country, and to compare it to other countries with vastly differing cultures, no less.
Even objective rankings of numbers can be highly misleading like GDP per capita figures. Did you know GDP includes government expenditures? So if a government spends a trillion dollars moving rocks between A and B, they can shoot to the top of GDP rankings, second only to the United States, whose government spends two trillion dollars moving rocks between A and B. Is that really a sign of wealth or a stable economy? Of course not. It's more of a sign of mental instability in the capital.
None of this happiness index even remotely passes the sniff test. And that makes me mad enough to singlehandedly bring the entire US happiness index rank down two positions.
Of course, this means politicians like Bernie Sanders take it as evidence their political ideologies are superior to others.
A slew of Nordic countries routinely ranks highly, with Finland taking the top spot for three years in a row.
Ignoring that these Nordic countries actually don't correlate with his plans very well (for example, Nordic countries tax everyone at a high rate regardless of income for their public services, not just the rich, and they enjoy quite a deregulated business environment with strong private property protections, something Sanders isn't exactly known for), touting these reports of happiness, even if we consider them accurate, bring a slew of problems.
First, or rather second, since Sanders failed to even properly line up his plans with a country that has actually implemented them, he would have to show that happiness has a tight correlative relationship with his political plans. It doesn't even do this. He fails to explain how Switzerland, with much fewer social programs than the Nordic countries with far lower rates of taxation, is also consistently ranked very high on the list. He also doesn't like to point to France and Spain, two countries with very generous benefits programs Sanders would like to implement (and I would argue, closer to his overall plan), because they rank pretty consistently lower than the United States on these lists. If we go by the "socialist" label, Zimbabwe, one of the more hardcore socialist countries, even if it's not specifically Bernie's flavor of socialism, ranked 3rd from last in the 2020 report.
Third, even if we assume he passed the previous tests, he needs to show a causal relationship between his policies and higher happiness rankings. It is not clear that he ever does. It is a difficult task to do, since the metric for happiness, like the subjective theory of value, varies wildly from person to person. But he is the one making the claim, not me. The burden of proof is on him, and just like his economic policies relying on the labor theory of value, a theory easily disproven, his claims that x or y must be the reason for happiness, just doesn't pass muster. Further, he doesn't bother to isolate any variables of cultures, other governing policies, climate, geography, etc. What is the effect of a huge array of art in a given area on happiness? What is the effect of a culture's appreciation of said art? What is the effect of parenting styles? What is the effect of heterogeneity of cultures? What is the effect of sunny or overcast climates? None of these are addressed, though to his credit, at least admitted Denmark is a largely homogenized culture.
So what is the methodology for this World Happiness Report ranking?
It's quite simple. Actually...it's crazy simple. They take the Gallup World Poll survey and take the answers to one question on a sliding scale. One question asks a person to think of a ladder with rungs on a scale from starving African child to Elton John. Okay, okay. I'm just kidding. The question is actually far more ambiguous. It asks the person to think of the ladder from 0 to 10. It's up to you to decide what zero (worst possible life) actually represents and what ten (best possible life) actually represents. The question asks the person to rank their own life on that scale. There are sub-bars in the actual ranking that shows social support and GDP and other factors, but these are just possible indicators to explain the ranking. None of those factors are used in the actual rankings themselves.
That's it.
Yeah, this entire ranking is based on ONE poll question. The more reliable rankings rely on a multitude of factors. Cato's Human Freedom Index rankings utilize 76 indicators across several broad categories, all more objective than asking a survey question, to compile their rankings. Even the problematic US News and World Report's college rankings utilize several factors for their rankings. Nope. The World Happiness Report decided one question on a single topic is good enough for a metric objectively more subjective and complex than freedom rankings and colleges.
Perhaps ironically, this makes it pretty easy to see what factors or biases can skew the conclusions of this index.
And it all starts to make sense.
Hypothetically, if this poll was taken in rural North Korea (which it wasn't), one can easily imagine for the first question, a score of zero would be torture in a concentration camp and a score of ten would be not starving. Then the scorecard would come back as tens all around since they would be afraid that this is actually a Kim Jong Un ploy to weed out the dissenters. Compare this to someone in the United States where a score of zero would represent somewhere along the lines of hungry before going to a food bank and ten would be Brad Pitt, pre-divorce (you pick which one). Would anyone argue that in this case, a ten in North Korea is really better than a two in the United States?
Herein lies the key.
Expectations can vary wildly across different countries and cultures. In the United States, everybody without Asian parents are told that they could be anyone they want to be when they grow up. Little Johnny, it doesn't matter that your mom is 4'-11" and your dad is 5'-6". You can be LeBron James if you just put your mind to it! The culture in the United States, for better or for worse, pushes encouragement to insane levels, driving some to narcissism. How many times have you heard that all you need is a college degree, any degree, and the entire world is opened up to you? A hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt later, they find out that their sociology degree from Evergreen State College entitles them to an entry-level Starbucks barista position, but only in Seattle, Portland, Berkeley, or San Francisco.
Finnish professor Jukke Savolainen wrote an excellent piece for Slate (not exactly a ring wing source), illustrating the Finnish and Nordic cultures. He zeroes in on the reason why their ranking finished first, despite the typical Finnish melancholy outward appearance. A Finnish cabinet member remarked after being introduced as representing the happiest country on earth, "If that's true, I'd hate to see the other nations." Savolainen talked about the culture of lagom, a Nordic mindset of having just the right amount. It's a frame of mind that is instilled into the people there that if you have life's necessities, that is good enough.
So back to that sliding scale, it looks like for Nordic countries, the high end of the expectations scale maxes out at around middle management at the local Initech office, debugging software for the Y2K switch under the watchful eye of Bill Lumbergh. Yeeeah.
This is like trying to say getting Cs in class when expecting Cs is better than getting As when expecting A+s.
Now, I certainly think America probably goes too far in setting expectations. It seems to create the one-upmanship of suburbia lifestyles where a person has to drive the fanciest car on the block, walk into the biggest house on the block, the most Honor roll stickers on the back of their deluxe trim minivan. That's not a particularly healthy lifestyle. At the same time, going through life thinking that as long as your heart is beating, have a roof over your head, and are able to drink at home naked (be honest, how quickly did you click that link?), that's about as good as you can expect out of life is, in a word, depressing.
Say what you want about either of those cultural differences, but the happiness rankings are definitely not due to how high you can drive taxes and how many social programs can be force-fed to everyone to grow a nice big foie gras before it bursts open, spilling toxins throughout the body. To make policy decisions off this ranking, or even to use it to bolster your argument, is utterly insane.
So if you want to be happy, apparently all you have to do is take a look at your life right now and decide that's what you've always wanted. Bham! Instant nirvana! Suck on that, Buddha!
Or you can stop reading these stupid happiness reports and prove that in this case, ignorance really is bliss.
