The field of happiness research has grown in recent years, but there is significant disagreement about how to measure happiness. Some scholars find people’s subjective assessments of their well-being to be unreliable, and they prefer objective indicators like economic and health data. The scholars behind the World Happiness Report said they tried to take both types of data into account.
In a chapter of the report on the distribution of happiness around the world, three economists ― John F. Helliwell, of the University of British Columbia; Haifang Huang of the University of Alberta; and Shun Wang of the Korea Development Institute ― argued against a widely held view that changes in people’s assessments of their lives are largely transitory. Under this view, people have a baseline level of contentment and rapidly adapt to changing circumstances.
The three economists noted that crises can prompt vastly different responses based on the underlying social fabric. In Greece, where the economy began to plummet in 2007, setting off a crisis in the eurozone that has resulted in three financial bailouts, widespread corruption and mistrust were associated with the diminishing sense of happiness over the past decade.
In contrast, trust and “social capital” are so high in Japan that scholars found, to their surprise, that happiness actually increased in Fukushima, which was devastated by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, because an outpouring of generosity and cooperation contributed to the community’s resilience and rebuilding.
“A crisis imposed on a weak institutional structure can actually further damage the quality of the supporting social fabric if the crisis triggers blame and strife rather than cooperation and repair,” the economists wrote. “On the other hand, economic crises and natural disasters can, if the underlying institutions are of sufficient quality, lead to improvements rather than damage to the social fabric.”
The report, which was released in Rome, included a chapter analyzing Pope Francis’ influential encyclical last year, called “Laudato Si’,” or “Praise Be to You,” which included a cutting assessment of a world in which continuous technological progress was accompanied by environmental degradation, growing anxieties about the future and persistent injustice and violence.
Jeffrey D. Sachs, a Columbia University economist who edited the report with Dr. Helliwell and Richard Layard of the London School of Economics, praised Pope Francis’ admonition against hedonism and consumerism.
He also forcefully rejected the notion that happiness and freedom ― especially when narrowly defined as economic liberty ― are interchangeable.
“The libertarian argument that economic freedom should be championed above all other values decisively fails the happiness test: There is no evidence that economic freedom per se is a major direct contributor of human well-being above and beyond what it might contribute towards per-capita income and employment,” Dr. Sachs wrote. “Individual freedom matters for happiness, but among many objectives and values, not to the exclusion of those other considerations.”
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