Let me simply state my skepticism of sociology and its accompanying qualitative polls. When a quadrapalegic person on welfare can be happy and a multi-millionaire in perfect health can be unhappy....

Oh come on. Set aside the your skepticism and champion Archaea's cause ... dismantle the Analytic Social Psychologist's study!

Where is the experimental design?

How was the survey administered?

What questions were asked?

How was the weighting of each question determined?

What kind of survey stratification was used (income, geography, ethnicity, age, sex, etc etc)?

What was the margin of error?

How many responses were available (eg. yes/no, agree/neutral/disagree, etc etc etc).

What was the sample size of St. Kitts versus the US?

How much variability is there in individual response? Monday, someone might be pretty happy and then Tuesday really sucks and kind of mutes their outlook on life.

The reasons why qualitative studies are inherently less reliable than quantitative studies should be more than self-evident.

Sorry, but your opinion is insufficient to make the argument --even in this forum-- that the study is flawed or erroneous.

I provided a link to the paper on the subject. It is also indicated on the site that one can email a request for more data. One of the links includes this text:

“The projection, which is to be published in a Psychtalk in March 2007, will be presented at a conference later in the year. Participants in the various studies were asked questions related to happiness and satisfaction with life. The meta-analysis is based on the findings of over 100 different studies around the world, which questioned 80,000 people worldwide. For this study data has also been analysed in relation to health, wealth and access to education.

Whilst collecting data on subjective well-being is not an exact science, the measures used are very reliable in predicting health and welfare outcomes. It can be argued that whilst these measures are not perfect they are the best we have so far, and these are the measures that politicians are talking of using to measure the relative performance of each country.”

Furthermore your credibility on the subject of qualitative vs quantitative data is hampered by your past arguments in support of Crowton.

And this, folks, is why Denmark, Bhutan, Malta, and the Seychelles are experiencing such a high influx of immigration.

Meanwhile here in the US, we may need to put up fences just to keep our own unhappy people here.

Who knew?

Oh the irony of wanting to put up fences in comparison to countrys that already have significant institutional barriers to immigrantion in place ... Think about it Tex, think about it ;)

Do I really care if Brunei/Bhutan/St. Kitts and Nevis have greater happiness than the US? Would a lifelong US citizen really find any added measure of happiness in those countries, let alone Denmark?

I've lived overseas for 20 years, so you can't accuse me of blind provincialism, I have ample real life experiences to compare against my time in the United States.

Is a happiness score of 273 in Denmark that much higher as to alarm me about the US only scoring a 247; only 10% lower than the Danes? Nonsense.

Maybe the relative lack of happiness in the US is simply due to the unrealistic expectations its citizens have of how their lives should turn out due to living in the ultimate "land of opportunity" whereas Danes are "just happy to be here".

If the Bhutanese knew by moving to America you could get high speed Internet and all the free porn you can stand, I suspect "happiness" level would experience a sharp decerase.

They are going though a massive recession due to a real estate bubble that popped due to easy credit ... hmms sounds like what may happen somewhere else

The Danes healthcare isnt free... they pay taxes for it. The big thing with Denmark and Sweden is that their population is by a far majority white. Hence, healthcare is a lot easier to administer because white people on average are healthier than any other race. Its like Utah if you adjust for population size Utah has the most profitable health care systems in the country. The biggest reason being is there are a lot of caucasians there.