BW #8: Happiness

This week’s topic: Happiness

March 20th was the vernal equinox in the northern hemisphere and the autumnal equinox in the southern hemisphere.

But March 20th also marked another important day, the International Day of Happiness (aka “World Happiness Day”). The idea is that people should take steps to improve their satisfaction and happiness — and to spread such satisfaction and happiness to others around the world, as well.

The creator of the International Day of Happiness, Jayme Illien, talks about “Happiness economics,” in which we measure the success of government policies not by gross national product (GNP) or gross domestic product (GDP), but rather by people’s aggregate happiness. That raises the question of how you measure people’s happiness, and there’s definitely an element of utopianism here — but I’m not sure if it’s such a bad idea to be optimizing for happiness, rather than material wealth.

After all, we know that the richest people aren’t necessarily the happiest — and vice versa. I’ve listened to some (not enough!) eposides of the “Happiness Lab” podcast with Dr. Laurie Santos, and it’s clear that there are plenty of very happy people who aren’t in the top 1% of earners. Similarly, we all know wealthy people who are far from happy.

It turns out that some researchers have been trying to measure happiness. Moreover, on World Happiness Day, those reearchers release an annual report listing the happiest (and unhappiest) countries in the world. The report for 2023 includes data taken through 2022, and compares countries’ happiness levels, along with a number of other factors.

Data and questions

This week, we’ll be looking at the data from this year’s world happiness report, trying to recreate some of the numbers that the researchers came up with, as well as ask some of our own questions.

The full world happiness report is at

https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2023/

and the specific data that we’ll be looking at comes from the “data for table 2.1,” at:

https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2023/DataForTable2.1WHR2023.xls

Note that this is not the same as the “data for figure 2.1.” I can assure you that my happiness level would have been a bit higher if they hadn’t used figure 2.1 and table 2.1 in the same document, and then labeled the only data files in that way!

Here are the questions we’re going to ask:

• Get the data file DataForTable2.1WHR2023, and turn it into a data frame.
• The main measure in the World Happiness Report is known as "life ladder," where people are asked where they currently are, on a scale from 1 to 10 — where 10 is the happiest possible life. According to this measure in 2022, which 10 countries are happiest?