Reference Reviews

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf

December 2008

Title: Happy Planet Index
Producer: New Economics Foundations (nef)
Cost: free
URL: http://www.happyplanetindex.org/
Reviewed: November–December, 2008

THE CONTEXT

As I mentioned in my last review, the former king of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, made a statement in the mid-1970s (when he was in his late teens!) that reverberated through the entire world. He made other kings/queens, prime ministers, senators and politicians salivate to make their policy and wit so memorable. The king said that the achievement of nations should be measured by Gross National Happiness (instead of Gross National Product, which was then the most often used measure for the wealth of nations, and remained so, just changing the measure to the slightly different Gross Domestic Product).

Interestingly, this seems to have given an impetus to do much more intense research on measuring individual, national, regional and universal happiness. The mother of all happiness information resources is Ruut Veenhoven’s World Database of Happiness for historical data series, going back to 1946, and covering six decades. It has, however, two limitations. One is that data has been collected regularly from residents of only two dozen countries. The other is that the data is not available is a readily accessible format for downloading and further processing. You would need the SPSS or the STATA software (expensive, and not learnable in your lunch break) to work with the valuable data. For social scientists this is not a problem, of course, and is justified by the fact that it is not a USA Today type of quick list, but an exceptionally well-documented perfect resource for research, but is beyond the scope of ready-reference. Scraping the screen is not a good option for downloading data.

However, there are many positive sides of this outstanding database that has information about the largest variety of variables, information at various scales and angles, such as survey questions about the levels of hedonism and contentment, and the multiple scales questions about overall happiness. The historical data is of high value, and allows one to see the growth of happiness in, say, Brazil, Argentina, New Zealand or Hungary but some the scope of the countries with data for several years is limited. The list of 156 countries in the country frame does not mean that there would be happiness data for each country, but there are some data for 135 countries. For example, there is no data for Bhutan, which is somewhat ironic.

It is a huge advantage that the full text of the updated edition of the original book about the "Happiness of Nations" is available for downloading in PDF format. It is a perfect background for the topic from the most authentic specialist, who provides answers to obvious critical questions, such as the validity of self-reports. The page that is the most appropriate and most directly useful for ready reference, is the page about the mean happiness scores of nations, for 95 countries based on surveys made between 1995 and 2005 and the related, comparative league tables. Be forewarned that the pages are part of a complex frame system, so they can’t be just printed or saved. The best approach for using the table mentioned above is going online or save it as a PDF file for a cheat sheet.

The Economist Intelligence Unit created an excellent table, called Worldwide quality of life index, 2005. It calculated the index on a scale from 1 to 10, and listed it along with the Gross Domestic Product per capita, and the rank difference between the two. The table is the last page of the PDF file. It is sorted by the Quality of Life index, so may not be easy to find the country/countries you are interested in, but it is worth looking for it not only to see the rank positions of specific countries, but also to learn the significant differences between their rank in terms of social quality of life and economic wealth. I was particularly pleased at how much higher the rank position of Sri Lanka (Rank #43 vs #91) and Vietnam (Rank #61 vs #97) are than their economic position because these were two countries where happiness was palpable for me from the moment of landing. It is no surprise to see the opposite contrast, when the rank of the country in terms of social quality of life is way below its economic rank, such as in all the largest oil producing countries in the Middle East. The scope of the list is limited to 111 countries, and it would be interesting to see an update of the list. I was especially pleased to see listed the nine quality of life factors (although not the weighting in the algorithm), such as family life, gender equality, political freedom –exactly some of the elements that make the super-rich oil-producing Middle East countries (but not Colombia or Venezuela of the OPEC group) mediocre in terms of social quality of life.

The Human Development Index (HDI), which I reviewed earlier this year, does a good job of quantifying and incorporating many variables that play important parts in the subjective well-being of individuals , such as wealth, health, access to education, gender parity in family life and politics), but it does not include a direct variable about the subjective well-being, happiness life satisfaction of individuals. The good news is that soon after I lamented in my recent review of the Measure of America database about merging the 2007 and 2008 editions of the Human Development Report and thus the skipping of the 2008 release of the Human Development Index, UNDP, the compiler and publisher of the HDR, announced the unplanned release of HDI 2008 (without a HDR 2008) just before the holidays. It is a laudable and smart decision.

As for the U.S., its pollsters and media conglomerates did not jump on the opportunity and the need for systematically surveying and reporting the emotional well-being of the nation until very recently. While we could learn more details than the average citizen would need about the meteorology and the status of the Dow Jones, Nikei and Hong Kong stock indexes every day, there was and still is not a regularly published index about the happiness of the nation. Gallup started to do daily surveys since 2008, but only snippets are released occasionally with little background information about the methodology of measuring the emotional well-being in the country. Apparently, it is going to change with the expanded Gallup Daily News on the Web launched on September 10. The mood barometer got worse day by day, and every day seem to have set a new record for national unhappiness. On December 17, Gallup reported that “Jobless, Bailout News Trigger Unhappiest Day So Far in 2008” and more specifically, that “the percentage of Americans experiencing a lot of happiness or enjoyment without a lot of stress or worry fell to a new low of 35%” .By international measures this is an extremely low ratio, and the drop from the very upbeat survey results released exactly a year ago, the current ratio is quite depressing. I still would prefer to see the Gallup National Well-Being Index than the indexes of the stock exchanges on the evening news.

THE CONTENT

After the unusually long CONTEXT part, I don’t think that much explanation is needed for the importance of the Happy Planet Index –as a benchmark for the regular worldwide emotional check-up, and as a model for a state by state report, not for a daily index. The Happy Planet Index was created in 2006 by the British think tank the New Economics Foundation (nef). This simple statement requires qualifiers. The acronym is spelled in lower case. The title of the report may be a cataloger’s nightmare, because it features the scribbled prefix “un” in front of the adjective. The charity describes itself as a think-and-do tank, as it wants politicians to get the message of the foundation’s report, and use its findings in formulating policy.

The British government is the prime target as Great Britain is ranked as 108th by the Happy Planet Index among the 178 countries for which the HPI was calculated. But leaders of the entire world, especially of the most developed world should do something to make the planet happy.

Once you read (or at least scan through) this 50+ page very smart document and get to the very last page of this PDF document (or jump to it through this link), the most essential part of the splendid resource for ready reference - featuring a simple but frightening rank list about the level of (un)happiness of the planet - you will realize that this report is like an early natural disaster warning signal, especially for the most developed, most affluent, most consumption-focused, most waste-producing countries which rank worse than Great Britain.

Canada is ranked 111th, France as 129th, Australia as 139th, the U.S. as 150th and Russia as 172nd –not the last because Estonia, Ukraine the Democratic republic of Congo, Burundi, Swaziland and Zimbabwe are still behind the largest member of the former USSR. (The document incorrectly says that Great Britain “is bettered by countries such as ... the U.S. ...“ True, the rank list looks absurd, with countries ranked on the top that you may not have ever heard of (such as Vanuatu, Saint Lucia, Antigua or have heard only in a negative context, such as Colombia) because of the “what bleeds –leads” policy of the commercial TV systems and tabloids. True, the weight given to one of the three components of the HPI, the ecological footprint (the measure for the use of environmental resources, land, ocean, plants for feeding and especially for absorbing carbon dioxide) may be too high vis a vis the other two components, and it does not take into account as a direct factor the per capita income of nations where indeed seven of the now G8 Group leads, still the document is a very loud wake-up call, because the clock is ticking, and our ecological footprint already exceeds the planet’s biocapacity.

The index is calculated by multiplying the life expectancy in the nation by its life satisfaction index and dividing it by the nation’s footprint. Life expectancy at birth is a classic measure in every country’s basic statistics, and is readily available the HDI index of the UNDP’s Human Development Reports. Footprint and biocapacity data is available for 150 countries (144 in 2006) by the Global Footprint Network, and for the rest it was calculated based on carbon dioxide emissions and some other variables. Getting data for the life satisfaction component was the most difficult. It required four resources, including the World Database of Happiness discussed in the CONTEXT part, the World Health Survey, the Latinobarometer and the Afrobarometer. For some countries additional sources had to be also used –and all these required significant consolidation and normalization. The report includes an exemplary chapter about the Data Sources and Estimation Procedures, another about Data Limitations, and a third one about the details of Calculating the HPI. These documents are easy to read and understand even for non-statisticians, and are very realistic and sincere about the problems and limitations.

THE SOFTWARE

The report may be downloaded as a PDF document and consulted offline, browsing and searching (through the free Adobe Reader’s ever more appealing version 9). Online browsing is more convenient , especially through the two interactive maps, one for the world, and one for Europe. On each one the desired country can be picked through hovering over the map, which shows the name of the country along with its HPI value. Pickin a country through the pull-down menu shows an information sheet for Europe, and another for the World. The two have different structure, so the European map and list are not just subsets of the Global Happy Planet Index.

There are some informative charts that are not available in the online version, and they could be important, such as the ranking of countries by HPI values within major regions (or former political affiliations, like the countries labeled as former communist countries).

All the rank lists are much better on screen because they are using shades of colors to identify at a glance to which strata a country belongs to within the three measurement components. If you can print them only on a monochrome printer this smart visualization is lost, and even some of the numbers are hard to read.

The rank list is sorted only by the composite HPI value. In print there is also a list by regions. It would be important to offer in the online version to sort the rank list by country to facilitate quick look up which is essential for ready reference. It would be also very useful to sort also by Life Satisfaction and Economy Footprint values. These are so important that adding the extra pages to the static PDF versions is also recommended. Alternatively, allowing the users to download in Excel format the last page which has the data for all the countries in a single page with color shades.

There is also a module to calculate your personal HPI, and nearly 130,000 users already did so. There are 42 questions, mostly related to physical health. I am not too crazy about it, but if it is a way to lure users to browse around the site, it is OK.

The idea of the former King really inspired a large community of social science researchers around the world to incorporate various measures to gauge the happiness level of nations along with other social and/or economic indicators (sometimes even without the overbearing traditional economic measures ) . There is an International GNH Conference dedicated to the original idea of measuring Gross National Happiness. Just last month the fourth meeting took place in Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan. The keynote address by the prime minister provides a good overview about the most important recent developments and the future. Things have come full circle when on the Coronation Day of the new King of Bhutan he vowed for the implementation and refinements of specific indicators for the GNH index, and the Royal Government has adopted the GNH index in its program just as I was working on this review.

Bhutan has reached an impressively high rank of #13 among 178 countries, and an even more impressive split rank of #8-12 in the Life Satisfaction component of the composite Happy Planet Index –in the company of Brunei, Canada, Ireland and Luxembourg. The next logical step will be the compiling of a world list by GNH index, and also using it along with other social measures to gauge the human development and status through a revised HDI and HPI that incorporates the GNH index. This would be not only practical but would also honor the idea of the former King who abdicated two years ago and called for free elections and changing the hereditary monarchy to a constitutional one. With this in mind, I wish you a Happy New Year with higher GNH.