The World Happiness Report 2018

The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness.

The World Happiness Report 2018, which ranks 156 countries by their happiness levels, and 117 countries by the happiness of their immigrants, was released on March 14th at a launch event at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Vatican. A subsequent event occurred on March 20th, celebrating International Day of Happiness at the United Nations.

In reading the Executive Summary of this report, two things stood out for me:

“The importance of social factors in the happiness
of all populations, whether migrant or not, is
emphasized in Chapter 6, where the happiness
bulge in Latin America is found to depend on
the greater warmth of family and other social
relationships there, and to the greater importance
that people there attach to these relationships.

The Report ends on a different tack, with a
focus on three emerging health problems that
threaten happiness: obesity, the opioid crisis,
and depression. Although set in a global context,
most of the evidence and discussion are focused
on the United States, where the prevalence of
all three problems has been growing faster and
further than in most other countries.”