A new study tries to unpick what makes people happy and sad. Mental illness is a better predictor of misery than poverty is
The Economist; 2017
KEEPING voters happy is the lifeblood of any ambitious politician’s career. So they may want to pay attention to a report, released to mark “World Happiness Day” on March 20th, from the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a UN body, and the Ernesto Illy Foundation, a non-profit. In addition to the usual rankings of countries from the happiest (Norway, for the usual reasons) to the least (Central African Republic, close to a failed state), the study also tries to unpick what makes people gleeful and—more unusually—what makes them miserable. Reducing suffering, the authors argue, may be more important than boosting pleasure, because improving the life of an already-happy person probably yields a smaller gain in total welfare than freeing someone from misery does. They analysed large-scale surveys from four countries—Britain, Australia, America, Indonesia—to identify which factors are most closely associated with the population of the least happy decile of the sample.
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