World Happiness Report: South Asia’s rankings reflect strange disparity

Happiness is specific, in the moment and therefore passing. Joy is more fundamental. It endures because it is more elemental. That explains why there is a World Happiness Report issued every year and not a World Joy Report.

This year’s World Happiness Report, released on March 20, has as its theme, “Sharing and Caring”, and how that impacts people’s happiness. Even though it is hard to quantify happiness in specific numbers and even harder to extend it to entire populations of countries by surveying a limited sample size of people, techniques such as deliberately dropping wallets on streets to study how many would be returned were deployed. The overarching idea was to study benevolence and how it plays out in societies as it relates to happiness.

“First, people are much too pessimistic about the benevolence of others. For example, when wallets were dropped in the street by researchers, the proportion of returned wallets was far higher than people expected. This is hugely encouraging,” the executive summary of the report says.

It also says, “Our wellbeing depends on our perceptions of others’ benevolence, as well as their actual benevolence. Since we underestimate the kindness of others, our wellbeing can be improved by receiving information about their true benevolence.”

In that context, a...

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