World happiness, ranked

David Blanchflower and  Alex Bryson in this voxeu article:

Economists have shown increasing interest in using wellbeing metrics to refine public policies. This column combines data from a poll covering two million individuals in 164 countries and a survey of two and a half million Americans focusing on eight measures of wellbeing, both positive (life satisfaction, enjoyment, smiling, being well-rested) and negative (pain, sadness, anger, worry. The US does surprisingly well, with nine of the list’s top ten ‘happiest’ places, while the Nordic countries, which traditionally rank highly using life satisfaction measures, do not rank as highly with other measures.

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