From the South Seas to Great Britain, The Tricky Science of Happiness

When discussing scientific measurements of happiness, people need to look carefully at how happiness is actually measured.

Dominic Lawson, a columnist for The Independent, takes the BBC to task for a recent piece of puffery on Vanuatu, a tiny Pacific island whose residents were deemed to be the happiest people in the world.

I couldn't help wondering why the BBC had nominated Vanuatu rather than Guernsey - other than the fact that the natives of Pentecost have a much more photogenic line in tribal dances. A few minutes of Googling provided the answer. A year ago there was a spate of articles declaring that Vanuatu is "the happiest nation on earth". All of them seem to stem from one survey, The Happy Planet Index, produced by a London-based think-tank called the New Economics Foundation.

To arrive at Vanuatu, the NEF combined traditionally accepted measures of happiness -- self-reported satisfaction and life expectancy -- with carbon footprints. (To put it gently, the latter isn't always relevant to personal well-being; just ask a homeless person in winter.)

What's worse, the NEF didn't actually consult Vanuatuans about their personal feelings of bliss, but relied on a small, earlier phone survey.

But while these unreliable findings were widely and uncritically repeated, observes Duncan, a much better study involving the happiness of children with cerebral palsy went almost completely unreported. That study, published in The Lancet, found that -- defying the expectations of "normal" people who think that handicaps equal misery -- the children were just as happy as their classmates.

This insight is particularly valuable for parents-to-be or new parents.
There is still a tremendous fear about giving birth to a child with a disability, based on the assumption that such a child will be wretchedly unhappy, someone to be pitied. Parents who actually have such a child - as I do - know that this is a false assumption, but are often dismissed as "making the best of a bad job".

From Pentecost island to modern Britain, the futility of trying to measure happiness [The Independent]

The Happy Planet Index: An index of human well-being and environmental impact [New Economics Foundation]

Self-reported quality of life of 8-12-year-old children with cerebral palsy: a cross-sectional European study [The Lancet]

Image: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa