WORLD HAPPINESS REPORT
If we want to influence the levels of happiness and misery, we need to know what causes them. As a result of some 30 years of research, we now know a good deal about this. 1 If we think of each individual, every one of us has her own genetic make-up, but the person she becomes depends on the interaction of those genes with the environment she encounters. Together, genes and environment determine the main features of a person’s life – both those that are very “personal” and those that are more clearly “external.” And these features in turn determine a person’s well-being, as illustrated in Figure 3.1. Figure 3.1
Among the more “external” factors, key determinants of happiness include: • • • •
income work community and governance, and values and religion
and, among the more “personal” features, key determinants include: • • • • •
mental health physical health family experience education, and gender and age
Thus a person’s happiness at a point in time is determined by the whole of her life course. The current external features of her life are important, but so are the personal features that have developed over the previous course of her life. For policy-makers the main issues are the environmental factors affecting happiness, since these are what can be changed. Ideally we would study their effects holding the genes constant, but most research so far has been unable to do this.2 So in this chapter we look directly at the ways in which external and personal factors (however they arise) affect a person’s happiness. What the policy-maker wants to know is how big an effect each factor has on happiness. So we concentrate both on that, and on the share of variance explained by the factor (which depends of course on the sample of people being considered). We look first at the more external factors (income, work, community, governance, values and religion) and then at the more personal ones (mental health, physical health, family, education, gender and age). In many cases there is
59