Happiness, like love, is perhaps one of the least understood and most sought-after emotions and experiences in human life. There are many inspiring teachings about achieving individual happiness. It is worth considering how happy entire countries are on a collective scale. Let's visualize the findings of the 2024 World Happiness Report, a long-standing effort to measure, quantify, and compare happiness levels around the world, using data from Gallup.
How Happy Are People Around the Globe?
The Gallup World Poll surveys approximately 1,000 respondents from almost every country on a range of issues. One of these is the evaluation of their current life on a scale of 0 to 10.
The World Happiness Report then averages the life evaluation scores for each country over a three-year period (2021-2023 for this year's edition) and ranks them from highest to lowest.
Happiest and Least Happy Countries in 2024
The top 10 happiest countries, led by Finland, Denmark, and Iceland, have remained largely unchanged from the 2023 results. However, there are a few new states in the top 20. These include Costa Rica and Kuwait, accompanied by the departures of the US and Germany from the same ranking.
A correlation between population size and happiness can be clearly seen if we look at the top 20 places in the happiness ranking. In the top 10 spots, only the Netherlands and Australia have a population of over 15 million. I
n the top 20, only Canada and the United Kingdom have a population of over 30 million. Afghanistan is ranked last. The state has the lowest happiness on the scale (1.7). It is also the only Asian country in the bottom 10, which is mainly populated by African nations.
Happiness Levels in North and South America
As mentioned earlier, Costa Rica, ranked 12th, is the happiest country in Central and North America.
It outperforms Canada by 0.1 points or three positions.
The report highlights an interesting phenomenon for the two most developed economies in the region, the US (23rd) and Canada (15th).
In these two states, older people are significantly happier than younger people.
This is a pattern also observed in Northern Europe.
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