What You Think You Know about Happiness and Why You’re Wrong

Some number-crunching to accompany Bill McKibben’s <a href="http://motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/03/reversal_of_fortune.html" target="new">Reversal of Fortune</a> in the <a href="/toc/2007/03/index.html" target="new">March/April 2007 issue</a> of <i>Mother Jones</i>.

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You might think that richer countries are happier. But there’s actually no correlation beyond about $10,000 per capita income. See how each country compares on this scatter chart. One surprise is that Vietnam, with a per capita income of less than $5,000, has been just as happy as France, with a per capita income of about $22,000. The happiest country surveyed was Puerto Rico. The unhappiest were Indonesia, the Ukraine, and Zimbabwe. Within Europe, the happiest countries were Denmark, Ireland, and Iceland.

All that data comes from the World Values Survey. You can play around with the dataset online. (Great for a class project, kids.) And definitely check out the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World and the other graphs that cluster cultural values by nation, all to be found by clicking the “Findings” tab. See how life satisfaction correlates with democracy and other ideologies. North America, for example, is more traditional than Northern Europe. Relatively speaking, the miserable former Soviet bloc focuses more on survival than on self-expression.

For those with a longer attention span, it’s worth reading Beyond Money, the most authoritative scholarly summary; 300 academic studies on happiness packed into 25 pages. To see how the “satisfaction index” has changed over your lifetime, check out the graph on page three. Though the GDP has tripled, the average person is no more contented with life now than the average person was in 1950.

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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