Happiness
Since Socrates and Confucius (and perhaps before), the idea of happiness has been contentious. How about the political science version of the issue?Sanford Silverburg, who teaches at Catawba College in Salisbury, NC, pointed me to an article by Spengler in Asia Times Online, in which he explains Why Israel is the world's happiest country.
He supports his contention by comparing suicide rates and birth rates in about 40 countries. Israel has the lowest suicide rate and the highest birth rate of the countries Spengler cites.
Sanford suggests this idea might be a good idea for a comparative case study. I'd add that students ought to try identifying another statistic supporting or contradicting the hypothesis that low suicide and high birth rates indicate national happiness.
Where do you find the numbers? The suicide rates of nations from the World Health Organization are online.
Birth rates by country from CIA World Factbook are also online.
What kind of data might support or contradict the hypothesis? Standard of living? GDP per capita? Life expectancy? (Those are all in the World Factbook.) Or check out The Economist's Quality of Life Index.
Thanks to James Lerch there are more ideas on comparative happiness. This time from Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute. Jim pointed me to Wilkinson's blog, The Fly Bottle. There I found a link to Wilkinsin's paper, In Pursuit of Happiness Research: Is It Reliable? What Does It Imply for Policy?.
You can probably imagine how a policy analyst from the Cato Institute will argue this idea. And that adds more dimensions to a comparative study. Here's the executive summary [I added some paragraphing]:
"'Happiness research" studies the correlates of subjective well-being, generally through survey methods.
"A number of psychologists and social scientists have drawn upon this work recently to argue that the American model of relatively limited government and a dynamic market economy corrodes happiness, whereas Western European and Scandinavian-style social democracies promote it.
"This paper argues that happiness research in fact poses no threat to the relatively libertarian ideals embodied in the U.S. socioeconomic system. Happiness research is seriously hampered by confusion and disagreement about the definition of its subject as well as the limitations inherent in current measurement techniques.
"In its present state happiness research cannot be relied on as an authoritative source for empirical information about happiness, which, in any case, is not a simple empirical phenomenon but a cultural and historical moving target. Yet, even if we accept the data of happiness research at face value, few of the alleged redistributive policy implications actually follow from the evidence.
"The data show that neither higher rates of government redistribution nor lower levels of income inequality make us happier, whereas high levels of economic freedom and high average incomes are among the strongest correlates of subjective well-being.
"Even if we table the damning charges of questionable science and bad moral philosophy, the American model still comes off a glowing success in terms of happiness."
That ought to suggest more debates about definitions, measurements, and important variables as well as more comparisons that could be made.
See also:
- Socrates on Prozac and Happiness by James R. Beebe, Dept. of Philosophy, University at Buffalo
- The Ethics of Socrates from Lander University
- The Science of Happiness from the BBC
- Measuring Happiness from the National Bureau of Economic Research
- The Wealth of Joy reported by France24
- Canadians among happiest in world reported by Canada.com
Labels: comparative methodology, theory
posted by Ken Wedding @ 1:02 PM
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