A new study finds Third Worlders back home in their native lands tend to be happier than the populations of immigration-destination countries like the US and UK.
This is an intriguing study because most contemporary social scientists define happiness purely in terms of preference satisfaction. This was Hobbes' definition of happiness and it related happiness to wealth or more specifically power, both of which are necessary to satisfy our desires/preferences. This is also why almost all of these studies rank the wealthiest countries as happiest. This was in contrast to the classical notion of happiness which defined it as performing one's function or achieving one's telos. I can't tell if this study is teleological, but I doubt it. My guess is that they just have an eccentric way of defining preference satisfaction (e.g., they include their own subjective preferences about what a good life looks like under the guise of vague questions about preference satisfaction). In any case, I seriously doubt that Indonesia is the happiest country in the world (from what I know about it, which, admittedly, is not a lot).
It's interesting that Egypt and Tanzania are in the bottom twenty countries in the World Happiness Report yet both are midrange(and above Australia and the USA) in The Global Flourishing Report.
In the United States we tend to see ourselves in relation to the accomplishments of others. If we weren’t made aware of the mass amounts of wealth and celebrity that others have we might not notice that we are pretty well off.
The Scandinavians seem to think that they are living better than most and are satisfied with what they have. That might apply to almost every country unless they are starving, getting shot and have nothing.
I read your subtitle and thought, as Ronald Colman in "Around the World", you didn't read that in the Times, but you sorta did. The data is there, and no one else notices.
Have they done studies on Most Delusional Countries?
I read decades ago that contentment with a lowly station is a Christian virtue (obviously now forgotten if not reversed), and ended up putting that to the test.
Swedish problems: you want to leave your apartment to wash your clothes, but your neighbors have booked up all the good time slots on the communal laundry machine, so you’re stuck there till midnight.
"But, a lot of people around the world rather like their home countries and would have reasonably happy lives at home."
The money sentence.
"I guess Indonesians must like Indonesia because they don’t leave much. Then again, it’s a vast place with more islands than you could visit in a lifetime, so maybe Indonesians with wanderlust just move a thousand miles, much like Americans seldom move out of the USA."
Even though its majority Muslim, they are Asian Muslims, so they don't have much of a proclivity to be the stabby, shooty, blow-upy type of Muslims. It helps when your country is basically Margaritaville. I'm sure that, like even Muslim countries, there are socially acceptable ways to have a good time with indigenous sources of alcohol/other mind-altering substances that are tolerated to a certain degree. When I lived in Turkey for a year, I was surprised at how many of my Turkish military colleagues loved their liquor, since it is prohibited under Islam. Then again, most of my colleagues were born and raised in the Western half of Turkey, which has a more "European" culture (and toleration of bending religious taboos), than the much more devout Eastern half.
Studies like these reflect the prejudices of the studiers. And most of these studies are performed by lefties. Thus, if a study like this was done for Americans, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont would tend to be at the top of a happiness list and West Virginia, Mississippi and Louisiana would be ranked near the bottom. But I've never heard of an unhappy Cajun and Vermont has a six-month Winter.
These happiness studies are stupid. Way too many variables (cultural, economic, demographic, political, etc) and people adjust their expectations. I suppose some of these researchers are sincere, but seems like agenda driven social science to me.
My understanding is that when Indonesians emigrate for work they tend to go to the Persian Gulf countries as they are muslim. Wikipedia says Saudia Arabia has 857,000 Indonesian citizens alone.
In contrast the USA has 145,000 Indonesians.
The Netherlands has 1,700,000 people with Indonesian ancestry due to the colonial relationship. The Van Halens' mother was Indo which is someone who is half Dutch and half Indonesian. The actor Mark-Paul Gosselaar who played Zach Morris on the " Saved By The Bell" also has an Indo mother.
Seems like a tough thing to measure because what drives a lot of satisfaction with life revolves around whether you feel you are meeting your culture's expectations in terms of benchmarks of status and respect. A white lady in Manhattan may consider a mid-six figure job, a 1,000 SF apartment, and a single kid who attends the right prep school the pinnacle of happiness, whereas a woman somewhere in West Africa feels like she's made it when he has her 9th son for her husband who has a plot of land and a respectable herd of goats. Both of these scenarios are totally unobtainable to these ladies' theoretical counterpart (even if they desired them), but provide a sense of well-being in their respective cultural contexts.
So without knowing the answer, I wonder if the "flourishing" index is really a list of more economically and socially flat societies where a broad share of the population feels they have enough status for respect in their communities versus places in which people feel a lack of status relative to others more acutely.
There is more than one direction in which the arrows of causality can point. Angela Nagle has written about the pernicious impact of growing up in a place where the highest ambition of the young and clever is to leave. Anyone who doesn't always has that nagging sense of "if you're so smart, why aren't you in Canada (or similar)?", plus life is more fun with all your closest friends in it rather than with most of them living abroad.
If you are a young person in a place that nobody much leaves, that source of nagging comparison just disappears right there as does that source of loneliness. So while it is no doubt true that leaving is an indicator that a place is bad in some way, everybody staying in a place can be a source of happiness in its own right (whether or not the place in question is objectively a good place to be)
Long ago I spent a couple years in Argentina, and a few times I met Argentines who had lived in the United States and then returned home. They seemed to have created an unresolvable state of dissatisfaction for themselves: they had experienced things they liked about the each of the two countries, but they couldn't have the advantages of both at the same time.
This is an intriguing study because most contemporary social scientists define happiness purely in terms of preference satisfaction. This was Hobbes' definition of happiness and it related happiness to wealth or more specifically power, both of which are necessary to satisfy our desires/preferences. This is also why almost all of these studies rank the wealthiest countries as happiest. This was in contrast to the classical notion of happiness which defined it as performing one's function or achieving one's telos. I can't tell if this study is teleological, but I doubt it. My guess is that they just have an eccentric way of defining preference satisfaction (e.g., they include their own subjective preferences about what a good life looks like under the guise of vague questions about preference satisfaction). In any case, I seriously doubt that Indonesia is the happiest country in the world (from what I know about it, which, admittedly, is not a lot).
It's interesting that Egypt and Tanzania are in the bottom twenty countries in the World Happiness Report yet both are midrange(and above Australia and the USA) in The Global Flourishing Report.
At least one of the reports must be useless.
Perhaps both.
As Mr. Campbell writes, perhaps both.
In the United States we tend to see ourselves in relation to the accomplishments of others. If we weren’t made aware of the mass amounts of wealth and celebrity that others have we might not notice that we are pretty well off.
The Scandinavians seem to think that they are living better than most and are satisfied with what they have. That might apply to almost every country unless they are starving, getting shot and have nothing.
perhaps off topic, but was not Indonesia dutch colony afor japan unpleasantness?
Yes. There’s 1,7 million Indonesians in the Netherlands.
There’s 10 million in Malaysia. 1.5 million in Savdi Arabia (likely guest workers),
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Indonesians
There are 1.7m with some Indonesian heritage. They tend to intermarry a lot with indigenous Dutch.
OK, not surprising.
The Dutch tried to get it back until 1949.
So it sounds as if the US receives the people who dislike their countries. But why during protests they wave their home flags?
I can’t wait to point this out at my upcoming liberal family gathering:)
Now that's funny!
I knew a Finn. He said that an extroverted Finn stared at somebody else's shoes.
I remember the joke
How do you know if a Finn is in Love?
He stops looking at his shoes and starts looking at hers.
That Finnish nightmares site is funny.
I read your subtitle and thought, as Ronald Colman in "Around the World", you didn't read that in the Times, but you sorta did. The data is there, and no one else notices.
Have they done studies on Most Delusional Countries?
I read decades ago that contentment with a lowly station is a Christian virtue (obviously now forgotten if not reversed), and ended up putting that to the test.
Swedish problems: you want to leave your apartment to wash your clothes, but your neighbors have booked up all the good time slots on the communal laundry machine, so you’re stuck there till midnight.
"But, a lot of people around the world rather like their home countries and would have reasonably happy lives at home."
The money sentence.
"I guess Indonesians must like Indonesia because they don’t leave much. Then again, it’s a vast place with more islands than you could visit in a lifetime, so maybe Indonesians with wanderlust just move a thousand miles, much like Americans seldom move out of the USA."
Even though its majority Muslim, they are Asian Muslims, so they don't have much of a proclivity to be the stabby, shooty, blow-upy type of Muslims. It helps when your country is basically Margaritaville. I'm sure that, like even Muslim countries, there are socially acceptable ways to have a good time with indigenous sources of alcohol/other mind-altering substances that are tolerated to a certain degree. When I lived in Turkey for a year, I was surprised at how many of my Turkish military colleagues loved their liquor, since it is prohibited under Islam. Then again, most of my colleagues were born and raised in the Western half of Turkey, which has a more "European" culture (and toleration of bending religious taboos), than the much more devout Eastern half.
Wasting Away in Javarittaville.
Studies like these reflect the prejudices of the studiers. And most of these studies are performed by lefties. Thus, if a study like this was done for Americans, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont would tend to be at the top of a happiness list and West Virginia, Mississippi and Louisiana would be ranked near the bottom. But I've never heard of an unhappy Cajun and Vermont has a six-month Winter.
These happiness studies are stupid. Way too many variables (cultural, economic, demographic, political, etc) and people adjust their expectations. I suppose some of these researchers are sincere, but seems like agenda driven social science to me.
My understanding is that when Indonesians emigrate for work they tend to go to the Persian Gulf countries as they are muslim. Wikipedia says Saudia Arabia has 857,000 Indonesian citizens alone.
In contrast the USA has 145,000 Indonesians.
The Netherlands has 1,700,000 people with Indonesian ancestry due to the colonial relationship. The Van Halens' mother was Indo which is someone who is half Dutch and half Indonesian. The actor Mark-Paul Gosselaar who played Zach Morris on the " Saved By The Bell" also has an Indo mother.
Seems like a tough thing to measure because what drives a lot of satisfaction with life revolves around whether you feel you are meeting your culture's expectations in terms of benchmarks of status and respect. A white lady in Manhattan may consider a mid-six figure job, a 1,000 SF apartment, and a single kid who attends the right prep school the pinnacle of happiness, whereas a woman somewhere in West Africa feels like she's made it when he has her 9th son for her husband who has a plot of land and a respectable herd of goats. Both of these scenarios are totally unobtainable to these ladies' theoretical counterpart (even if they desired them), but provide a sense of well-being in their respective cultural contexts.
So without knowing the answer, I wonder if the "flourishing" index is really a list of more economically and socially flat societies where a broad share of the population feels they have enough status for respect in their communities versus places in which people feel a lack of status relative to others more acutely.
There is more than one direction in which the arrows of causality can point. Angela Nagle has written about the pernicious impact of growing up in a place where the highest ambition of the young and clever is to leave. Anyone who doesn't always has that nagging sense of "if you're so smart, why aren't you in Canada (or similar)?", plus life is more fun with all your closest friends in it rather than with most of them living abroad.
If you are a young person in a place that nobody much leaves, that source of nagging comparison just disappears right there as does that source of loneliness. So while it is no doubt true that leaving is an indicator that a place is bad in some way, everybody staying in a place can be a source of happiness in its own right (whether or not the place in question is objectively a good place to be)
I’ve lived in a fair few places and travelled to a few more.
Of the more obscure nationalities I’ve met include several Paraguayans, a Bhutanese, a Faroe Islander, a Botswanan, a Laoatian, and a Cape Verdian.
I don’t think I’ve ever met an Indonesian though.
Long ago I spent a couple years in Argentina, and a few times I met Argentines who had lived in the United States and then returned home. They seemed to have created an unresolvable state of dissatisfaction for themselves: they had experienced things they liked about the each of the two countries, but they couldn't have the advantages of both at the same time.