“The Danes are the happiest people in the world!”
“To be happy, learn from the Finnish.”
You may have seen similar headlines in recent years, as people have long questioned what it means to have a “good life.” Some say it’s about happiness, or achievement, or taking care of family.
Researchers working on the science of happiness have typically used the Cantril Scale to measure wellbeing: Imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top, where the top represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder do you personally feel you stand at this time?
Cantril’s ladder represents a unidimensional view of a good life; more precisely, it measures how satisfied we are with our lives. As a metaphor, the mental image of a ladder with each rung representing a version of our lives is easily understandable across cultures, and is a simple way for countries to collect data on wellbeing.
But such a unidimensional measure has its limitations, especially for public health professionals. We’re focused on policies and programs that improve people’s lives and wellbeing, so what we choose to measure directly influences how resources are allocated. Understanding what gets measured, and what kind of data is acted upon by stakeholders, are both crucial endeavors.
For a recent paper in Frontiers in Public Health, my colleagues at Harvard University and I used a multidimensional measure of wellbeing that includes a flourishing framework capturing five domains of wellbeing -- happiness, health, purpose, character, and social relationships. They are universally desired as end goals in life.
We also looked at inequality with this multidimensional measure, and then we looked at inequality and multidimensional wellbeing globally. We used data from 1.2 million individuals across 162 countries, which were collected via the Gallup World Poll.
We found that, when viewed with a multidimensional measure of wellbeing, people in New Zealand, Ireland, and Australia ranked the highest, in contrast with the top three countries based on the unidimensional measure only (Denmark, Finland, Switzerland). More interestingly, there are notable discrepancies for countries like Indonesia, which ranks 10th globally in terms of multidimensional flourishing, but 89th in terms of Cantril’s unidimensional ladder. Greece, on the other hand, ranks 140th in terms of flourishing, but 74th in terms of Cantril’s ladder.
Many of these discrepancies are due to differences in the domains of purpose and character. Our results show that populations that were thought to be less satisfied with their lives are in fact doing well, and vice versa. There may be something around how and what Indonesians identify as their purpose and character that the world needs to learn from.
In terms of inequalities in wellbeing, countries with high levels of flourishing, perhaps unsurprisingly, tend to have lower levels of inequalities in general. We found that Qatar, Iceland, and Denmark have the lowest inequalities in wellbeing within their populations, while Armenia, Afghanistan, and South Sudan have the highest. Countries like the United States, however, stand out because, while it’s highly ranked at 8th in terms of flourishing, it ranks 29th when it comes to inequality, suggesting that more attention is needed to the drivers of inequalities in sub-populations.
As wellbeing increasingly occupies the forefront of our minds, it’s important to note that a life that’s “well-lived” may mean more than just happiness. At the same time, even as populations as a whole are doing well across multiple dimensions of wellbeing -- in itself not an easy feat -- there are still inequalities, especially in countries where wellbeing is not equally experienced by all.
If you agree that public health is about helping people have well-lived lives, a lot of work in the wellbeing space awaits.
Alden Lai, PhD
Assistant Professor, Public Health Policy and Management