No. Let me follow up on yesterday’s post, with more data testing Nicholas Kristof‘s assertion that Costa Rica is the happiest nation in the world.
Unfortunately, the data that Kristof was citing weren’t actually measures of happiness. Instead, Kristof analyzed data on life satisfaction. As we saw, data from the same survey analyzing where respondents perceive themselves to stand on “the ladder of life,” led Costa Rica to fall from the number-one spot to equal 19th. But neither of these is actually a measure of “happiness.”
Fortunately, the good folks at the LatinBarometer just sent me the latest data from their 2008 poll. This poll does measure happiness. And it turns out that Costa Rica is not even the happiest country in Latin America. I’ve summarized these data in the graph below.
There are different ways of ranking these 18 nations. If we are looking at the proportion “very happy,” Costa Rica ranks seventh, behind Guatemala, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, and Honduras. Focusing on the proportion who are “quite happy” or “very happy,” Costa Rica pulls ahead of El Salvador and Honduras, but behind Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, and so ranks equal eighth of eighteen, equal with Panama. My preferred ordering is based on an ordered probit regression on country fixed effects, which puts Costa Rica fifth. (This is the ordering I used in the graph.)
Unfortunately for Kristof’s hypothesis, there’s no way to look at the available data and see Costa Rica as the happiest nation even in Latin America.
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Can you give any pointers on where to find out what an “ordered probit regression on country fixed effects” might be?
Tell us more about the origin of the data.
In Spanish language in Mexico if you ask someone “(son) usted feliz” or “(tu) estas feliz” OR “cuan feliz son usted” etc. only a very impolite Mexican or someone really peed off in the moment would return a less than positive reply.
It’s the culture … something that you economists aren’t too familiar with.
Out of a population of over 100 million in Mexico only 12 million have jobs in the formal economy … and the country’s largest employer is WalMart … how could Mexicans really be “happy”?
A cursory look at the graph indicates, to me, that Brazil should be at the top as it has the fewest, by percentage, unhappy citizens.
But the conclusion supported by the data you present doesn’t fit the political point that Kristof was trying to make.
None of this is measuring happiness in any meaningful way, as I see it. To do this by taking a survey is akin to taking a measure of wealth by asking people how rich they feel.
Earlier commenters have already noted there may be cultural differences in the way questions are answered – or even linguistic difference in what the questions actually mean.
What you’re trying to measure is a psychological state. Find a way to objectively measure it directly without effecting the results, then I might be interested in the study.
What are the questions included in the poll ….if it was asked to people whether they are happy or un-happy then I guess they are again judging there position in the ladder..similar to what you had pointed out yesterday
@2 has it dead on. Latin American countries are always near the top of the list internationally but I’m almost certain it’s a cultural tendency to answer that question, ‘yes’. Brazil being an outlier supports this because it’s very culturally different from Spanish-speaking countries, perhaps even more likely to say ‘yes’ to whatever Portuguese word is being used.
Furthermore, the responses really don’t look very different. Just looking at ‘not very happy’ rates, it looks like most places are very similar, wtih a few Central American countries being worse than average, and Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru being very bad.
All in all, it just looks to me like Costa Rica may be close to ceiling on this poll.
@Esteban Maybe in Mexican culture the correlation of unemployment and happiness isn’t as negative as in other cultures.
What do you know about the other cultures of these countries on the list? Is Mexico the only one that would over-report happiness?
Is it impossible to be happy AND work at WalMart?
What’s the most similar country to Mexico on this list in terms of your measure of happiness (unemployment in non-walmart-formal-jobs)?
Saying “economists don’t know what culture is” isn’t a better analysis than the one offered here.