The 'World Happiness Report' Is a Sham

"The happiest countries in the world are in Scandinavia [according to the World Happiness Report]; this year, Finland is followed by Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden. [New Zealand is ranked 12th, between Australia and Switzerland.] America, despite being one of the richest large countries in the world, persistently underperforms: this year, the United States only comes in 24th out of the 147 countries covered in the report, placing it behind much poorer countries like Lithuania and Costa Rica.
    "I have to admit that I have been skeptical about this ranking ever since I first came across it ... while Scandinavian countries have a lot of great things going for them, they never struck me as pictures of joy. ...
    "So to honour the release of this year’s report, I finally decided to follow my hunch, and looked into the research on this topic more deeply. What I found was worse than I’d imagined. To put it politely, the World Happiness Report is beset with methodological problems. To put it bluntly, it is a sham. ...
    "In light of ... confident pronouncements [from media], and in the absence of any critical voices in most of these news stories, you might be forgiven for thinking that the report carefully assesses how happy each country in the world is according to a sophisticated methodology, one that likely involves both subjective and objective criteria. But upon closer examination, it turns out that the World Happiness Report is not based on any major research effort; far from measuring how happy people are with some sophisticated mix of indicators, it simply compiles answers to a single question, asked to comparatively small samples of people in each country ... [which] does not even do a good job of measuring respondents’ satisfaction with their own lives. ...
    "But perhaps the biggest problem with the World Happiness Report is that metrics of self-reported life satisfaction don’t seem to correlate particularly well with other kinds of things we clearly care about when we talk about happiness. At a minimum, you would expect the happiest countries in the world to have some of the lowest incidences of adverse mental health outcomes. But it turns out that the residents of the same Scandinavian countries that the press dutifully celebrates for their supposed happiness are especially likely to take antidepressants. ...
    "It is easy to see why editors are tempted to assign some beat reporter without expertise in the social sciences to write up a fun little story about how much happier those enlightened Scandinavians are compared to benighted Americans. But if the media wants to live up to its self-appointed role as a gatekeeper of reliable information, it can’t continue to be complicit in the spread of such shoddy clickbait."

~ Yascha Mounk from his post 'The World Happiness Report Is a Sham'

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1. "It’s not just this survey. Have you ever wondered from where exactly all these folk derive their data for all these things about the world’s happiest this and the freest the-other? I pressed one fellow once whose 'freedom index' showed New Zealand at the time to be the world’s freest — earning us their 'gold medal for freedom' with scores like 9.6 out of 10 for property rights only a few years after the Resource Management Act had taken most of them away.
    "After a whole riot of wriggling to try to avoid the questioning, he eventually conceded that much of their data is based on subjective surveys sent out to selected 'leaders' in each country. And from that news it didn’t take much more to learn that most of those surveys were completed by local cheerleaders desperately keen to trumpet the virtues of their hometown. (Q: Is your place a hell of place to do business? A: [Big tick] Hell, yes!! You’re darn tootin’!)
    "So, garbage in, and garbage out."

~ me from my 2012 post 'NZ: Prosperous?'

2. "[T]here are many things wrong with the way these indices are scored – none of them inspiring much confidence in their methodology.
    "The Index of Economic Freedom scores countries according to a subjective scale on the size of their government; their legal system and property rights; the size and scope of government; freedom to trade internationally (or not); and something they call oxymoronically 'regulatory efficiency.”'
    "I say a subjective scale because these numbers recorded to three significant figures are based largely on surveys conducted by business groups in each host country; and are difficult to take seriously when New Zealand comes in with a whopping 95 out of 100 for property rights ... and 96.1 out of 100 for business freedom (in other words, almost as good as it’s possible to get)  ...
    "Bear in mind that the only reason American foundations produce indices like these is to browbeat American politicians. But if New Zealand is nearly as good as it gets in this modern world, there really is something wrong with the world we’re in."

~ me from my 2014 post 'New Zealand third freest?'

3. "So since most of these surveys are garbage in garbage out, I figured I’d track this one metric as a measure of how reliable all the others are.

"Bear in mind that this survey, like all such surveys, aren’t carried out by folks in the field fully endowed with local knowledge. They’re pulled together by people at desks very far away from the places they write about ... with facility mainly in handling a spread sheet and a bunch of somebody else’s dubious data.

"Their appendix tells me their source of dubious data for the score on property rights is something called the Global Competitiveness Report, put out by a group called the World Economic Forum. … The Forum is best known for its annual winter meeting for five days in Davos.” Remember Davos? A meeting of men famously described by Daniel Hannan as deriving most of their income, directly or indirectly, from state patronage.

"So where did Davos Man get his figures from for his Global Competitiveness Report? I went to the report to check:

'The GCI uses the World Economic Forum’s annual Executive Opinion Survey to capture concepts that require a more qualitative assessment, or for which comprehensive and internationally comparable statistical data are not available. For this year’s GCI, more than 14,000 business leaders in 140 economies were surveyed on topics related to national competitiveness. ...

"What proportion is opinion, and what proportion is this other data?

'The exact share of Executive Opinion Survey data in the 113 indicators used to calculate the index varies slightly by country, depending on its stage of development. In general, approximately two-thirds of the data used in the GCI 2015-2016 are derived from the Executive Opinion Survey and one-third is derived from international sources’ statistics.'

"So how much of the data is simply opinion? Answer: About two-thirds, emanating from this 'Executive Opinion Survey.'

"And where do we find this Executive Opinion Survey data? Answer: We don’t. It’s not publicly available.

"It is however possible to discover that New Zealand’s Executive Opinion Survey data comes from a survey completed by just 46 people (see the Survey’s Table 2, page 81.). Names and addresses of this select group of cronies are unfortunately not supplied. However the report does list Phil O’Reilly’s Business NZ as their local 'partner institute' (the 'unique strength of Business NZ being, according to their own website, their 'capability to engage with government officials, community groups, MPs and Ministers on a daily basis'). So I’m guessing the cronies are his.

"None of the survey data of this infamous forty-six appears on the Business NZ website, but the NZ Initiative website at least does offer this cautionary note:

'Note the information in the opinion survey can be skewed by perception and by small samples (e.g. New Zealand has a sample size less than 50) and therefore can have substantial error ranges, so analysis should be confirmed with supporting logic and evidence.'

"None of which either the Fraser Institute nor Davos Men have bothered to do.

"Meaning that a subjective worldwide survey of cronies and business cheerleaders gets trumpeted every year as bestowing upon this small authoritarian backwater a medal for freedom – and people who should know better post pieces praising  'reform' in which the government ended up bigger, the total tax take ended larger, and Big Brother became 'bigger and more ominous then ever'.”

~  me from my 2016 post  'A wooden spoon for the Fraser Institute’s “economic freedom” medal'