Talk:World Happiness Report

Untitled
2021 results are out let’s put them — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1700:12D0:D700:0:0:0:28 (talk) 08:00, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

Criticism as a balancing view
The page appear to be one sides, I created a Criticism section to provide some balance, please help improve it by adding more information.

From an econometric perspective, some statisticians argue the statistical methodology mentioned in the first world happiness report using 9 domains is unreliable.

Other argue that the Word Happiness Report model uses a limited subset of indicators used by other models and does not use an Index function like peer econometric models such as Gross National Well-being Index 2005, Sustainable Society Index of 2008, OECD Better Life Index of 2011, and Bhutan Gross National Happiness Index of 2012, and Social Progress Index of 2013.

Other critics points out that Happiness Surveys are contradictory in Ranking because of the varying methodologies. They also argue that the surveys are inherently flawed. "No matter how carefully parsed the data may be, a survey based on unreliable answers isn't worth a lot." For instance, "A 2012 Gallup survey on happiest countries had a completely different list, with Panama first, followed by Paraguay, El Salvador, and Venezuela" They also cite a Pew survey of 43 countries in 2014 (which excluded most of Europe) had Mexico, Israel and Venezuela finishing first, second and third"

Other point out that the ranking results is counter intuitive when it come to some dimensions, for "instance if rate of suicide is used as a metric for measuring unhappiness, (the opposite of happiness), then quite some of the countries which are ranked among the top 20 happiest countries in the world will also feature among the top 20 with the highest suicide rates in the world."

From a philosophical perspective, critics argue that measuring of happiness of a grouping of people is misleading because happiness is an individual matter. They state "the Dalai Lama, Ghandi, Tolstoy and several others, happiness is an individual choice that is independent of the society, its structures and enabling or dis-enabling conditions and not something to be measured using variables that can only capture a nation’s well-being. This means therefore that one cannot really talk of a happy or unhappy nation, but of happy or unhappy individuals."

50.235.144.34 (talk)
 * The correlation between this ranking and the usage of anti-depressants is also worth noting. This is basically the rating of anti-depressant consumption per capita.91.78.79.65 (talk) 03:40, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

Seems to be serious issues with the data
This doesn't actually align with the Happiness Report at all. It seems like a bunch of politically motivated edits are playing shenanigans? For instance, in the 2015 report the US was ranked #15 with 7.119. Debuskjt (talk)
 * Okay. I've updated the list for 2016 and there's already been constant nationalistic editting going on to move countries around. This happened in the 2015 list as well. This page needs to be monitored pretty closely for bad edits. Debuskjt (talk) 17:19, 17 March 2016 (UTC)
 * How are Puerto Rico, Brazil and Mexico above the United Kingdom when the UK scores higher in every category?? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.154.231.3 (talk) 12:08, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
 * As a person born and raised here in Denmark, I am often asked about this topic. Our high consumption of anti-depressants is well documented (appx. 250000 people), and despite this fact, we are certainly not at the bottom of suicide statistics. Add to that a dysfunctional mental healthcare system, and you may begin to realize how these reports are out alignment with reality and do not deserve mention without adequate facts questioning them. I too believe these reports are a form of propaganda more than science. JoaCHIP (talk) 13:25, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

I agree, I think someone need to add such information with supporting sources in the criticism section 50.235.144.34 (talk)

Are the sources of this ranking really serious?
I doubt that the people in Saudi Arabia are really happy with their live, especially the women.--141.19.228.15 (talk) 18:36, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

The Czech Republic is at place 31 AND 39, that can't be right — Preceding unsigned comment added by SFKNL (talk • contribs) 18:51, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

I think this is a valid point, you can find supporting statement and sources and add them in the criticism section, but please be respectful to other cultures 50.235.144.34 (talk)

Rankings seem outdated
I don't see Bhutan at No. 8, and the date says 2013. It needs to be updated. --Rsrikanth05 (talk) 12:06, 25 November 2015 (UTC)


 * The rankings do not correspond to those found in the citation given before the rankings. HGilbert (talk) 16:20, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Is this really a measure of "happiness"?
I am not entirely sure myself here, but I feel the first paragraph ("The World Happiness Report is a measure of happiness (...)") is misleading. Sure, the report calls itself "The World Happiness Report", but it doesn't actually investigate if any individual in any of these nations are happy.

Instead, it measures things like GDP, average life expectancy, and other things that can be reasonably expected to have some correlation with happiness. Now, if this correlation was simple and obvious, there wouldn't be a problem: It's reasonable to say a study measures "temperature", even if what was really measured was the level of expansion of the mercury within the thermometers. These thermometers have been calibrated, and we know that, excepting some freakish conditions, certain levels of expansion correlates accurately with temperature.

Correlation itself doesn't have to be incredibly accurate, but then the mechanism needs to be well-known. You can, for example, measure crime by counting the number of police reports. This may be an imperfect measure of crime, but the connection between crime and crime report is obvious: when an individual crime is performed, there is a chance (different depending on the circumstances) that it will be reported. More reports means more crimes. The number of reports is only a measure of crime to the extent that this is true.

Now, I haven't read the "happiness" report, and perhaps it features some impressive, recent research that shows unambiguously that their unique combination of factors and weights always consistently correlates with some other more objective measure of happiness (such as interviews, the results of which are as close as we can get to a definition of happiness at the moment). But I really doubt this. I can perfectly well imagine a country with a huge GDP, long life expectancy and minuscule amounts of corruption, whose inhabitants are on the whole sad, lonely and miserable. I can also imagine primitive tribal societies with no economic society to speak of where people regularly die early of preventable diseases, but where people live happy and fulfilling lives. I'm not trying to make some contrarian point here, I'm just saying happiness research is really difficult and complicated, and is far from "solved".

I feel it's like calling a measure of GDP "a measure of crime". Sure, they probably correlate strongly, but a measure of GDP is is not "a measure of crime". Come to think of it, the "happiness" report in question is probably just a good a measure of crime as it is of happiness.

So what is it a measure of? "Well-being", "life-quality" or something like that, I guess. In fact it reminds me specifically of the HDI, whose introductory paragraph is much more accurate: The HDI "is a composite statistic of life expectancy, education, and income per capita indicators, which are used to rank countries into four tiers of human development." You know what? I'm just going to use that as a template and edit this article :) Thanks for your attention. Ornilnas (talk) 01:43, 5 April 2016 (UTC)
 * The major difference is in fact that it does survey actual people in these countries, making it significantly different than HDI. There is a section in the article that talks about this and the report is linked from the article. Debuskjt (talk) 23:09, 7 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Wow, you're right; looking at the FAQ, the GDP and life expectancy measures aren't even used to calculate the score. They are just used to "explain" the original scores, which are entirely based on interviews. I think this should be made explicit in the article. To me, in the article as it stands now it looks like the scores in the list are calculated from weighted measures of GDP etc. It mentions the World Gallup, but it doesn't mention that the questions used are such as "Do you find meaning in your life?", and not "What is your yearly income?". Ornilnas (talk) 22:10, 8 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Yes this measure makes no sense. "Social Support" factor is upside down.  "Freedom to make life choices" doesn't seem to include taxes into its factoring or the ability of a person to think against the norm for that country.  "GDP" section should be adjusted to show a net amount, not per population ... in fact sheer population or some sort of pop growth or immigration rate would better indicate how much people actually want to be there.96.58.130.108 (talk) 04:12, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

I have no reason to doubt its findings. For example, South Korea ranks abysmally low on happiness for a developed country and it also has the highest suicide rate in the OECD. Seems to correlate. – Illegitimate Barrister (talk • contribs), 10:32, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

Data seem inconsistent
There is something wrong with data like this:

|data-sort-value="-0.401"| -0.401
 * data-sort-value="1.4417843819"|
 * data-sort-value="1.1637449265"|
 * data-sort-value="0.7950401306"|
 * data-sort-value="0.5794125795"|
 * data-sort-value="0.3617095649"|
 * data-sort-value="0.4445321858"|

Some data-sort-value values do match the Percentage bar values, but some do not.

This can also be seen if you sort by a specific column; the length of the bars do not reflect the sorting.

The above example is just an example; there are several similar rows were data do not match.

What is the proper relationship between the data-sort-value and the Percentage bar value for each column? Where is that defined?

And is the table created automatically by a script? In that case, what script?

--Jhertel (talk) 00:33, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
 * thank you for informing us about this issue. However, the problem is not the table itself, it's the vandals who have won the edit war. The current table was first created by me using a custom script, and if you verify the first version you will notice that everything is ok with it. Unfortunately, vandals love playing with tables and there aren't enough users to fight them. I will repost the table from the (22:12, 23 March 2016‎ Deleted14857) revision, since it is just an updated version of mine.Faltur (talk) 21:57, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your reply and for restoring the values. Now the four rightmost columns make sense when it comes to the relationship between data-sort-value and Percentage bar: data-sort-value = 0.01 * Percentage bar consistently.
 * I still can't find full sense in the first two columns, though. It seems like data-sort-value = 0.02 * Percentage bar for those. Why 0.02? Shouldn't the Percentage bar values be adjusted, so the maximum value is 100? No bars reach full width; 95.27732134% is the largest value of any of the columns.
 * Is it possible to post the script source code here, or link to it? If possible also with the original data taken from the sources. Then it would be obvious how the table is created, it can be verified for correctness, and it can be rerun by others when new data comes out. My aim is solely to have the highest quality and to make it open and verifiable by everyone. --Jhertel (talk) 03:21, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I forgot to explain where things came from. The input values were took from this table (Figure2.2), which is cited at the reference [7] in the article. GDP Percapita and Social Support columns contain values that range from 0.0 to 1.x. That's why I set their max value to 2.0 (and 1.0 for the other four rightmost columns). The CalcPercentage function receives the input value, multiplies it by 100, and divides the result by MAX_VALUE. The javascript is available here (although I don't remember if it will work well by just copying and pasting the table without further modifications). Feel free to make any corrections, improvements, or suggestions. Faltur (talk) 12:48, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Thank you so much for all the information. It's all very informative and useful. --Jhertel (talk) 23:42, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Relevance of mention of disputed territories
To this edit, wrote "→‎International rankings: There's absolutely no significance to whether or not Israel is recognized by a few of its enemies, not when [discussing] the World Happiness Report." While I do partly see the point, I undid that edit and would like to explain.

First of all, the edit was inconsequential; several other countries follow the same principle in the list, including Palestine. (Also, 31 countries not recognizing Israel, including almost the entire arabic world, is really not "a few", but that's less relevant here.) Either all such comments and markings of disputed territory should be removed from this list or all should stay.

Secondly, I do not agree that the notes about recognition should be removed. I don't see any problems in mentioning the disputes, as we are simply mentioning open facts. And if we do not mention them, we will step on the toes of people of those countries that do not recognize these few countries by mentioning the countries as were they fully recognized. And we are not really stepping on anyone's toes by mentioning countries with limited recognition or disputed territories, because the lacks of recognition are simple, indisputable, and open facts. We are not saying that these countries shouldn't be recognized, only that some countries do in fact not recognize them. So by mentioning this, we are simply being more precise, but still absolutely neutral. And I believe that is what Wikipedia should strive for. So while the mentioning of disputed territory might not relate to happiness (but it also might, by indicating current and often long-lasting unsolved conflict with others which theoretically could influence happiness), I do find it more correct and precise to include the notes about recognition.

Also, mentioning it can inspire the reader to learn more about international politics, which I see as very positive. But that's a minor additional reason.

--Jhertel (talk) 00:22, 22 December 2016 (UTC)

2017 Sweden/Australia rank
The report says this on the matter: "...Australia and Sweden tied for the 9th position, having the same 2014-2016 score to three decimals." which is why I thought it appropriate for the table to match. The Excel document lists them both as 7.28399991989135 so it's not due to rounding.  Jolly  Ω   Janner  03:37, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
 * This is the journalist who says that ("Australia and Sweden tied for the 9th position"), rather than the report, which doesn't say that anywhere. Additionally, the journalist counted "three decimals" only, as they say explicitly. As for the excel document, could you give a link for this document? I can't find it.
 * On the other hand, the report, p. 20, ranks Sweden 10th. Additionally, the report p. 23 states explicitly: "Australia 9th, Sweden 10th". HOTmag (talk) 07:45, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for pointing out the report. Here is the spreadsheet. I would suggest keeping Sweden at 10th place. It doesn't seem to be alphabetical since Vietnam is before Nigeria.  Jolly  Ω   Janner  07:58, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the link. Please notice, that for every country, its first three decimals, are always followed by either "999...", or by "000...", so it seems like their Excel calculator has a bug or something. HOTmag (talk) 11:00, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

2017 Norway rank
India heading the list? Someone made a practical joke, it methinks. :( Change it back, please... — Preceding unsigned comment added by ენარჯილისი (talk • contribs) 17:20, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Where do data come from?
I was surprised to see that the healthy life expectancy of Central African Republic is higher than that of Italy, so I tried to examine the data of the 2018 World Happiness Report and I have found the Chapter 2: Online Data, in which there are the same "happiness scores", but in the column Explained by:Generosity" of the Figure 2.2 there are the same values of the column "Freedom to make life choices" in the Wikipedia's article. In addition, the column Freedom to make life choices" shows the same values of Wikipedia's column Healthy life expectancy. Where do these data come from?--Cats&#39; photos (talk) 06:05, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

Missing countries
Several countries (e.g., Cuba, North Korea) seem to be missing from the list. Can we discuss why they were not included in the report? Peter Chastain  [¡hablá!]  15:18, 9 January 2019 (UTC)


 * I expect it's because those countries have not given Gallup the access or information needed to independently (accurately) conduct their polling. 130.160.149.7 (talk) 02:06, 10 November 2020 (UTC)

2020 happyness report
Hello. Please, could You somebody add report from 2020 year? Thank You. Cassa342 (talk) 16:47, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

North korea's own happiness test
It seems that the people's republic of korea (north korea) made his own version of country happinesse on the year 2011.The chart made by an unknown study/ies, someone believe it was the korean comunist party itself. Perhaps we cant see further than the 7 given in the national tv channel from NK, we can see that they analized 203 countries ( because usa is the last one in this position): more positions above show south korea(position number 152) and the top 5; 5venezuela, 4 iran, 3 cuba, 2 north korea and the first position is the people's republic of china Ericulture (talk) 00:02, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

Show The Results!!!
Other Wikipedia articles ranking countries by a metric show the results. Why doesn't this one? If it's a copyright issue, then the report is private information and this article should be removed from Wikipedia IMMEDIATELY. If the report doesn't actually contain a simple and complete listing, then it's not what most people want (who in their right minds wants to spend hours reading the political views of someone they've never heard of at the UN?), and there's a BIG opportunity for someone to deliver what people actually do want - a ranking! — Preceding unsigned comment added by New Thought (talk • contribs) 10:07, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Colonially weird!
According to my friends from Afghanistan. This system may be promoting colonialism in Europe once more.

--Nitheesh Yevan (talk) 07:59, 26 July 2021 (UTC) Nitheesh Yevan

Content overkill
No good reason to include years of reports. Links to, sure, but include here?!? 70.109.133.47 (talk) 16:33, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Early results
I don't know why the pre-2016 results aren't here. So, top 12 for 2012 [https://s3.amazonaws.com/happiness-report/2012/World_Happiness_Report_2012.pdf. Chap2. Page 31 of 170.]

Denmark, Finland, Norway, Netherlands,

Canada, Switzerland, Sweden, New Zealand,

Australia, Ireland, United States, Costa Rica.

MBG02 (talk) 09:46, 29 July 2022 (UTC)

Responsible Technology for meaningful innovation
Greater empowerment of the masses resulting in adverse content and impacting social wellbeing, thereby leading to meaningless innovation and impact of mental and physical health 83.137.6.181 (talk) 14:54, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

Make sections collapse
Make sections collapse like every other Wikipedia article, instead of one loooooong article 2600:8801:280C:5900:5129:8EE1:F108:D30C (talk) 06:43, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

2023 map
Red and green are quite likely the worst possible choice for a colourmap given that Daltonism is a thing. Consider using literally anything else, but minimal effort gives much better results. 88.129.167.223 (talk) 00:30, 23 May 2023 (UTC)

The section "Legitimacy": Question:
The section quotes a researcher who makes a distinction between happiness and satisfaction, but without explaining what the difference - between both those psycological phenomena - really is, and without explaining if it has any meaning - for statistical purposes. Wouldn't it be correct to say, that the happier we are - the more satisfactory we are, and vice versa: the more satisfactory we are - the happier we are, statistically speaking? I'm not quite sure what the excat difference between happiness and satisfactory is, but I suspect that even if such a difference really exists (I doubt if it does but let's assume it does), it would have no statistical impact on the data of the report - if the happiness index was replaced by the satisfaction index.

Note it's only a question, without any intention to doubt the authenticity (or the legitimacy) of the quote. HOTmag (talk) 10:02, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

Youth index
Hello, we should also mention the youth happiness index by country. 80.246.133.33 (talk) 10:20, 5 May 2024 (UTC)