Have We Become Less Happy Over the Past Decade?
Technology. Politics. Economy. Society. A lot has changed since 2008. Populism is on the rise — and worries about climate change, widening income gap, privacy, human rights (amongst a score of other issues) continue to persist. How have these dynamic trends impacted our perception of personal happiness? I use data from the World Happiness Reports for a quick exploratory analysis.
On the International Day of Happiness (20th March, 2019), the UN released an updated version of its annual World Happiness report. I’ve been wanting to explore some large, macro-trends related to life satisfaction for a while now, so thought this might be the perfect opportunity to analyze 10 years’ worth of data on our accounts of our happiness. (For those interested in understanding how happiness is measured, I provide a brief overview along with relevant links towards the end of this post).
Regardless of our own personal views or experiences, it is hard to argue that our world has experienced a sea-change across multiple domains. The global economic recession of 2008 significantly eroded our trust in institutions — yet, the election of a charismatic, African-American President in the United States brought a message of hope to many. A sentiment that was in some ways short-lived. More recently, we have witnessed a resurgence of right-wing populist political movements across the U.S., South America and much of Europe. At the same time, much of the Middle East is embroiled in conflict, and Islamophobia-driven terrorism is on the rise. Of course, not to forget the looming worries about the impact of social media on democracy, or the dire warnings about climate change and global warming.
Faced with all this, how have we adjusted our own perceptions of individual well-being and happiness? Are we as a society, less happy now than we were back in 2008?
Short answer — not really. The world’s average happiness score in 2008 was 5.4. In 2018, it was 5.5. It even looks like we may have become marginally happier — but given that happiness is measured on a scale of 1 to 10, the average trend, so to speak, really doesn’t say much at all.
So instead, let’s adopt a different approach. First, are there certain countries that have tangibly moved up or down the happiness scale? Looking at the two maps below, a few things immediately stand out. North America, Australia/NZ and Western Europe generally seem happier throughout the past decade. Asia, on the other hand, is a little bit of a mixed bag. China and Pakistan have become a little happier since 2008 (though not as much as North American/Western European countries), but India and Afghanistan have visibly dropped lower on the happiness scale. Much of African and Middle-Eastern residents continue to experience a happiness score lower than the world average — possibly reflective of the various socio-economic and political challenges in those regions. South America has mostly improved — with the exception of Venezuela (for obvious reasons), and Brazil (perhaps the Bolsonaro effect and the rise of far-right populism?) Either way, it’s clear that things have changed — and a country-level analysis reveals a lot more than world averages.
Next, I wanted to identify how happiness has trended each year, for the past 10 years for some of the happiest countries. I decided to examine the 10 countries that had the highest aggregate scores for happiness over the past decade. This approach of subsetting the data immediately reveals a gradual drop in happiness scores for most countries.
The U.S. has experienced a steady decline — and surprisingly enough, so has Canada (save for the brief uptick in 2013). The UK bucks expectations — though scores declined for the better part of the last decade, they seem to have bottomed out in 2015, and have steeply climbed back up over the past three years. It will be particularly interesting to see how Brexit negotiations develop over this year, and how that impacts British citizens’ perceptions of their well-being.
These happiness scores are telling, but do very little to shed light on the underlying factors. In other words, what is causing people across these relatively happy countries to to feel happier/sadder than they did ten years ago? I did some digging into this dataset, and plotted trends across some socio-political variables. Here are some key takeaways from this exercise:
Confidence in national governments mostly declined for the better part of the last decade, and continues to be on shaky grounds for a number of these countries.
After a peak in 2009, American citizens have for the better part, lost confidence in the federal government. 2017 saw a slight resurgence — potentially reflecting a Pro-Trump sentiment from certain sections of the population — but dropped back down last year. With the primaries in full swing this year, this will be a variable to keep an eye on in 2019. To the north of the border, Canadians were feeling pretty bleak about their government in 2014, but saw their faith restored with the election of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party in 2015. The Liberals’ honeymoon seems to have been fairly short-lived, with 2018 scores being the lowest since the elections. Canada has a federal election coming up this year, which is likely to have an impact on citizens’ perceptions of their government. Across the ocean, the U.K. government has certainly been experiencing a trust deficit following Brexit — but no steep drops yet. I suspect the story might be entirely different if we were to ask British citizens to rate their feelings towards their government today.
While the perception of corruption (within bureaucracy) seems to have dropped (or stayed low) for most of the happiest countries, the U.S., Mexico and Germany seem to be headed in the opposite direction.
This trend is not as surprising given that these countries had a relatively high perception of corruption even in 2008. While Germans possibly felt that corruption was being dealt with after 2012 (possibly because of the president Christian Wulff resigning from his position), in 2018, that trend seems to have been slightly reversed. While it is too early to tell what that portends for the government, it is interesting to note that this slight uptick aligns with Transparency International’s warnings as well. Similarly, Enrique Peña Nieto’s election as the President in 2012 had a tangible impact on lowering corruption perception in Mexico — however, the government’s inability to tackle corruption and the growing disenchantment with Peña Nieto led to an even steeper increase in the number of Mexicans feeling that their systems were highly corrupt. This seems to have somewhat tapered off in 2018 — the election of a populist, left-leaning new president seems to not have had as immediate an impact on public perception of corruption.
Happier countries seem to have become less generous over the past decade. This trend universally applies to all of the countries in the chart below. Canada’s drop in these scores over the past decade is particularly surprising (and concerning). As a nation that is often known internationally for its…well, “niceness” and kindness, this result is unfortunately echoed by other reports as well. The U.S. too, has experienced a decline, a trend that is perhaps at odds with the rise of philanthrocapitalism amongst the top 1%. Does this potentially suggest that large, very publicly-known, philanthropic initiatives are unintentionally crowding out regular charitable giving? While the current dataset doesn’t go deeper, I will be exploring this hypothesis in a future post.
While most of the happiest countries tend to have a relatively high degree of social support (>0.85), certain countries such as the U.S., Canada and the U.K. seem to have experienced a marginal, but gradual decline in scores over the past decade. The U.S. in particular, from a high of 0.96 in the recession year has dropped about 6 points to 0.9 in 2018. From a social cohesion and a public policy perspective, this is concerning. It potentially highlights deeper ruptures in the fabric of American society — fractures that perhaps, are getting worse with current political scenario.
Social support is important. It may be tempting to relegate it to a lower level of priority in the basket of issues we are dealing with. Yet, when determining which factor has the highest level of impact on our happiness, social support wields the largest influence. GDP per capita has a positive and significant impact too — but, the magnitude is quite small compared to social support. Another significant predictor of happiness is a variable termed “positive affect” — this captures an aggregated score of responses to various questions aimed at determining how often respondents experienced positive emotions. Countries such as Mexico, had high levels of positive affect, which just serves to show that our individual positive experiences can sometimes be rather independent of the broader political and economic trends.
Perceptions of corruption, on the other end, have a negative impact on happiness, perhaps because it makes us feel that opportunities are stacked against us, and reduces access to avenues that enable upward mobility. This weighs on our happiness, and outlook towards the future.
I began this post by asking a rather simple question — have we become less happy over the past decade? The answer to that, as it turns out, is “depends”. Depends on who you ask — on average, a Chinese citizen will likely state that yes, life seems to have gotten better, but an average American will likely tell us that life seems to have become a little bit bleaker over the past 10 years. I suspect that these trends radically differ along demographic and socio-economic categories as well. For a future post, I will likely be digging through survey data that tracks these trends over time, across different countries. But until then, I will refer to my nerdy regression (above), and leave you with something to noodle on: money makes us happy — just not as much as social support.
This dataset is from the World Happiness Report. Major thanks to the funders of these reports for making this fabulous dataset freely available. Happiness scores are aggregated in response to the following question: “Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?” For additional methodology details, please refer to the statistical appendix. All visualizations are through Tableau — regression analysis and visualization in R and Exploratory.
