Happiness as a sustainability factor. The world happiness index: a posetic-based data analysis

Abstract

The World Happiness Index is calculated by a simple arithmetic addition of 7 sub-indicators. Such an aggregation is subject to possible compensation effects and may thus hide important information and consequently give a false impression. A posetic-based data analysis allows an evaluation of the data without any presumptions or aggregations leading to a different happiness ranking. The relative importance of the seven sub-indicators is disclosed. The most important sub-indicator appears to be the ‘Dystopia’ indicator, which reflects the countries own perception of doing better or worse than the hypothetical country Dystopia. Further, it was shown that, e.g., the gross domestic product per capita in terms of purchasing power parity plays only an inferior role. The study further elucidated so-called ‘peculiar’ countries, i.e., countries where one or more sub-indicators are either extremely high or low compared to the general trend of this indicator(s). Thus, a contradiction for Switzerland with regard to generosity compared to the CAF World Giving Index is disclosed. The effect of introducing weight regimes leading to a significantly reduced uncertainty in the average happiness ranking is discussed as is the correlations between the original happiness index ranking and the average rankings. In a final section some variations in the average ranking when changing to the data to the 2017 index are discussed.

Appendix 1

See Table 6.

Table 6 Data applied for the study as retrieved from HI 2016