The 2024 World Happiness Report offers a number of insights on the state of the world—and older Indians. But not everyone is happy with its methodology—or agrees with its findings.
Ok, tell me about the report…
Basic deets: The United Nations has released an annual World Happiness Report since 2012. It was a response to the advice of the Bhutanese prime minister at the time—Jigme Thinley—to pay closer attention to well-being as a measure of social and economic development. It is prepared by a team of researchers—in partnership with Gallup.
The rankings: are based on a global survey of people in more than 140 nations. For the very first time, the 2024 report offers separate rankings by age group—which exposes a significant generational divide. A nation’s rankings are based on a key life evaluation question—called the ‘Cantril Ladder’: “It asks respondents to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10 and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale.”
The big winners: The #1 country is Finland—for the seventh year in a row! There isn’t much change at the top—with all five Nordic countries in the top 10.
The nations that experience the greatest improvement in their happiness are Serbia (#37)—which jumped by 69 places since 2013—and Bulgaria (#81), which improved by 63. Also doing much, much better: Latvia and Congo. Kuwait and Costa Rica made their debut in the top 20—coming in at #14 and #13.
Unhappy in America: The United States has fallen out of the top 20 for the very first time. It has slumped from #15 to #23. Germany too fell from #13 to #24. This Axios chart captures the sharp dive:
The primary reason: for the US decline is "Americans under 30 feeling worse about their lives"—due to factors that range from personal to political:
Today's young people report feeling less supported by friends and family, less free to make life choices, more stressed and less satisfied with their living conditions, Lara Aknin, an editor of the report, told Axios. People under 30 today also feel less confident in government and have increased perceptions of corruption, she added.
Except for the UK, this is not the trend in most industrialised countries—where younger generations are more satisfied with their lives than their elders:
[S]ince 2006-10.. happiness among the young (aged 15-24) has fallen sharply in North America – to a point where the young are less happy than the old. Youth happiness has also fallen (but less sharply) in Western Europe.
By contrast, happiness at every age has risen sharply in Central and Eastern Europe, so that young people are now equally happy in both parts of Europe. In the former Soviet Union and East Asia too there have been large increases in happiness at every age…
As for gender: Women experienced more negative emotions than men—in every part of the world—and the gender gap is larger at older ages. In advanced countries, this bit was notable: “Girls report lower life satisfaction than boys by around the age of 12. This gap widens at ages 13 and 15, and the pandemic has amplified the difference.” We don’t know what happens in other parts of the world for these age groups due to lack of data.
As for India: Happiness levels have fallen in every age group in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. That said, India is holding steady at an abysmal #126. FYI: Singapore is the happiest country in Asia at #30.
Is that all we have on India?
Nope! For the very first time, the report includes a chapter dedicated especially to India. It focuses on older Indians—above the age of 60. It is based on data from the Longitudinal Aging Study in India Here’s what it found:
- Older Indians are more satisfied with their lives—-but women less so than men. Unmarried women are the least happy.
- Those who consider religion to be important are happier than those who do not.
- The happiest region in India: The West—which we assume means Gujarat, Maharashtra etc.
- The biggest predictors of life satisfaction among older Indians: Their living arrangement—“self-rated health” is a distant second, followed by discrimination. Caste, religion etc are very low on the list. See the chart below.
Ok, so what’s wrong with the report?
Not everyone is unhappy with the Happiness Index—but its methodology has more than a fair share of critics. India, especially, isn’t thrilled. A State Bank of India report promptly accused the index of "overlooking persistent issues prevailing in many better ranked nations”—and insists our real rank is #48. After all, Ukraine comes in at #92—and it’s being bombed by Russians every day. Even Sri Lanka and Pakistan—teetering on the brink economic catastrophe—have been ranked higher at #112 and #108, respectively. And it isn’t just an ‘India’ problem.
A problem of methodology: For starters, the data itself is viewed as weak:
The rankings themselves are based on Gallup surveys of a few thousand participants in each country who are asked to personally rate their lives on a scale of 0 to 10. This “life evaluation”, in other words, is someone’s stated personal opinion of how content they are with their life at that particular point in time. That information is then coupled with some other factors and presented in the annual World Happiness Report.
A Western bias: The survey itself is biased toward Western nations—who always seem to end up on top. As Al Jazeera points out, Finland has some of the highest rates of antidepressant use in Europe. Adding to this confusion: a number of competing happiness indexes—with wildly different rankings. The Global Happiness Report, for example, puts China at the top.
‘Aspiration’ is bad: ORF Online also argues that the report casts the perfectly natural desire for more in developing countries as ‘dissatisfaction’:
[T]he biggest flaw that this report has indulged in is through interpreting aspirations as “unhappiness”. The developing world is definitely going to be more aspirational and deserves to be so. However, that does not necessarily make them “unhappy”. In certain parts of Europe, degrowth as a philosophy has been talked about as the very next stage of their civilisation. This entails contraction from the existing development trajectory. Shall this be attributed to “dissatisfaction”, or shall this be looked at as “over-satiation”?
Also: The survey uses the Cantril Ladder to rank countries—by asking a single question:
Considering your life as a whole and using the mental image of a ladder, with the best possible life as a 10 and worst possible as a 0, indicate where on the ladder you personally stand. This question basically gets people thinking about themselves and their resources, accomplishments, opportunities, and status.
But, but, but: A 2023 study points to a core problem: “How can one reasonably conclude that country A is happier than country B, when happiness is being measured according to the way people in country A think about happiness?” So a person in a highly individualistic culture may define happiness in terms of their personal experiences. But in a society that values collective happiness, the definition of well-being may be very different:
To put it simply, asking someone, “How satisfied are you with your life?” may, in fact, be asking them to think about happiness as it relates to their individual life achievements rather than other factors such as their interpersonal relations and social harmony… How different might the world happiness ranking look if the main question was, “Do you feel loved and cared for?” or “Do you feel like you belong?”
Adding to the confusion: Different people may simply ‘read’ a question in very different ways. This makes survey data a dubious basis for measuring anything quite as profound as happiness. Take for instance a common question like: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days — would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy?” What UCLA researchers found:
[E]very individual answering these survey questions runs them through their own personal interpretations of “taken all together” and “you” and “these days” and “pretty happy.” You end up with useless data because people are essentially answering a lot of different questions… When answering common scale questions — “On a scale of 0-10, how happy are you?,” for example — there was no uniform understanding of, say, a 6, or a move from a 4 to a 5.
The bottomline: Happiness reports offer a valuable reminder that GDP is hardly a good measure of a nation’s well-being. But they’re not very good at capturing the elusive nature of a human condition—that has confounded poets, therapists and scientists alike. Consider this bit of irony: A 2022 study found that people living in the ‘happiest’ countries were often unhappy—“due to the societal pressure to be happy.”
Reading list
We recommend reading the happiness report summary and the chapter on India—even though the data crunching is a bit nerdy. New York Times looks at why Finland always comes in at the top. Al Jazeera and Greater Good are very good in explaining the problem of cultural bias. Anderson Review UCLA looks at problems in methodology. The Conversation has more on the research on unhappiness within very happy countries. The Atlantic looks at what you personally can get out of a report like this.
