The
World Happiness Report, brought out by the United Nations, always attracts a lot of attention. People are eager to check out where their country ranks on the World Happiness Index.
This election year, the Happiness Report is grist to the opposition’s political mills, because India’s rank is a lowly 140 out 156 countries. We are apparently a glum lot and the opposition has lost no time in attributing the glumness to the policies of the Modi government. With mounting rural distress and unemployment, so goes the story, who in his right mind can be happy?
Let us for the moment accept that the Happiness Report is God’s truth and that Indians are terribly unhappy. The question is: how do unhappy people vote? The World Happiness Report has an entire chapter aimed at answering this question.
Their findings are unambiguous. The report says, ‘The data show a significant relationship between life satisfaction and incumbent support.’ Happy people gratefully vote for the incumbent government, no doubt under the profoundly mistaken impression that politicians are a source of happiness. The report goes even further, giving a numerical value to the correlation: ‘Controlling for individual and year fixed effects as well as time-varying individual demographics like age and marital status, becoming satisfied with life makes people around 1.9 percentage points more likely to support the incumbent party.’ That suggests unhappy people should vote incumbent parties out of power. That is why the opposition is using the report as a stick to beat the Modi government with. The implication seems to be that people will realize they are unhappy after reading the report and rush out to vote for the opposition.
Does the report’s finding about gloomy Indians seal the BJP’s fate then? No, there’s a countervailing factor at work. The report also finds ‘a clear relationship between satisfaction with life and respondents’ opinion of the benefit of having a strong leader. The unhappiest among the survey respondents are the most likely to say that having a strong leader in charge would be good for the country.’ That should be good for Narendra Modi, particularly after the recent spat with Pakistan.
The more important question is: how reliable is the report? Well, the authors are all eminent economists. But that’s a bit like Mark Antony calling Caesar’s killers honourable men in his speech.
Take a look at the Happiness ranks and you’ll find that while India is at 140, Pakistan is ranked 67. Really? A country with Taliban running amok and a bombing a week is happy? A bankrupt nation desperately seeking an IMF bailout is happier than India? That’s the first chink in the report’s armour.
A bigger chink, rather a gaping hole, is that Venezuela is ranked at no 108. So a country from which people are fleeing by the hundreds of thousands, a country with sky-high inflation, a nation teetering on the verge of civil war, is happier than India?
After that, it’s no surprise at all to see the Palestinian Territories, sometimes described as the world’s largest open-air jail, with Israel bombing the place at will, at number 110, far above India.
And the icing on this turd is provided by Somalia at number 112.
Either Indians are born pessimists, sunk in clinical depression, or the World Happiness Report is junk. Take your pick.
