Happiness under Capitalism

Across the planet over the last half century, countries have taken different paths in how they

• use their natural resources
• prioritize biological versus manufactured productivity
• prioritize local systems versus international trade
• prioritize sustainability versus capitalism

How do these choices interact with the countries' values and reported happiness?

The summary below visualizes 139 countries on several economic indicators alongside their happiness survey scores. At first glance, there is a very clear overall pattern: the higher the economic indicator, the higher the country's happiness. Hover over a line in the parallel coordinates plot below to see the name and the exact economic indicators for the corresponding country.

How do biocapacity, trade, consumption, and happiness interact?

Does this surface hypothesis—the more economic activity by any measure, the happier the country—hold up under closer scrutiny? This work-in-progress report aims to answer this question and explores a few different ways to visualize the data.

Does money buy happiness at the global scale?

World Happiness Report

This World Happiness Dataset from Kaggle shows happiness scores for over 150 countries from 2015-2019 measured and calibrated via the Gallup World Poll. The contribution of six core factors to happiness in each country is also provided: *economic production

• social support
• life expectancy
• freedom
• absence of corruption
• generosity

For now I log the 2019 values only to see how they correlate with more detailed production/consumption/ecological data.

World Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity

This National Footprint Accounts dataset from Kaggle represents the ecological footprints (EF) and biocapacity (biological productivity) of 195 countries over almost 50 years (1967 through 2014). For each country, for each year, there are 5 ecological footprint metrics:

• biocapacity
• consumption
• exports
• imports
• production

Each metric tracks the global hectares of land required to support this aspect of the footprint. A global hectare is a unit of land normalized across the globe for productivity, such that a global hectare of the most productive crop land is functionally equivalent to a hectare of entirely dry desert. Consumption is defined as follows: EF Consumption = EF Production + EF Imports - EF Exports Further, each metric is reported both per capita ("PerCap") and total ("TotGHA").

Each metric captures several land types:

• crop land
• grazing land
• forest land
• fishing ground
• built-up land
• carbon (offsetting or producing land)
• total (sum of the above)

Note that in some cases, Production is the same as Biocapacity, meaning that capacity is fully utilized.

This gives 10 metrics * 7 land types, plus GDP and population, or 72 datapoints per country per year. Missing values (or ones deemed unreliable by the creation committee) are represented with -1. You can read more here.