By James Lee
Every year the United Nations comes out with a world happiness report. They give each country a score based on how their citizens rate their own lives and every year certain countries like Finland rank near the top. My goal was to look into different reasons for why these countries are consistently the happiest. The data set came with some different variables that likely explain why some counties are happier than others. There was clear correlation between happiness some of the features like Life Expectancy and Freedom Score.
You would definitely expect life expectancy and freedom to have strong upward trends by some of the other variables didn’t explain happiness quite as clearly. Perception of corruption trended slightly downward but wasn’t a very strong trend and the countries generosity score had no clear trends. This may be because both of these are pretty ambiguous ratings, even more so than ratings like a countries freedom score. It is very hard to quantify the generosity or corruption of a country whereas many countries have very clear laws that either enforce or restrict freedom.
Average Happiness Score By Region
Each region ended up with fairly similar mean happiness scores. The most notable regions were North America and Western Europe who had the highest means, and South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa who had the lowest means. One explanation for this may be the climate of these areas. Sub-Saharan Africa has a very unforgiving climate especially relative to North America and Western Europe who have climates that are very good for growing crops. This has allowed western civilization to advance quicker which has lead to a higher quality of life for these people.
Education Spending
After looking at the features supplied by the happiness report data I wanted to look deeper into different possible causes for each countries happiness scores. I found a data set that gave each country’s government expenditure on education as a percent of their GDP. I decided to use data from 2017 partially because a lot of the countries were not up to date with the data and partly to give a little time for the spending to have an effect on peoples lives.
Plotting the data showed there was a positive trend between education spending and happiness.
Military Spending
I also found data on each country’s government expenditure on military as a percent of their GDP. Similar to the data on education I decided to use data from 2019.
There was no obvious trend in the data but the regression was slightly negative.
Analysis
Finland is consistently one of the happiest countries in the world and this is likely due to the fact the are close to the lead in every category that is correlated to happiness. Finland out performs the US in life expectancy, freedom, perception of corruption and education spending. The US out performed Finland in Generosity but that showed to have no real positive trend in happiness. The US also spends much more on military than Finland but the data shows that if this has an effect on happiness it is a negative one. So, according to the data the US should focus more on education and health care rather than their military in order to become a happier nation.
