pursuit of happiness?

Malaysia can do a lot better in the World Happiness ranking as the country is free from disasters, rich in resources, besides being blessed with a multi-racial, multi-religious society.

AMONG the earliest songs that I learned as a boy scout in school was this: “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.”

It was indeed a happy song at an age when happiness was so much easier to define.

With age, comes the realisation that happiness is hard to find. It is such a subjective thing and seeking out its sources isn’t easy.

Perhaps the saying was created to make the poor feel good but for ages, philosophers, religious leaders and cultural icons have offered this answer: Money can’t buy happiness.

It may be so. The United Nations’ first ever World Happiness Reportreleased last week attests that it is not just all about the cha-ching cha-ching and ba-bling ba-bling, as Jessie J puts it in her Price Tag.

It found that generally, richer countries tended to be happier but wealth was not the sole defining factor for happiness.

The 158-page report, commissioned for the UN Conference on Happiness, was based on responses from a worldwide survey from 2005 to the middle of 2011 to determine the happiness level of countries.

The rankings take into account several factors, including health, family, job security as well as political freedom and government corruption.

“Political freedom, strong social networks and an absence of corruption are more important than income in explaining well-being differences,” the report stated.

Disneyland may be touted as the “Happiest place in the world” but when it comes to countries, it’s Denmark.

The Danes are blissfully above Finland, Norway, Holland, Canada, Switzerland, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia and Ireland in the rankings.

The United States is 11th while the Britain notched 18th – below the United Arab Emirates and just above Venezuela.

The common thread in the countries ranked at the top was good governance and confidence in public institutions.

The world’s poorest countries are at the bottom of the scale. Togo (home of rich EPL football star Emmanuel Adebayor) is the unhappiest place in the world, followed by Benin, Central African Republic, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Comoros, Haiti, Tanzania, Congo (Brazzaville) and Georgia.

Malaysia is two-thirds above the rest. We are supposedly the world’s 51st happiest country, a spot over Thailand but way below Singapore’s position of 33rd.

For comparison, Indonesia was judged at 83rd, below Myanmar which ranked 74th.

The report states that a country’s GDP is crucial but it is not all that is important.

So what’s the big deal about the report? It is significant because of the increasing number of economists, political scientists and psychologists involved in exploring the measure of happiness.

Happiness, or rather “Happynomics”, has become the hottest topic in contemporary social science.

Politicians around the world have started to pay more attention and many countries, including Australia, China, France, Germany and Britain have included happiness and national well-being into policy formulation frameworks.

“Happynomics” is coming to the fore at a time when developed countries, including the US, are being seen as sliding socially, economically and geopolitically.

In the report’s introduction, economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s The Earth Institute, said the world had come to a stage where “the lifestyles of the rich imperil the survival of the poor”.

He said the US is a key example of this “age of stark contradictions”, describing it as a place where affluence has been accompanied by widening social and economic inequalities, high levels of uncertainties and anxieties, declining social trust and low levels of confidence in government.

He cited obesity, adult-onset diabetes, tobacco-related illnesses, eating disorders, addictions to shopping and TV, as examples of disorders of development.

We are still a long way from being a developed country but all of the above sound familiar, don’t they?

But as Asli Centre for Public Policy studies chairman Tan Sri Ramon Navaratnam has noted, it is a pity that we rank only number 51 out of 156 countries in the report.

Most Malaysians would agree with him that we can do a lot better as the country is free from natural disasters, rich in natural resources and land for habitation and cultivation, besides being blessed with a multi-racial, multi-religious society.

To go back to the happiest nation in the world, the 5.5 million Danes have one probable grumble: high taxes.

They pay probably the highest taxes in the world – between 50% and 70% of their incomes but they don’t complain because the government covers healthcare and education and spends more on children and the elderly than any other country.

The high taxes have another upshot. With a banker taking home as much money as an artist, people don’t choose careers based on income or status.

A garbage collector can live in a middle-class neighborhood and still hold his head high.