GDP “measures everything,” quipped Bobby Kennedy, the American president’s brother, “except that which makes life worthwhile.” To better track living standards, the Human Development Index (HDI) ranks countries by life expectancy, education and income per person. The latest report on July 24th put Norway on top (as it has been since 2000). America is fifth. Drought-ridden Niger and war-torn Congo are lowest.
How does this compare to day-to-day well-being? We plotted HDI against self-reported data on happiness from Gallup, an international polling company. It asks if people had been “laughing or smiling a lot, feeling well-rested, and being treated with respect” in the previous day. By this measure Paraguay has been the happiest place on Earth for the past three years. Syria, locked in civil war, is lowest.
Strikingly, there is little correlation between the two measures (the correlation coefficient is 0.25, which is a very weak association). Lithuania has a happiness score of 53%. For its level of development one might expect happiness closer to 70%. Meanwhile Mali and Rwanda are much happier than their living standards might imply.
More interesting still, development is generally clustered by region. But in terms of happiness, it runs the gamut from gloomy to chirpy within the same income group. And regional stereotypes reveal themselves: people in far eastern Europe and central Asia are dour despite having reasonable living standards, while those in Latin America at the same level of development tend to be cheery—around 20 basis points higher.
In the chart above, rolling over the data points reveals information; clicking on regions in the key focuses on certain areas. This unveils interesting outliers. People in Myanmar are as happy as those in Hong Kong who have much higher living standards. Depressingly, Haitians are unlike their Caribbean neighbors and resemble sub-Saharan African countries.
