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WASHINGTON: The world is becoming a happier place, a study published
in this month’s Perspectives of Psychological Science revealed.
Data from national surveys conducted between
1981 and 2006, which were collated by researchers at the University
of Michigan Institute for Social Research, showed that happiness was
on the rise in 40 out of 52 countries.
And in a separate happiness ranking, which
looked at 97 countries representing 90 percent of the world’s
population, only 20 countries were listed as unhappy.
University of Michigan political scientist
Ronald Inglehart, the lead author of the study, said the up swell in
happiness came as a surprise to researchers, who have long felt it
was “almost impossible to raise an entire country’s happiness
level.”
“There has been a lot of research over the
last 25 years indicating that happiness is very stable,” Inglehart
told Agence France-Presse.
“There may be short-term changes but it
returns to a set point,” he said.
But the study, which was part of the ongoing
World Values Surveys, appeared to disprove that theory.
For the past 26 years, World Values Surveys have
asked more than 350,000 people how happy they are.
Among the 52 countries and territories for which
long-term comparative data were available, India, Ireland, Mexico,
Puerto Rico and South Korea showed steep up ticks in happiness last
year, while the happiness quotient in 14 other countries, including
nine in Europe, also rose, but less sharply.
Those 14 countries are Argentina, Canada, China,
Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands,
Poland, South Africa, Spain and Sweden.
“Economic growth, democratization and
tolerance are strongly linked with happiness,” said Inglehart.
“We have had an unusual set of circumstances
in the last 25 years where all of these things that are quite
important and have strong linkages to happiness have been going in a
favorable direction. So most countries have rising levels of
happiness,” he told Agence France-Presse.
“Democracies are significantly happier than
non-democratic countries; prosperous countries tend to be happier
than poor countries; and tolerant people—even intolerant people
living in a tolerant society—tend to be happier.”
In the United States, Switzerland and Norway,
happiness was stagnant, but all three countries were still in the
top 20 of the 97 nations that were ranked in order of happiness
levels.
Denmark, where 52 percent of the population said
they were very happy, was at the top of that list and Zimbabwe at
the bottom, with only around four percent of Zimbabweans saying they
were happy.
“Zimbabwe has everything going wrong. It’s
desperately poor, AIDS is high, people are being killed and the
political system is repressive. It’s not a great place to live
these days and it’s deeply unhappy,” said Inglehart.
-- AFP
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