The Gallup Global Emotions Report 2024, released last Tuesday, begins with a provocation. By trying to measure the intangibles of life like feelings and emotions, the survey seeks insights into the health of societies that, As the report’s authors themselves note, “Traditional economic indicators like GDP were never intended to catch on.”
Thankfully, the report does not offer another critique of Why GDP is not A perfect index for progress. Instead, it reports the annual state of two indicators—one for positive sentiment, the other for negative—that can complement GDP by trying to give us a quick idea of how society is actually doing.
The results are amazing… well.
Perhaps you have felt that The world is accelerating in chaos; Heard more chatter about experts who think AI will lead to human extinction; Or thought that even if not, our continued failure to adequately deal with climate change Either way the job will get done. Or maybe you have children, and we’re especially fascinated by how confused we are when it comes to the mental health of young people.
Against doom
The media is known for its negative bias. I could rewrite that Dummer-esque paragraph about the world accelerating into gloomy chaos in its mirror image, churning out incredibly exciting achievements, ideas and success stories that instill a sense of optimism. In fact, we’ve got a whole package like that here.
Still, the Gallup report’s topline results look pretty good. Positive sentiment reached a global score of 71 out of 100, the highest since the start of the pandemic. And negative sentiment fell for the first time since 2014. Among all age groups, the younger ones were the best. They experienced more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions than anyone else. And in both directions, this has been the case since measurements began in 2006.
And to make things even more interesting: GDP tracks nicely with it Some assumptions of well-being, a highly economically developed country not found at the top of Gallup’s Positive Experience Index. The list is dominated by countries from Latin America and Southeast Asia. Although happiness levels can be compared across countries with different cultures, This still raises questions about the emotional resources of industrialized nations, but it also reflects significant challenges in determining how to measure something as vague and intangible as how we actually feel.
Different methods paint different pictures of well-being
Each measure of well-being is biased in its own way. The Gallup sentiment survey, which surveys nearly 1,000 respondents from each of the 142 countries it covers, focuses on two measures. The positive experience index is the average of several questions:
- Did you feel well rested yesterday?
- Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?
- Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?
- Did you learn or do something interesting yesterday?
- Did you enjoy much of the day yesterday?
Higher scores mean positive sentiment is more widespread across a given country. The Negative Experiences Index has a similar structure, asking whether respondents experienced physical pain, anxiety, sadness, stress, or anger the previous day. According to this measure, the happiest countries in the world are places like Paraguay, Indonesia and Thailand.
But wait. Perhaps you’ve heard that Finland actually Happiest country in the worldAnd so it has been for seven consecutive years.
That comes from the ranking World Happiness Report, which also uses data collected by Gallup, but on a different question. It uses a question known as focusing on life satisfaction rather than everyday experiences Cantril ladder. It asks people to imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero to 10, with the top “representing the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder representing the worst possible life for you.” Then, they ask people to sit on the stairs.
When you look at happiness like this, you get Scandinavian dominance:
If you ask people to rank themselves on a life satisfaction scale, you’ll get different answers than if you ask the same group of people about their feelings the day before. By conjuring up the image of a social ladder, the life satisfaction method can actually measure something close to it social status Than happiness, argues my colleague Segal Samuel. “The toxicity of social comparison may also help explain the observation that higher GDP does not always correlate with increased happiness,” he wrote. “The US has high GDP, but it has extremely high inequality. So many Americans are comparing themselves to other, wealthier Americans — and becoming more miserable as a result.”
Measuring everyday emotional experience can avoid concerns of biasing results toward the condition. But it can miss a bunch of other considerations associated with a happy life or course progress. Amartya Sen, renowned development economist, argued That reducing welfare to pleasurable mental states “can be very misleading, as it may fail to reflect a person’s actual deprivation.” People are remarkably adaptable, and can still find and report pleasurable experiences while living in situations of extreme poverty, limited opportunities for education and social mobility, or political oppression.
Interestingly, not even from one country G7 — an informal group of economic powerhouses that meets annually to coordinate global governance — can be found at the top of both lists. If a G7 were formed based on happiness rather than economic development, it would be made up of countries like Paraguay and Indonesia, not the US or Germany. If we had a life satisfaction G7, it would mostly be Scandinavia.
The paradox of vibecession among young people
As Gallup’s report revealed, young people were more positive than anyone else for nearly two decades, and they quickly returned to pre-pandemic levels of feeling good. Even zoom in on the United States, where youth anxiety and depression are rampant growth after the past two decadesRegardless, positive experiences are more prevalent among young people than anyone else, the Gallup report says.
Part of this discrepancy may boil down to methodology. The survey defines “youth” as anyone between the ages of 15 and 30 The report contains no data on adolescents under the age of 15, where a good deal of youth mental health crises (which mostly seem to be limited, curiously, In English speaking countries) is being
But it’s still quite interesting that young people between the ages of 15 and 30 consistently appear to be more positive and resilient than any other group. Where do we hear about the ghost of doom?
For example, A 2021 global survey Among 10,000 young people aged 16-25, 75 percent think that “the future is scary,” 55 percent agree that “the things I value most will be destroyed,” and 56 percent agree that “humanity is doomed.”
Stack these two surveys next to each other — positive emotions are prevalent among most young people, but they also feel that everything around them is falling apart — and you get a tension that looks strangely like vibration.
Below the pulse title, still description ongoing Really good on paper but an economics paradox really bad According to the people who live in it, something more subtle seems to be going on. People are reporting that they are doing well personally. It’s everything else — the local economy, the national economy — it’s terrible.
Global emotions seem similar to the paradox. The prevailing mood goes something like this: “I’m fine, but humanity is doomed.”
Emotional wealth
Projects that try to expand our repertoire of indicators that tell us something How we are doing as a civilization is worth celebrating. But we should also ensure that we learn our lessons from the days of GDP.
What makes GDP a constant? problematic The measurement itself has little to do with an error or bias. It’s a very useful measure of economic activity (and indeed tracks quite well with life satisfaction). But even the man who coined it, economist Simon Kuznets, warned in 1934 that “the welfare of a nation . . . can scarcely be inferred from the measure of the national income.”
Nevertheless, GDP has become the short hand of progress, turning it into something it never was. Similarly, surveys that attempt to track intangible aspects of social health are surprising complements to GDP. But the vagueness of the mind, by their very definition, resists measurement. if i feel The most intense, pure, concentrated form of pleasure Did I ever know yesterday, could a survey question really capture that? That being said, we should take these findings lightly and look at wellness from other perspectives as well.
Still, emotion surveys are already yielding a handful of mysteries to explore. Why are some of the most developed countries rich in positive emotions? Are young people doing a little better than we thought? What lessons can we learn from Paraguay or Finland for good governance?
We may be coming out of a time when metrics like GDP dictated the structure of our society Looks good on paper. By turning intangibles into tractable data points, however imperfectly, perhaps these kinds of surveys will help bring our attention back to the judgment and design of societies by validating the direct emotional experience of engaging in what it really feels like to be a part of them. Cities, people, technology and landscape. Maybe then, we can all join young people in their apparently resilient and positive experience of the world.
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