The happiness bonus

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the World Happiness Report, annually compiled by a group of happiness experts affiliated with various universities around the world, including Columbia University, the London School of Economics and the University of British Columbia. The aim of the initiative is to place people's happiness at the center of global development processes and to provide measures capable of capturing its determinants and variations over time.

This year's report confirms the trend of the previous year, showing how in 2021 people's assessments of their own lives remain resilient despite the pandemic crisis.
In the last 10 years, in fact, people's satisfaction with their lives, averaged over the approximately 150 countries in which the measurement was carried out, has remained almost constant.
Positive emotions, such as smiling during the previous day and having the feeling of having fun, have been quite stable over time, even during the pandemic years. Negative emotions, on the other hand, such as worry, sadness, anger and stress have increased over the past decade, particularly during 2020 (the first year of Covid), before improving slightly in 2021.
More to the point, anger remains much less frequent, with no significant trend changes. Stress was fairly constant for a few years starting in 2006, but then increased steadily, faster than worry or sadness, with its strongest increase in 2020.
Worry and stress increased 8% in 2020 and 4% in 2021 compared to pre-pandemic levels.

A comforting figure, on the other hand, is that of generosity. The most notable change during Covid lies, in fact, in the global surge in 2021 of different forms of solidarity: in every region of the world, there is There has been a large increase in the percentage of people who donate money to charity, help strangers and volunteer.
Such forms of altruism have also given a boost of happiness to both donors and recipients, as well as those who have limited themselves only to observing them from the outside. In fact, they register on average more positive assessments of their own lives, most likely because they felt gratified in seeing the people in their community more willing to help each other in times of need.

Other findings of the report demonstrate how Covid has reduced the importance of income for satisfaction with one's life; the pandemic, however, has increased both the advantages of having someone to count on in times of difficulty , either the negative effects of having a health problem or being unemployed. In other words, after Covid, negative experiences for our happiness seem to have been compensated by having someone we can count on, rather than by income.

Covid has also demonstrated the crucial importance of trust for human well-being. In general, some scientific studies have shown that communities with high levels of trust are generally much more resilient in the face of tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, etc. Trust and cooperation facilitate quick and collaborative responses, which also improve citizens' happiness and demonstrate to people the extent to which others are inclined towards solidarity. According to the authors of the report, therefore, there is a "happiness bonus" when you have the opportunity to see the goodness of others in action.
Furthermore, data from the report show that deaths from Covid in 2020 and 2021 were significantly lower in countries with greater trust in public institutions.

This result is in line with other studies that have shown that regions with high social capital have been more successful in reducing infection and mortality rates. One possible explanation is that some aspects of social capital related to altruistic and cooperative behaviour, trust in others and above all in institutions favor behaviors that would help a society to comply with the rules aimed at stopping the spread of the virus (e.g. social distancing, the use of masks).


Perluigi Conzo
NP October 2022

To read and possibly download the World Happiness Report: https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2022/