The World Happiness
Some uncomfortable truths
Exploring the world
As an avid world traveler, I have visited 27 countries in my life. But exploring the world is more than my hobby.
I have been working in the product globalization field, where I help people around the world learn to use tech products despite cultural and language barriers.
Facing Uncomfortable Truths
However, the more I explored, the more I came face-to-face with uncomfortable truths.
Why do people in some countries have to live on the river to avoid property taxes?
And how can people on the opposite side of the world own luxury mansions in the most expensive cities?
While working for global companies, I met many tech workers from developing countries who could not even afford their basic work-related expenses, such as internet bills and translation fees for their services.
Where does this gap come from? Why must some people worry about their basic needs every day?
And how come other people are so far removed from these daily concerns?
World Happiness Report
One day, I came across the World Happiness Report1, which was a publication of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network2. The authors of the report analyzed different factors in our lives that affect our happiness. The annual report used six key variables to compile the happiness score.
- Ladder score (Happiness score): Individuals’ own assessments of their lives (0-10).
- Six key variables:
- GDP per capita (GDP): GDP divided by the population of a country. The report used the natural log of GDP per capita.
- Healthy life expectancy (Life expectancy): National average number of “healthy” years a child at birth is estimated to live.
- Social support: “If you were in trouble, do you have relatives or friends you can count on?” (Yes 1, No 0)
- Freedom to make life choices (Freedom): “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?” (Sat 1, Dis 0)
- Generosity: the residual of regressing to the question “Have you donated money to a charity in the past month?” on GDP per capita. (Yes 1, No 0)
- Corruption: The average of “Is corruption widespread throughout the government or not?” and “Is corruption widespread within businesses or not?” (Yes 1, No 0)
How is our world doing?
Even though the reports from 2012 to 2020 covered comprehensive data and statistics, they did not look at our inequality. So, I decided to begin my own journey to understand more about the inequalities in our lives.
According to the graph (left), the overall world happiness score has been increasing since 2013. However, would this score be accurate for individual countries?
Revealing a huge disparity
As you might imagine, I discovered major differences in happiness from country to country. The colorful map reveals the disparity more clearly.
Because the gaps seemed to be regional, I wanted to see how deeply these inequalities have permeated our lives.
Unchanging gap in happiness
As you can see in the line chart (at left), the gap between top-scoring regions (North America and Western Europe) and low-scoring regions (Africa and South Asia) has never been reduced.
It’s also interesting to note that the happiness rankings of mid-scoring regions have continually changed within a certain range.
What can be done to reduce this gap? First, we need to understand the most critical determinants of the happiness score.
Income, health and support
The correlation heat map (at left) identifies the GDP per capita, social support and life expectancy as the three highest factors that determine a country’s happiness score.
The map also shows a strong correlation between GDP and life expectancy.
I wanted to verify whether the gap between the regions I had identified previously would also occur in the GDP and life expectancy.
No money, No healthy life
In the scatter plot of GDP and life expectancy, I saw noticeable clusters again. Even though we have experienced a positive trend with increasing GDP and life expectancy rates over the years, the gap between the highest and lowest regions has never been resolved.
I was disturbed to realize that a healthy life is not guaranteed if one does not have enough money. The perfect example of this uncomfortable truth is the inequality in world COVID-19 vaccine distribution, which is happening right now.
A new kind of inequality
While many healthy people in the United States complain about waiting for their turn to be vaccinated against COVID-19, some people living in poor countries do not expect to be vaccinated until 2023.3 4
Two big culprits are rich countries and big pharmaceutical companies.
Using their massive buying power, rich countries are hoarding more vaccines than they need.5
In addition, some major vaccine companies do not share their intellectual properties with other companies, which is delaying large-scale vaccine production.6
This is truly the new chant of “No money, No healthy life."
Not only is it immoral to hoard vaccines, but if we fail to develop herd immunity, it will also prevent us from ending the pandemic.
"We believe that this inequity is deeply morally unfair, but, more than that, it's not the way to combat a global pandemic. Unvaccinated populations provide fertile ground for new COVID-19 mutations." 7
- Robbie Silverman from Oxfam
Maps look alike
As you can see, the vaccine distribution map mimics the earlier map of world happiness scores. What will our world happiness map look like in the future? If we do not stop the nationalistic distribution of vaccines, we might see more red and less green in 2022.
Becoming friendly neighbors
Social support is one of the three top factors affecting people's happiness. People from Africa and South Asia responded that they do not have many people to rely on when they are in trouble.
Fortunately, we started to see some positive gestures toward them recently. 8 9 10
It is not just governments or vaccine companies who can help people in developing countries get vaccinated earlier.
We, as ordinary people, can also help them by donating to the COVAX (COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access). COVAX aims to coordinate international resources to enable the equitable access of COVID-19 diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines.11
Don't you want to be their friendly neighbors and end this global pandemic together?
References
1 Wikipedia contributors. (2014, April 24). World Happiness Report. Wikipedia. Link
2 Helliwell, J. F., Layard, R., Sachs, J. D., Neve, J. D., & Wang, S. (2019). World Happiness Report 2020, 19-22.
3 Malash, V. (2021, February 19). More than 85 poor countries will not have widespread access to coronavirus vaccines before 2023. Economist Intelligence Unit. Link
4 Unprotected African health workers die as rich countries buy up COVID-19 vaccines. (2021, February 17). Science | AAAS. Link
5 Al Jazeera. (2021, February 19). Rich nations ‘hoarding’ a billion doses of excess COVID vaccine. Coronavirus Pandemic News | Al Jazeera. Link
6 Berger, M. (2021, February 23). Global vaccine inequality runs deep. Some countries say intellectual property rights are part of the problem. Washington Post. Link
7 How to stop vaccine nationalism from prolonging the pandemic. (2021, February 19). Fortune. Link
8 Reals, T. (2021, February 20). Biden pledges up to $4 billion to help get poorer countries vaccinated against COVID-19. CBS News. Link
9 Berger, M. (2021b, March 5). WHO head pushes for waiver of some intellectual property rights for coronavirus vaccines, in bid to broaden access. Washington Post. Link
10 2.2 million COVID-19 vaccines allocated by the COVAX Facility arrive in Ethiopia, marking the start of the country’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign. (2021, March 13). WHO | Regional Office for Africa. Link
11 COVAX explained. (2021, January 21). Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. Link
Image Sources
Cover page: Link
Photo by Ben White on Unsplash licensed under an Unsplash license
Exploring the world
1) Map: Link
2) Graphic: Link
Photo by kirasolly on Freepik licensed under an Freepik license agreement
Facing the uncomfortable truth
1) River house: Link
Photo by Claudiovidri on Shutterstock licensed under an Shutterstock License Agreement
2) Mansion: Link
Photo by Daniel Barnes on Unsplash licensed under an Unsplash license
3) Developer: Link
Photo by Impact Photography on Shutterstock licensed under an Shutterstock License Agreement
4) Girls working: Link
Photo by Jordan Rowland on Unsplash licensed under an Unsplash license
World happiness report
1) First cover: Link
2) Second cover: Link
A new kind of inequality
1) Stick figures: Link
Photo by sulit.photos on Shutterstock licensed under an Shutterstock License Agreement
2) Countries with hands: Link
Photo by Pictrider on Shutterstock licensed under an Shutterstock License Agreement
3) Major vaccines: Link
Photo by ALDECA studio on Shutterstock licensed under an Shutterstock License Agreement
4) People with masks: Link
Photo by United Nations COVID-19 Response on Unsplash licensed under an Unsplash license
Becoming friendly neighbors: Link
Photo by Mabeline72 on Shutterstock licensed under an Shutterstock License Agreement
Built with Shorthand