Can money buy happiness?
This is an entry for Reddit’s DataViz Battle for the month of June 2019. See all plots and code here. Shout out to r/dataisbeautiful mods for preparing these battles every month!
Data
The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness. More than 150 countries are included every year and the results can be of great help when experts need to assess country’s progress and recognise areas where improvement is needed. Details about the report and the report itself can be found here.
The given datasets contained results from 2015, 2016 and 2017. The report assumes there are 7 factors contributing to country’s overall happiness:
- Economy (GDP per Capita),
- Family,
- Health (Life Expectancy),
- Freedom,
- Trust (Government Corruption),
- Generosity.
These are all numerical values representing the extent to which a certain factor contributed to the calculation of the Happiness Score compared to Dystopia aka the world unhappiest country, a hypothetical country where these factor values equal to the world’s lowest national averages for each of the mentioned six factors. This brings us to the 7th factor of the dataset - DystopiaResidual, which is the sum of Dystopia Happiness Score and the residual value/the value of unexplained components for each country.
Country’s overall happiness score can therefore be expressed with the following equation:
HappinessScore = Economy + Family + Health + Freedom + Trust + Generosity + DystopiaResidual.
How happy is happy?
First let’s get familiar with our data. Happiness Score is a numeric value ranging from 0 to 10, but what does it mean? How happy are the happiest/unhappiest countries? Which parts of the world have the highest score?
Let’s take a look at top 10 happiest and unhappiest countries from 2017:
Apparently, even the happiest countries (only) achieve about three quarters of absolute happiness, which, in this case, is represented by the score of 10. We can see 7 out of top 10 happiest countries are in Western Europe and 7 out of 10 top unhappiest countries come from Sub-Saharan Africa.
Putting these numbers on a map gives us a better view.
I will try to explain the results using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a five-tier model of human needs. According to Maslow, in order for motivation to occur at the next level, each level must be satisfied first.
Indeed, the highest happiness score was recorded in economically stable countries, where there are no war zones and people’s needs for safety and security are fulfilled, so they can feel love/belonging, gain self-esteem and achieve self-actualisation.
What makes us happy?
Let’s split the happiness score into factors and take a look at how each of the them contributes to region’s happiness.
The results suggest that money indeed plays a central role when it comes to happiness — together with health, economy seems to be one of the most important factors in most of the regions. Interestingly enough, if we were to investigate further, we would come across a famous study, where they found that Americans improve their emotional well-being by earning up to $75,000 per year. Beyond that, people may feel more accomplished, but there is no evidence of any emotional benefits. So this is where other factors enter the equation — family, health, freedom …
Another thing that is worth pointing out is the Dystopia Residual. Its value is noticeably higher in underdeveloped regions, which makes us think there are some factors the report did not take into account. Since the whole thing is released by the UN, we can assume it is influenced by Western indicators.
So … should I start packing?
See how your country ranks and which factors have the most impact on the overall score here.
Final thoughts
To answer the question from the title: we saw that economy plays an important role in country’s overall happiness score, so yes, in some way money does buy happiness, or at least some part of it.
However, if we consider some other metrics, our ranking can become very counterintuitive, which is also the reason the World Happiness Report is often subject to criticism. A good example is suicide rate, where we realise some of our happiest countries are also the countries with the highest suicide rates in the world, which raises the following question: Can nation’s happiness really be properly expressed using only a couple of factors?
