The happiness factor

Submitted by Lindsay
Melbourne Australia!

It is a Poor Heart that Never Rejoiced - proverbs

(5/2019) The 2019 United Nations’ World Happiness report has just been published, and America is continuing to fall down the ratings, now at 19th. This is the lowest ranking ever, although France and Belgium slipped further to 24 & 25, mostly due to the refugee problem and the economy. The United Kingdom, home of hyper-observation and the anxiety of Brexit, comes in at 15.

The parameters they use are: measured income; social support; life expectancy; freedom; generosity; and trust in government. The leading 50 countries are rated, and the results are both unexpected and surprising.

The Scandinavian countries continue to be the top five, with the first surprise being New Zealand in at number 8, followed by Canada, Austria and Australia. Thailand comes in last, which is not to say it’s the worst, just that it made it into the top 50.

Why Scandinavia? They certainly come top in social support and trust in government, and are high in life expectancy; the one that is most telling, however, is generosity. This is actually a mark of community involvement, of local cohesion, and concern for your neighbour. When you can walk down the street and be pleasantly greeted by strangers who would sooner take you for a coffee than ask what your affiliations are or have their hand out, you have to feel safer, more included, and far more likely to help someone down on their luck.

The higher the ranking, the more the views of the citizens are taken seriously, the more they will be believed by authorities, and their confidence in the probity of government greater than elsewhere.

In many respects they are the opposite of America both in appearance and practice. They don’t crave headlines, talk nonsense, or are noticeably xenophobic. And above all, the government trusts the citizens. That is a rarely considered parameter, but is one of the foundations of true democracy, one that is both easily eroded and yet exploited - except when the citizenry are well educated. In fact, the higher the ranking the greater the level of education, and this is one of the easiest parameters to achieve. It just takes a system that puts state funded education way ahead of private money, with state funded teacher training and sufficient resources to maintain the standards.

Profit gained from education is not monetary, it is the knowledge that the ability to work together, to know that productivity and cooperation is more important than being top dog and producing bigger dividends. This in turn reduces stress levels, and stress is the enemy of happiness - and it is also one of the things that promotes drug use and criminality. As well, justice is not politicised and remains out of private hands. Their strengths are the people and what they offer and can do. They are not exploited, lied to or taken as idiots.

Fundamental to all this is something that will, I am sure, grate, make you gnash your teeth and stop reading: They have some of the highest tax rates in the world.

Yes, they have socialist leanings - and the people like it. This is the opposite of you, who believe that everyone has the right to do their thing without government interference or, let’s be honest, paying your hated tax obligations.

Scandinavia and many other countries hold that paying tax, (providing it is equitable, where the rich pay a higher percentage of tax the those lower down) is a right. The government provides welfare, pensions, healthcare, most education, all the while running essential services.

Like many countries around the world, they do not see profit as the be all and end all of existence. They have kept capitalism in its box, not allowing it to grow, cancer-like, to feed off the health and well-being of the citizens. One could say they are, in fact, more civilised.

That is not to say that America is all-bad; it most certainly is not, but it has dropped down the rankings because too many things have declined: Trust, social support, freedom, male life expectancy, and generosity. So has measured income, although that’s hard to see when more and more people are becoming million-billionaires. Yes, minimum wages have risen in many places, but it’s the middle class that have languished. They have suffered from losing out to the plutocrats; the poor have not got poorer because they are at rock bottom already.

Australia fell one place because of the idiotic changes of government and anger over the removal of moderates. We are somewhere between you and the Scandinavians, with a far right group that must have come from the detritus of the tea party; their hero is Steve Bannon, and they want to implant their egos into the Australian mind. With an election here in a month, the conservatives are lead by a Pentecostal smiler who is one of them.

There is one strange feature of this index. It shows that this right wing conservatism pulls the ratings down – across all the countries assessed. As parts of Europe have become more anti-democratic, the happiness of the people has fallen, and like you, their suicide rates have shot up.

You may think that a happiness index is a bit silly in this day of conformity, but it is one way of gauging the state of the nation, and much more accurate than the hyperbole that flows from to presidential machine.

When you are happy, when you feel it in your bones and the sun shines, then you can clap your hands in a celebration of living.

I’ll shake on that, from Australia to you.