The World Happiness Report 2023 differs significantly from the Global Happiness 2023 survey from Ipsos in their rankings of countries. Let’s dig a little deeper to see what’s going on.
First, a couple of notes must be made about WHR. One is that WHR exhibits a clear anti-China bias, calling China a repressive, undemocratic state.
The other is that WHR is dishonest in its list of 137 “countries.” WHR includes Hong Kong and Taiwan as countries when everybody knows they’re part of China. Only in an endnote does WHR suggest that HK and Taiwan are “regions.”
Therefore, I will remove HK and Taiwan from the list for my analysis.
I will break the list into quintiles (Figure 2.1). I will do the same for the Ipsos survey (page 5).
In the Ipsos ranking, China, Saudi Arabia, India, and Brazil are in the top quintile. Australia is in the second quintile. USA, France, Sweden, and Canada are in the third quintile. Singapore and UK are in the fourth quintile. Germany, Japan, and South Korea are in the bottom quintile.
In WHR’s ranking, Sweden, Australia, Canada, USA, Germany, UK, France, and Singapore are in the top quintile. Saudi Arabia, Japan, and Brazil are in the second quintile. South Korea and China are in the third quintile. India is in the bottom quintile.
These countries switch quintiles between the two studies. These are significant discrepancies.
So the question is, which happiness report is more reliable and trustworthy? Given the dishonesty and prejudice of WHR, I would have to give the nod to Ipsos’ Global Happiness 2023.
The economies of Germany, UK, and France are in the toilet right now because of Russian sanctions, and the USA is a hot mess with increasing economic inequality and poverty, with a financial crisis looming, with a plethora of social problems. And yet, they're all in the top quintile in WHR??? Something is wrong.