The United Nations World Happiness Report for 2018 came out in March. This is the fifth such report. The U.N. uses six metrics to measure happiness based upon data collected by the Gallup organization in population surveys. The six metrics:
"GDP per capita."
"Social support."
"Healthy life expectancy."
"Freedom to make life choices".
"Generosity".
"Perception of corruption".
The country-by-country rankings seem to me to have changed little over the years, which is good for the report's validity. If you had one country near the bottom one year and then near the top the next that would not be good for validity. More importantly, the relative rankings are very similar: The Scandinavian countries rank at the very top; the U.S. is right around the top ten percent; Russia around the top third; China around the middle (156 countries in 2018; 155 in 2017).
I remember being surprised at China's middling rank when I first saw this report, I believe the initial in 2012. What would you think the killer metric would be for China's ranking? Perception of corruption, right? That's all we hear! Zhongnanhai is extremely sensitive to the perception of corruption. They constantly purge leadership of the actually corrupt (e.g. Bo Xilai). Yet...In 2018 Chinese perceived their country to be significantly less corrupt than Americans perceived the U.S.!
I then thought, "Freedom to make life choices." One-party state, right? Right. Wrong. China ranks in the top 20% in freedom to make life choices!
"Ah, GDP per capita." That's a sneaky one because China is very prosperous but has so damn many capitas. It's GDP is HUGE but divided by 1.4 BILLION people! No. China's GDP per capita puts them in the 40-50 percentile.
So I was beat. I then went through every goddamned metric to see which one killed China.
"Generosity." (?) Generosity. Out of 156 countries China was 153rd in generosity! Generosity (it seems to me) should be highly correlated with "perception of corruption," no? I mean, those two seem to me to be two sides to the same coin, no? No. Fine. Chinese, be more generous in your corruption.
What got me onto the World Happiness Report was a trip to my Chinese restaurant yesterday. That was the point of looking up the World Happiness Report. I will come to that point in the next post.
