Happiness Index
Who is the happiest person in the world?
Alexander Sotov, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, 14.06.2012
On the eve of the Rio+20 International Summit on Sustainable Development, a British non-governmental organization has published a World Happiness Index, according to which Costa Rica, Vietnam and Jamaica have a bright future.
How can humanity achieve prosperity without leaving behind mountains of garbage? That is, not only for current, but also for future generations? Experts from the London-based New Economics Foundation (NEF) tried to answer this "damned" question by publishing a rating of countries based on the ratio of a person's "happy years of life" and the level of consumption per capita. The duration of the "happy years of life", in turn, was measured using the average life expectancy in a particular country and the results of sociological surveys on the satisfaction of its residents with their well-being conducted by the Gallup agency.
Jamaicans are happier than BritsIt turned out that in 2012 the list of happy countries is headed by Costa Rica.
It is followed by Vietnam, Colombia, Belize, El Salvador, Jamaica, Panama, Nicaragua and Venezuela and Guatemala. In the second ten – Cuba, Israel, Pakistan and other developing countries. In Costa Rica, life expectancy and residents' assessment of their well-being in relation to the level of consumption of natural resources per capita is three times higher than in the United States. Nine out of ten "green" and happy countries are in Latin America and the Caribbean – these are low-income countries.
As for Russia, our country took the 122nd place in the ranking out of 151 countries, losing not only to the Baltic states, but also to Kazakhstan. But we managed to bypass Luxembourg (138th place) – the only EU country at the end of the list. Qatar, Chad and Botswana complete the table. There, either life expectancy is low, or the level of well-being is low, or both. Coupled with the "non-ecological" economy.
"Rich and poor states pursue the same goal in different ways," says sociologist Nick Marks, the creator of the happiness index. "Our index not only reveals how much the countries of the world still have to go to find happiness and at the same time preserve the natural resources of the planet, but also the direction in which they should move". But a senior researcher at the Saama Abdala Foundation is more straightforward: "Countries like Costa Rica have bypassed the UK on the World Happiness Index, because their population lives happily, using only a small fraction of the resources we consume." In his opinion, without reducing the current level of consumption, the health of the planet cannot be saved.
On the Happy Planet Index website, you can play with an interactive map of the world level of happiness, calculate your own index (integral and for individual indicators) and compare it with different averages – for the world as a whole, for the country of residence and with the results of www inhabitants who were not too lazy to put about a hundred ticks in the questionnaire in the American language – VM.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru14.06.2012