A Chinese cookbook for happiness and success. Nadine Koerner
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they are, as well as how "satisfied" they are. The results are then combined to arrive at a measure of their "subjective well-being," a term generally considered synonymous with happiness as mentioned above. However, because of these two different ways of measuring happiness, uncertainty arises when it comes to determining which countries in the world are happiest. There is support for the validity of both measures. For example, former president of the American Psychological Association, Dr. Martin Seligman, uses the "happiness only" measure in his book Authentic Happiness.[23] In contrast, Dr. Ron Inglehart, founding president of World Values Surveys, considers the "subjective well-being" measure a more accurate indicator of personal happiness.[24]
According to the WVS results 2004, the world’s happiest countries were Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador and Puerto Rico. When it comes to subjective well-being, results were slightly different as number one was Puerto Rico, second Mexico, third Denmark, forth Colombia and fifth Ireland. Nigeria made it to rank 19, El Salvador rank 12, Venezuela rank 13. China took rank 45, out of 79 examined countries. And according to the World Values Survey in 2007, Denmark was the planet’s happiest country.[25]
To gauge the relative happiness of residents in 148 countries in 2012, the Gallup organization called roughly 1,000 people in each country and asked about their experiences the day before. The poll was released in December 2012 and showed that people in seven developing Latin American nations are among the most likely to report happiness and feeling positive about life. At the top of the poll were Panama and Paraguay, with 85 % of the respondents reporting positive emotions. China, the United States, Chile, Sweden and Switzerland took the 33rd place.[26]
Looking at shorter-term bliss, Gallup also asked citizens to talk about their happiness at a specific point in time ("yesterday") rather than life as a whole. From this measurement, Ireland comes in as the happiest nation followed by Thailand, New Zealand, Canada and Iceland. The United States comes in sixth. The least happy countries based on feelings at a moment in time are Togo, Congo and Lithuania, Gallup found. When it comes to the trend of hope on economy, the Gallup barometer of Global hope and happiness showed that for the three year trend, China is the top 5 country in the world, with 32% of net hope on world economy.[27]
At the end of 2012, a Gallup poll of 37 countries declared China to be the 10th-happiest country in the world, but in April 2012 a United Nations report put China at 70th.[28]
Besides those three above mentioned measurements, one of the most widely used measurements is The Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) which is a global cognitive assessment of life satisfaction designed by Dr. Ed Diener and colleagues in 1985. The SWLS requires a person to use a seven-item scale to state her agreement or disagreement (1 = strongly disagree, 4 = neither agree nor disagree, 7 = strongly agree) with five statements about one's life.[29]
The Gross National Happiness Index, proposed in 1972 by Bhutan's former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuk, has been praised and criticized. At that time most countries used the Gross Domestic Product to measure a country's economic success, which was equated with personal well-being and implied happiness. In spite of this Wangchuk thought that social and environmental factors, among others, should be measured as well. He assumed that happiness would be a goal of all people and that it should be the government's responsibility to ensure that a country's conditions are such that a person living there can attain happiness. Until 1999 Gross National Happiness (GNH) was mainly an idea that was practiced in Bhutan. In 1999 however, the Center for Bhutan studies was established and began to spread the idea internationally. In 2004, Bhutan held an international seminar on GNH and since then the use of GNH in combination with GDP to measure a nation's social and economic progress has increased internationally in recent years. However, measuring the Gross National Happiness Index is a complex process as it includes 33 indicators that come from nine different fields like health, education, living standard, community vitality and psychological well-being, which are all equally weighted.
The GNH has received a lot of criticism, for example that its indicators are relatively subjective. Critics claim that because of the subjectivity of those indicators it would be too difficult to get an accurate quantitative measurement on happiness. They also say that due to the subjectivity, governments may be able to change GNH results in a way that best suits their interests.[30] China, like many other developed nations, ranks relatively low on the Forbes' gross national happiness (GNH) index, though its GDP is now the second largest in the world.[31] This however is due its low scores on environmental quality and not necessarily due to psychological well-being.
Another index frequently used to measure happiness is the ‘Happy Planet Index’ (HPI), introduced in 2006, which includes 178 countries in its surveys. However, the name of this index might be misleading and the HPI actually cannot be used as a true happiness measure, as it does not understand itself as such. The HPI measures the extent to which countries deliver long, happy, sustainable lives for the people that live in them. The Index uses global data on life expectancy, experienced well-being and Ecological Footprint to calculate this. Much criticism of the index has been due to commentators falsely understanding it to be a measure of happiness, when it is in fact a measure of the ecological efficiency of supporting well-being.[32]
As shown above, the results of happiness research and related rankings of countries into a global hierarchy of happiness are difficult to compare due to different standards of measuring and data compilation. Additionally, SWB values might change depending on the type of scales used, the order of items, the time frame of the questions, and current mood at the time of measurement and other situational factors.
Because global self-report measures may be subject to distortions, including traditional artifacts such as impression management, researchers should assess the impact of these artifacts when possible. Other problems include sampling methods and sample sizes. The World Value Survey in 2007 took for example, 1003 samples in Andorra, a country with a tiny population, but only 1959 samples in China, a country with a population of 1,35 billion people.
Measuring success
While many indices exist to measure happiness, there is no ‘official’ measure for success of people in different countries worldwide. This might be due to the fact, that there is no single, globally accepted definition of success and the perception of success is diverse: professional standing, educational accomplishments, athletic achievement, celebrity status, humanitarian impact, political clout, financial freedom, personal fulfillment, etc.
Few countries have a ‘national notion’ of success, one is Singapore. In Singapore, success is measured by the 5 Cs, a Singaporean acronym for the symbols of material success: car, cash, credit card, and condominium and club membership. In Hong Kong property is the measure of success and makes or breaks a person's fortune – and often happiness.
But there are many examples where it is very questionable if success can be measured in such ways:
Steve Jobs: He dropped out of college after one semester and returned soda bottles for money to buy food. Later on he got fired from a company he helped to found, but, by Forbes estimates, he was worth 8.3 billion USD at the time of his death.
Thomas Edison: He spent a total of three months in public school before being found to be ‘unsuitable for public school’. Thomas Edison was home schooled, never attended college, bounced from one job to another, often being fired.However at the time of his death in 1931 held more than 1,093 patents and had founded four companies including General Electric, which is still in existence today.
Mother Teresa: She never went to medical school, never married and never had children. At some points in her life she begged for food and yet she won a Nobel Peace Prize and established 610 Missions in 123 countries before her death in 1997.
Surprisingly or not, according to the June 2013 Monitor on Psychology, ‘Subjective well-being'