Context
The reasons for happiness are complex but not unpredictable. To have meaningful data we had to identify and grasp broad social trends using several sets of data sourced primarily from Gallup World Poll data in The World Happiness Reports. We also collected additional data on countries' military expenditures, social support systems, life expectancies, government corruption perceptions, and household incomes.
The happiness scores and rankings from The World Happiness Reports are based on answers to the main life evaluation question asked in the poll. This question is known as the Cantril ladder. It asks respondents to think of a range, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale. The scores are from nationally representative samples for the years 2013-2018 and use the Gallup weights to make the estimates representative.
The data associated with the following happiness score estimates the extent to which each of six factors – economic production, 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. They have no impact on the total score reported for each country, but they do explain why some countries rank higher than others.
The factors in the report are as follows: GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, social support, generosity, freedom to make life choices, and perceived corruption. Social support is defined as the answer to the following question: If you were in trouble, do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them, or not? Freedom is defined as: Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life? Generosity is defined as: Have you donated money to a charity in the past month? Corruption is defined as the answers to two questions: Is corruption widespread throughout the government or not? And: Is corruption widespread within businesses or not?
Because the happiness data is distributed and weighted in the World Happiness Reports, we pulled in additional data that was not distributed or weighted. We used this additional data to compare happiness to the individual indicators to analyze and make further predictions.
