Quote:
Originally Posted by tooblue
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.
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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".