World Happiness Report 2013
corruption (or rather a lack of it), and personal freedom, the rule of law and the quality of the environment.17 Chapter 2 of this year’s report finds that six variables together explain some 75% of differences in average happiness across countries and time. Four of these six variables are typical measures of human development, namely income (measured by log of GDP per capita), healthy life expectancy at birth, freedom to make life choices and social support. The other two measures — corruption and generosity — while not always seen as measures of human development are certainly not contradictory to the human development approach. Indeed one could argue that corruption in particular is a measure of human development as it reduces people’s freedoms to live their lives in the way they want, while there is a growing literature on the links between altruism and human progress.18 And so, as one might expect given their shared origins, there seems much to unite the two approaches. Meanwhile, using data from the United Kingdom, Paul Anand and colleagues examined the relationship between subjective well-being and people’s capabilities, concluding that “life satisfaction is highly multivariate with respect to capabilities” and that the relationships were “reasonably robust” among different age groups and between men and women.19 Given the very considerable similarities between the thinking about human development and happiness it is difficult to understand why the two schools of thought are not more closely aligned. Perhaps one reason is that when human development experts hear the word “happiness” they think of the positive affect of day to day emotions (happiness in the emotional sense), rather than happiness defined in terms of overall life evaluation (happiness in the evaluative sense). In this chapter the word happiness is used to mean longer term life evaluations, a meaning which has closer conceptual links to the human development approach (remember, lives they have reason to value).20
What Do The Data Show? As argued, measures of human development and life evaluations should, in theory, be closely related. Three questions on the conceptual and empirical links between the two approaches are investigated. 1. Do those countries with higher human development according to the HDI (and therefore, as UNDP believes, with citizens who highly value the lives they lead) actually report higher life evaluations? 2. What are the empirical links between other aspects of human development, beyond the HDI, and overall life evaluations? 3. How do the variables that correlate strongly with life evaluation relate conceptually to human development theory? All of the analysis that follows, other than the exceptions noted,21 uses annual national data averaged over the period 2010-12, in common with Chapter 2. The numbers of countries in the sample range from 124 to 152 depending on the variables used. Question 1: Do those countries with higher human development according to the HDI (and therefore, as UNDP believes, with citizens who have a higher reason to value the lives they lead) actually enjoy higher life evaluation? Human development is an open-ended concept, and many things could be treated as dimensions of human development because they represent capabilities or functionings. Let’s start with the HDI, which is the measure used by UNDP to rank countries but is, as the UNDP recognizes, only a partial measure of human development. Health, income and education are all included in the HDI. Recall that the measures comprising the HDI are life expectancy at birth (as a proxy measure of overall health); both expected and mean
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