What makes a country happy? In November 2018, two of us found ourselves lamenting the difficulty of researching that question, because of the patchiness of relevant data sets on well-being from outside the North Atlantic zone. Humans had already probed the outer reaches of the visible universe and mapped the ocean floor, but much of the human experience outside the West was still empirically understudied. Those conversations sparked an idea: Why didn’t we collect the missing data ourselves? Our guest essay for Times Opinion this week is about the result: The Global Flourishing Study, a five-year survey of over 200,000 people in 22 countries on all continents except Antarctica. In contrast to other global happiness rankings based on just one metric, we sought to account for many aspects of flourishing, including not just happiness but also health, meaning, relationships and community, character, and financial and material security. Our essay describes some of what we’ve learned from the first year of that data. Notably, across the whole sample, overall national flourishing decreased slightly as G.D.P. per capita rose. We found a stark divide between wealthier, principally Western, countries, which report the highest scores for life evaluation and financial and material security, and less wealthy countries, which report the highest scores for meaning, pro-social character traits, relationship satisfaction and community involvement. These findings challenge the widespread assumption that flourishing increases with material prosperity, and they prompt us to reconsider the potential trade-offs of a myopic focus on economic growth above all else. We have more questions than answers at this point, but we’re excited to share what we’re learning with you.
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