http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-03/the-15-happiest-economies-in-the-world
This week Bloomberg calculated the "misery index". As one can assume, this composite index contains measurements from inflation to unemployment that cause negative utility to consumers. Thailand and Switzerland were deemed the least miserable countries. The United States placed eighth. Bloomberg credited unemployment as the reason that the United States did not "medal" in their rankings. Denmark also had a very strong showing in sixth place, followed by China. Denmark is forecasted to lead the world in GDP per capita this year at a whopping $67,619. Thailand's place at the top was surprising, but this was due to an unemployment rate of under 1%. Additionally, this low unemployment rate has failed to initiate inflation. If you are interested, Venezuela was ranked as the most miserable country.
I found the title of this article slightly misleading. It was titled "The 15 Happiest Economies in the World", but this ranking was based off of the lowest countries in the "misery index". This backward system appears to be ranking countries as the least worst. While I question the system, these figures can be extended to our study of growth as an outcome of an economic system. The traditional indicators do not capture well-being or happiness. For example Bhutan is using a gross national happiness index (GNH) as an indicator of progress in an economy. There definitely is room to explore factors that indicate genuine progress and well-being that are not captured by GDP. What do you think?
5 comments:
The "misery index" composites economic trouble in any one nation, and I agree that a better title might be "The 15 Least Unhappy [...]". There are multiple measures of "happiness" available, such as the Gross National Happiness index among others. Part of the problem is that quantifying economic happiness is highly difficult for the reason that different cultures and nations put different levels of emphasis and different desired values on certain indicators than other nations (i.e. income inequality across nations), and some of these sub-indices may not be readily quantifiable.
I agree that least miserable and happiest are two different things. Going by most normal human life index you would never find any other country that can rival the Scandinavian countries and Canada. Negativity only shows one side of the equations and you are essentially forsaking some other important life quality index that might dramatically affect the perception of a "happy society"
This article is for sure misleading because as we learnt in class happiness cannot be measure by GDP or economic indexes. Moreover, these kinds of measure are very subjective because being rich and wealth off or living in a society with lots of social benefits do not mean happiness. Japan can be one of the example because of its high suicidal rate
This article compares non-equivalent numbers in a way that doesn't really make sense (as Lily said, happiness cannot be measured by GDP) and make conclusions that don't really reflect the data all that well. It's interesting, I suppose, but the compilation of raw data seems more interesting than their weird rankings.
It's interesting to me that they even conducted a "misery index" when they have already established a measure of happiness through the HDI.
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