Can we understand happiness?
Exploring data from World Happiness Report 2020
In this attempt to answer the question in the article title “Can we understand happiness?”, I thought to try the data analysis approach. Then I attempted to find researches and datasets about happiness, until I found the World Happiness Report.
What is World Happiness Report?
According to the official website of the world happiness report
The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness that ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be.
So based on that survey results, a happiness score is calculated for each country.
Besides the happiness score, there are additional columns that estimate the extent to which each of six factors — economic production (GDP), social support, life expectancy, freedom, absence of corruption, and generosity — contribute to making life evaluations higher in each country than they are in Dystopia, a hypothetical country that has values equal to the world’s lowest national averages for each of the six factors.
These key factors have no impact on the total happiness score reported for each country, but they do explain why some countries rank higher than others.
There is one more column which is the residuals or the unexplained components. This column indicates how much of the Happiness score cannot be explained by the key factors.
To learn more about these 6 factors along with the residuals and unexplained happiness, why these specific 6 factors were chosen as key factors used to explain happiness score, and how they are calculated, please refer to the References below.
So let’s use the data of the 2020 report to check the top happiness scores and its relationship to life expectancy and the other key factors and see how these key factors can explain happiness.
What are the happiest countries and regions in the world?
Obviously the first thing we can learn from the report is which countries are the happiest.
The top 10 happiest countries are:
Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand, Austria and Luxemburg.
Then with a little bit work we can calculate happiness score per region.
Here are world regions ordered by happiness score from highest to lowest score average:
- North America and ANZ
- Western Europe
- Latin America and Caribbean
- Central and Eastern Europe
- East Asia
- Southeast Asia
- Commonwealth of Independent States
- Middle East and North Africa
- South Asia
- Sub-Saharan Africa
We can see that although most of the top 10 happiest countries are in Western Europe, the happiest region is North America and ANZ (Australia and New Zealand), then comes Western Europe.
Now it would be interesting to check if the happiest region will be the one with the longest life expectancy as well.
What are the averages of healthy life expectancy per region?
Healthy life expectancy can be defined as the average number of healthy years a child at birth is estimated to live.
Let’s calculate the average life expectancy per region.
Here are world regions ordered by the average of healthy life expectancy from highest to lowest:
- Western Europe : 72.86
- North America and ANZ : 72.18
- East Asia : 71.09
- Central and Eastern Europe : 68.15
- Latin America and Caribbean : 66.72
- Middle East and North Africa : 65.31
- Commonwealth of Independent States : 64.73
- Southeast Asia : 64.71
- South Asia : 62.45
- Sub-Saharan Africa : 55.09
We can see that the order of regions here is different from the one of the happiness score. Western Europe is the one with longest life expectancy although it is in second position on the happiness scale.
Another example is Middle East and North Africa which in position 6 for life expectancy and it is in position 8 on the happiness scale.
The maximum value of life expectancy is 72.86 and minimum value is 55.09 with standard deviation of 5.28 years.
The average life expectancy is 66.33 and 75% of population has life expectancy of 70.36.
These are very interesting insights, but can we also find the general relationship between life expectancy plus the other key factors and happiness score?
How are the six key factors correlate to happiness score?
From correlation matrix, we can list the six factors ordered according to correlation with happiness score from the strongest to the weakest as follows:
- GDP per capita
- Social support & Healthy life expectancy
- Freedom to make life choices
- Unexplained happiness (Residuals)
- Perceptions of corruption
- Generosity
Before discussing the results, let me explain couple of points:
- I put Social support & Healthy life expectancy together in position 2 as both have same correlation with happiness score.
- In position 4 comes the unexplained happiness, it is not a key factor but I wanted it to be visible in the list so it can help us keep the uncertainty in perspective.
Let’s go back to the results, We can see that the top 3 factors that are strongly correlated to happiness score are GDP, Healthy life expectancy and Social support.
Actually we can also observe very strong positive correlation among those 3 factors.
Both Freedom and Corruption have moderate correlation to happiness score, meanwhile Generosity has very weak correlation.
Finally:
In my attempt to answer the question “Can we understand happiness?”, I analyzed data of the world happiness report and I got to know that there are some key factors that can explain happiness score to a great extent, where the top 3 factors are GDP, Healthy life expectancy and Social support.
And there is still the unexplained happiness components factor, which indicates how much of the happiness score cannot be explained by the key factors.
This factor needs to be reduced by discovering more factors that contribute to happiness and complete the picture.
So happiness still has a mysterious aspect to it waiting for us to reveal!
The complete analysis and charts are available at my GitHub.
