The World Happiness Report is primarily based on the Gallup World Poll, and the annual report is scored over the previous three years – that is to say, the ranking and scoring for any given year, say the 2021 rankings, would be based on the scores collected over three years, from 2018 to 2020.

The first was published back in April 2012, almost a year after the UN General Assembly adopted resolution 65/309 Happiness: Towards a Holistic Approach to Development, which, among other things, invited member states to “pursue the elaboration of additional measures that better capture the importance of the pursuit of happiness and wellbeing in development with a view to guiding their public policies”.

Beyond being a way for the citizenry to check in and see how they fare against other nations on the happiness index, its ultimate aim is to assist and guide policymakers towards policy that positively enhances the lives of citizens.

Of the 149 countries ranked, “the typical annual sample for each country is 1,000 people. If a country had surveys in each year, then the sample size would be 3,000 people.” While it has six key variables on which world happiness is explained, it is also very much based on how participants evaluate their lives.

The six variables are: GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and an absence of corruption.

As the report states: “Note that we do not construct our happiness measure in each country using these six factors – the scores are instead based on individuals’ own assessments of their subjective wellbeing, as indicated by their survey responses in the Gallup World Poll.

“Rather, we use the six variables to help us to understand the sources of variations in happiness among countries and over time. We also show how measures of experienced wellbeing, especially positive emotions, supplement life circumstances and the social environments in supporting high life evaluations.”

According to the 2020 report: “The regions with the highest average evaluations are the Northern American plus Australasian region, Western Europe and the Latin America Caribbean region… Sub-Saharan Africa has a significantly lower level of life evaluations than any other region, particularly before 2016. Its level has remained fairly stable since, though with some decrease in 2013 and then a recovery until 2018.”

A happiness report dipped in the pandemic

This year (2021) marks the ninth World Happiness Report. Laid out and explained in detail over 212 pages, it largely (and understandably) focuses on the impact of Covid on the happiness of the ranked countries.

With all the challenges brought on by the pandemic and lockdowns, including being able to only survey two-thirds of the usual countries (95 out of 149) and mostly by phone rather than in person, it is, as per the authors, likely to be less precise than previous reports. And to make up for this, they have balanced their findings with those of the previous 2020 report, which was based on 2017 to 2019 scores: “The resulting rankings exclude the many countries without 2020 surveys, and the smaller sample sizes, compared to the three-year averages usually used, increase their imprecision. We then place these rankings beside those based on data for 2017-2019, before Covid-19 struck, and also present our usual ranking figure based on the three-year average of life evaluations 2018-2020.”

The authors also report that the “change from 2017-2019 to 2020 varied considerably among countries, but not enough to change rankings in any significant fashion materially. The same countries remain at the top,” they explain, noting that there had been “surprising resilience in how people rate their lives overall”.

Their observation is that “this shows that Covid-19 has led to only modest changes in the overall rankings, reflecting both the global nature of the pandemic and a widely shared resilience in the face of it.”

Unsurprisingly, one of the key areas affected by the pandemic was mental health. They found that mental healthcare needs have increased, and people who felt less connected felt a sense of decreased happiness. While on the positive side, “the pandemic has shone a light on mental health as never before”.

South Africa’s bottom-third position

At the top of the 2020 happiness rankings, from first to 10th: Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand, Austria and Luxembourg. The same countries occupy the 2021 top 10 list, with some changing positions; Netherlands is now happier than Norway, and Luxembourg is now happier than New Zealand and Austria.

And much further down the list in the last third, moving up six places from 109 in 2020 to 103 in 2021, South Africa is now happier than some previously happier countries such as Bangladesh, Gabon, Cambodia, Turkey, Algeria and Pakistan.

South Africa’s overall score also increased from 4,814 in the 2020 report to 4,956 in 2021. In the bigger picture, this still puts South Africa in the bottom third. While the document does not specifically explain the reason for the increase in the country’s three-year average score, it does make some caveats for its process in a challenging year: “How do we square this substantial resiliency at the population level with evidence everywhere of lives and livelihoods torn asunder?

“First, it is important to note that some population subgroups hardest hit by the pandemic are not included in most surveys. For example, surveys usually exclude those living in elder care, hospitals, prisons, and most of those living on the streets and in refugee camps. These are populations that were already worse off and have been most affected by Covid-19. Second, the shift from face-to-face interviews to cellphone surveys has tended to alter the characteristics of the surveyed population in ways that are hard to adjust for by usual weighting methods.”

Due to the three-year format of the report, the potential for imprecision in the 2021 report, as well as the criteria that the team behind the report use to gauge happiness, this writer would argue that the 2020 report, which looks at 2017-2019, is perhaps more relevant for South Africa, and it contains more relevant lessons in its areas of focus – the social environment, urban life and the natural environment.

Because even with the raging pandemic, it is the support structures around citizens that inform how events will affect their life evaluations. And while the impact of Covid globally and locally cannot be underestimated, within the South African context it is yet another tragedy to add on to crime, unemployment, corruption, poverty and other tragedies that remain a part of South African life.

As Rebecca Davis so eloquently put it in her recent column (Please don’t talk to me about Mandela right now): “As South Africans, we don’t get to be playful, or grumpy, or stingy, or sexy, or any one of 100 other options for national stereotypes. We get to be RESILIENT. A nation of resilient little battlers, constantly picking ourselves up and dusting ourselves off after national tragedy or government scandal… What, actually, is the point of a government?”

South Africans. Why so sad?

To quote once more from Davis’s column: “This is a tinderbox of a state, teetering on the edge from years of corrupt misrule. This is things well and truly falling the fuck apart. This is a government that has failed its people again, and again, and again.”

Considering the World Happiness Report’s emphasis on institutions and the quality of government would be one way to explain a lot about South Africa’s ranking and the life evaluations offered to the Gallup World Poll by participating citizens. Highlighting the importance of a strong social environment, the report also points out the risky conditions that lead to a lower evaluation of happiness and wellbeing.

Although these are measured primarily from a survey done on a smaller pool of only 35 European countries, they arguably apply to South Africa as well. These are “discrimination, ill-health, unemployment, low income, loss of family support (through separation, divorce or spousal death), or lack of perceived night-time safety, for respondents with relatively low trust in other people and in public institutions”.

In countries with lower rankings, the report also argues that there tends to be a higher level of wellbeing inequality, and that it plays a larger role in lower life evaluations than income inequality. According to the Gallup World Poll, “respondents are asked to rate their life on a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being the worst possible life and 10 being the best possible life”. Wellbeing inequality is then measured by comparing the variance between the responses of the top 20% and bottom 20% life evaluation scores.

“We found that wellbeing inequality, as measured by the standard deviation of the distributions of individual life evaluations, was lowest in Western Europe, Northern America and Oceania, and South Asia, and greatest in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East and North Africa,” states the report.

The Wintry Nordics. What have they got to be so happy about?

“We find that the most prominent explanations include factors related to the quality of institutions, such as reliable and extensive welfare benefits, low corruption, and well-functioning democracy and state institutions. Furthermore, Nordic citizens experience a high sense of autonomy and freedom, as well as high levels of social trust towards each other, which play an important role in determining life satisfaction,” the report explains.

It adds that “quality of government is another key explanation often provided for the high life satisfaction of Nordic countries, because in comparisons of institutional quality, the Nordic countries occupy the top spots along with countries such as New Zealand and Switzerland”.

But what of the dreary weather?

“First, it is true that the Nordic countries do not have the pleasant tropical weather that popular images often associate with happiness; rather, the Nordic winter tends to be long, dark and cold. It is true that people account for changes in weather in their evaluations of life satisfaction, with too hot, too cold and too rainy weather decreasing life satisfaction. However, effect sizes for changes in weather tend to be small, and are complicated by people’s expectations and seasonal patterns… based on current evidence, weather probably doesn’t play a major role in increasing or decreasing Nordic happiness.”

The report also addresses the issue of suicide rates in those countries, and states that even though the Nordic countries such as Finland were reported to have high suicide rates in the 1970s and 1980s, these have declined sharply and that these days the reported suicide rates in the Nordic countries are close to the European average, and are comparable to those of France, Germany and the US.

It goes on to address other theories about Nordic happiness, such as those that might point to smaller populations and ethnic homogeneity: “Smaller countries on average are not more homogenous than larger countries. In fact, today the Nordic countries are actually quite heterogeneous, with some 19% of the population of Sweden being born outside the country.”

And for those who might quote studies that suggest that ethnic diversity is associated with reduced trust in a community, the report draws on other studies to argue that “it is not ethnic diversity per se, but rather ethnic residential segregation that undermines trust. Corroborating this, other research has demonstrated that the economic inequality between ethnic groups, rather than cultural or linguistic barriers, seems to explain this effect of ethnic diversification leading to less public goods.”

Further searching for the root of what the report calls “Nordic exceptionalism”, and looking beyond government and institutions, it also proposes that “one potential root cause for the Nordic model thus could be the fact that the Nordic countries didn’t have the deep class divides and economic inequality of most other countries at the beginning of the 20th century”, and ultimately concludes that “there seems to be no secret sauce specific to Nordic happiness that is unavailable to others. There is rather a more general recipe for creating highly satisfied citizens: Ensure that state institutions are of high quality, non-corrupt, able to deliver what they promise, and generous in taking care of citizens in various adversities.” DM/ML