I don't know. The World Happiness Report relies on one simple question, which is easy to criticise but at least it applies a clear and consistent method. The paper referred to does not. It uses a special US dataset for states and a much smaller global dataset for every other country, then treats the results as if they measure the same thing. This setup almost guarantees that US states look unusually good. The authors present this as evidence, but it mostly reflects differences in survey design rather than real differences in wellbeing. In that sense the methodological problems here are more serious than the ones they point to in the World Happiness Report.
In case others are wondering what the one simple question is (called the Cantril Ladder):
“Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. Suppose we say that 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. If the top step is 10 and the bottom step is 0, on which step of the ladder do you feel you personally stand at the present time?”
Personally feels a little more convoluted than just asking "How happy are you, on a scale of 0-10?"
I'm not a psychology expert but from stuff I read I bet the reason they don't ask "How happy are you, on a scale of 0-10?" is they tried that and found the same person would give different answers from day to day and moment to moment based on what is going on this very minute.
I'd also bet that they found the above "convoluted" question was one that led to the same people giving more consistent answers from day to day and moment to moment.
Even if I'm wrong I hope you see this is a much thornier problem than just asking a question and assuming the answer tells us anything about the person taking the survey.
I have done survey methodology research and fully agree, almost assuredly when you see questions worded in a seemingly "convoluted" way like this, the reason is that there was exhaustive research that found this wording was the best balance of reliability and validity.
There is also a lot of value in a question that works well enough, that you ask consistently over long stretches of time (or long stretches of distance). Maybe it's not perfect, but the longitudinal data would be worthless if they updated the wording every single year.
Although I'm no survey expert, the thing I'd like to bring to everyone's attention is how easy it is to not take into account people that have a degree of numeric or math illiteracy... which I guess they are the main target demographic that is included by these questions (and I can also guess that they make a worryingly large part of the demographic, because our systems are rarely inclusive).
In my experience, having met people from multiple countries during the time I've been living abroad, what I have noticed is that — in this world filled with inequality — it is a privilege to be able to have a good grasp in scientific subjects. And, for lots of different factors, people have setbacks or trauma that make it difficult to learn a subject that is either boring or painful to them.
So, yes the questions are a bit convoluted, but they help paint a mental image for probably the majority with a thing that they may be closely familiar with: stairs... Plus, it probably helps statisticians get a better signal to noise out of the questions, too.
I agree – I'm sure social psychologists and psychometricians have been thinking about this since forever, probably since even the dawn of modern psychometrics. Cross-cultural and cross-language validity would likely be particularly problematic with something more detailed, especially once you get entangled with things like how anger is expressed and conceptualized, the role of positive outer expressions of affect like smiling, etc.
It's easy to overlook the importance in outlining a process for evaluating each rung in the ladder.
Adding this nuance to the question serves to invite deeper thought and avoid assigning a motivation-based rating (like when you give the Uber driver 5 stars when what you felt was actually just "satisfactory").
A more basic rating question can invite other kinds of influence, such as a motivation in how they'd like their life to be perceived rather than how they genuinely feel it to be.
In surveys with less nuance the data tends to correlate around the extremes.
Yep. There are some implicit cultural expectations around "best possible life" which vary from country to country, but it's not quite as much a "is the word in your local language we've rendered as happy closer in meaning to satisfied or ecstatic?" question, and it's also less about short term emotions on the day of the survey and much more about satisfaction with life opportunities, which is generally more relevant for international and longitudinal comparisons...
Happy have so many definition that I like the question better, it is much less ambiguous than "happy".
My happiness changes depending on many external factor and varies by hour and days, but the answer to the former question aren't going to change quite as often, would have probably provided the same answer over the entire year.
What an interesting question. It would seem intuitively that a population with a limited band of socioeconomic mobility must answer 10 and one with a wide band of mobility must answer 0. I wonder whether that is true.
I have to say, I don’t understand what ”for you” means in ”best/worst possible life for you”. At first I read it roughly as ”given the fundamental unchanging circumstances of your life, such as where and when you were born, who your parents are, and your basic health” but maybe they mean something like ”in your subjective perspective on what is good/bad”?
My thought as well, but the question is: does it matter for what the survey is trying to achieve?
Some people will interpret it one way, some a subtly different way, but is there a reason that people's interpretation changes over time in a way that is more rapid and more significant than the underlying question of how good their life is broadly? Probably not.
There may be cultural differences that make it tricky to do comparisons between cultures / countries, but it should give something useful when looking at the same culture / country over time.
Your question is likely to be interpreted as you asking the person's current MOOD hence different answers on different times are likely. While you are thinking of a less changing wider concept.
The social context is important too, there is a social stigma around admitting that you are not happy which will play into this question too.
I'm a Finn. I personally interpret that survey as Finland being the least unhappy place. There's a social safety net, health care is taken care of, you know your life won't get destroyed by the slightest misfortune, you get a good education for free, your surroundings are generally safe and well maintained, you feel safe & are fairly certain nothing bad will happen, there are people around you who share your values, life is good.
Things that for example the article author's favorite USA does not have. But of course a Murkin' can't accept that. I fully expect him to gripe that somehow the Corruption Perceptions Index is also somehow unfair to his favorite country too, and just cannot be right.
And maybe check what Finland is doing with its military and what happened around World War II before saying that USA pays "most of our defense".
What's really rich is Americans deciding they no longer like their self-assigned World Police role, and managing to blame their supposed allies for that. Never underestimate the quality of Russian psyops, I guess.
What Finland had during WW2 is not relevant to the value the US has provided all Western countries by making shipping lanes safe for the last 75 years.
These are America's choices. And it's America's choice whether to wield these in world-leading competitiveness or as ossified self-serving bureaucracy.
Other countries make other choices about where to do world-leading R&D (that Americans can take advantage of as lower prices). Chinese solar, for example.
Yes, and now they're starting to choose differently. Which is a shame, because shaming a country for acting in the worlds self-interest is a very strange thing to do.
I am yet to be convinced that 4000 data points are sufficient to extrapolate how happy 2.8B people are in the world. (India and China) Especially when it deals with a complex topic as happiness without taking any cultural differences into account.
People on HN tend to argue it’s sufficient data to be statistically significant, but I don’t see how.
One way to interpret this is not as the author's endorsement of the other report, but as a demonstration of how fragile these happiness rankings are to perturbations in methodology / definition.
Apropos to that: I wish the author had said more about critically evaluating tweaks in methodology and definition.
(For example, he cites Blanchflower and Bryson because he prefers positive affect as a measurement of happiness – but doesn't note that Blanchflower and Bryson pool data for 2008-2017, so in terms of rankings they may be measuring something meaningful but different.)
> I don't know. The World Happiness Report relies on one simple question, which is easy to criticise but at least it applies a clear and consistent method.
The simplicity is nice, but for the (probable) fact that suicide attempts/rates and emigration don't correspond... so lets not call it happiness.
The substack references Nilsson et al [1] in regards to criticisms of the Cantril Ladder. It's a pretty easy to read paper so I highly suggest just reading it.
> In that sense the methodological problems here are more serious than the ones they point to in the World Happiness Report.
It's a simple question, sure, but it's not clear that it's a very meaningful one, even if other approaches aren't necessarily any better. When I think of the word happiness, I don't exactly associate it with suicide or rarely smiling.
"Pick a random number between 1 and 10" is also a clear and consistent method, and also not particularly meaningful.
The point I took from the article is that we should stop paying attention to this meaningless metric. I didn't read it as a request to replace it with another metric.
I would like to rewrite it, replacing desires with hormones, since they are the drivers for desires, when young one could jump a wall, risking his/her life to see the one we desire, then in their fifties on a nude beach everybody looks and feels mundane.
The defining experience of our age seems to be biochemical hunger.
We're flooded with hormones that tell us to crave more, even when we already have more than we need.
We're starved for balance while stimuli multiply around us.
Our dopamine peaks and crashes without reason; our cortisol hums in the background like faulty wiring.
We live with a near-universal imbalance: the reign of thin hormones.
These thin hormones promise satisfaction but never deliver. They spike and vanish, leaving behind only the impulse to chase the next hit.
Philosophers once spoke of desires that change the self; today, our neurochemistry is being short-circuited before the self even enters the conversation.
A thick hormone is slower, steadier. It reshapes you in the process of living it—like the oxytocin that comes from trust, or the endorphins that build with persistence.
But thin hormones—those dopamine flickers from notifications, likes, and swipes—do nothing but reproduce themselves.
They deliver sensation without transformation, stimulation without growth.
Modern systems have perfected the art of hijacking our endocrine circuitry.
Social media fires the neurons of connection without the chemistry of friendship.
Porn delivers the hormonal spike of intimacy without the vulnerability that generates oxytocin.
Productivity apps grant the dopamine signature of accomplishment with nothing actually achieved.
We’ve built an economy not of meaning, but of molecules.
And none of it seems to be making us more alive.
Imagine that, the United States is attempting to pervert truth into utter and complete lies. It's almost as if this is the only brand the United States has left.
At this point in my life if I see something with United States looks good compared to the rest of the world I just immediately assume it is a lie. Because the United States is nothing but lies and greed anymore. We cannot even claim innovation as a central motivator anymore.
