WORLD HAPPINESS REPORT 2013 was edited by John Helliwell, Richard Layard and Jeffrey Sachs

In July 2011 the UN General Assembly passed a historic resolution. It invited member countries to

measure the happiness of their people and to use this to help guide their public policies. The first

WORLD HAPPINESS REPORT was published in 2012. The need is a rising worldwide demand that policy

framing must be closer to issues that really matters to people as perceived from their lives. The reports

look for differences and trends in the equality or inequality with which happiness is distributed within

and among countries and regions.

The essence of traditional virtue ethics is that happiness is achieved by harnessing the will and the

passions to live the right kind of life. A desirable level of happiness means feeling mildly to moderately

positive usually, with occasional negative emotions in appropriate situations. Promoting a healthy start

in life is vital, and there is ample evidence to indicate that early intervention programs have an

important protective or preventive effect. Also, individuals who are happier tend to have better social

relations. Well-being is also related to having less gossip and more meaningful conversations.

The questions to use must be chosen according to end use purpose since they are of critical importance

for measuring subjective wellbeing. The contextual impact of preceding questions must be also taken

care of. The analysis of subjective well-being data requires a relatively large sample size and should use

micro-data analysis. Also the, enumeration should be spread over a large period say an year, so that

any incidence of holidays might not bias the survey results. Most arguments for putting happiness more

center-stage in policy making have been normative in nature; happiness is what would appear to matter

most to most people. It has been thought to be less vulnerable to interpersonal differences in how

people use the measurement scale. Although limited to a few questions, the core measures provide the

foundation for comparisons of the level and distribution of life evaluations, eudemonia, and affect

between countries, over time and between population groups. If individuals were to routinely mix up

their responses to these very different questions, then measures of happiness might tell us very little.

For instance, for young adults there might be no differences in health or longevity due to happiness

because young adults very rarely die and mostly have healthy bodies.

The data for global life evaluations is from the Gallup World Poll. The global happiness picture has many

trends, and the slow-moving global averages mask actual improvements in some regions. The

correlation between HDI and life evaluation is, at 0.77, similar to the correlation between life evaluation

and log GNI. The measures of life satisfaction or happiness with "life as a whole" that form the main

focus of the World Happiness Report are measures of life evaluation and are also at the core of the

OECD approach. For example, an individual buys the basket of commodities offering the highest relative

happiness consistent with the individual's budget. Utility function is used to measure the happiness they

achieve from the basket of goods.

Schools and workplaces need to be more conscious of mental health as the treatment of mental illness

SUMMARY OF WORLD HAPPINESS REPORT 2013

is probably the single most reliably cost-effective action available for reducing misery. Also improving

happiness in other ways would reduce the frequency of mental illness.

Not only is there a direct biological path from happiness to healthier bodily systems, but unhappiness is

also associated with destructive behaviors that can exacerbate health problems. Negative emotions may

predict mortality, while positive emotions predict longevity- example of apes in captivity.

Notions of subjective well-being or happiness have a long tradition as central elements of quality of life.

Like nearly every traditional philosophy, Buddhism holds that happiness must be achieved through

striving, using tools of learning from masters, habitual practice, and the exercise of the mind and will.

Matthieu Ricard emphasizes that achieving durable happiness is a skill and requires a change in

perspective. That tradition was almost lost in the modern era after 1800, when happiness became

associated with material conditions, especially income and consumption.

After making the current comparisons based on the three most recent survey years, the report looks for

changes and trends in happiness in countries, regions, and for the world as a whole. The report

examines the average levels and distributions of these responses, sometimes referring to the measures

as the Cantril ladder, and sometimes as life evaluations or measures of happiness about life as a whole.

The report says that having supportive relationships boosts subjective well-being, but having high

subjective well-being in turn leads to better social relationships. Good relationships both cause

happiness and are caused by it. One indirect route from happiness to health is that individuals who are

high in subjective well-being are more likely to practice good health behaviors and practices

The European Social Survey showed that well-being losses were high in Greece, due to loss in

institutional trust.It was found that happiness extends up to three degrees of separation, and

longitudinal models show that individuals who are surrounded by happy people are likely to become

happier in the future. The respondents to surveys clearly recognize the difference between happiness as

an emotion and happiness in the sense of life satisfaction. Richard Easterlin has demonstrated that the

Easterlin Paradox in which the US has substantially raised incomes over the course of several decades

without raising subjective measures of happiness.

Happiness is an aspiration of every human being, and can also be a measure of social progress.

Individuals are no longer seen to derive their happiness from altruism, compassion, social connections,

or virtue. Happiness has the potential to generate positive snowball effects in society. Subjective well-

being has an objective impact across a broad range of behavioral traits and life outcomes, and does not

simply follow from them.

The important new development is that countries and researchers increasingly are using measures of

subjective well-being to help formulate better policies and to measure the success of those policies.

It is important to emphasize that research does not prescribe extreme bliss but, rather, tentative

evidence suggests that a moderate degree of happiness tends to be "optimal" for the effects surveyed.

Although the study is small scale and is mostly interested in the epigenetic effects of different types of

well-being (hedonic and eudemonic well-being) it opens a promising new direction in the study of how

happiness may inuence health outcomes. Bhutan has gone the furthest but others, like the UK, are

now systematically collecting data on happiness and life satisfaction. Human development has a place

for happiness: a society that is becoming unhappier is not making progress against at least one

important criterion.

Research on individual risk-taking provides evidence of a negative correlation between happiness and

risk-related behavior. There is also evidence for a positive feedback loop between pro-social spending

and happiness. Another positive benefit is that positive emotions can undo the ill-effects of negative

emotions on health. The general trend is that higher incomes and longevity raise happiness, corruption

perceptions lower happiness, and generosity and freedom raise happiness. Also renewed focus on the

role of ethics, and in particular of virtuous behavior, in happiness could lead us to new and effective

strategies for raising individual, national, and global well-being.