And Who Are The Happiest People In The World?

These days, it would appear to be the Danes, tied with the Swiss. Last year it was the Puerto Ricans. Or maybe the Australians. Three years ago, Nigerians came in first. It's a bit disorienting. This guy says happy people are crazy: they're burdened with "major affective disorder, pleasant type."

In the New Statesman, Nick Cohen tries to sort it out with the help of the economist Andrew Oswald:

Novelists, poets and psychologists have always thought about happiness. Oswald has found a way of counting it. And this miserabilist approach, this calculus of contentment whose utilitarianism seems against all the spontaneity we associate with happiness, may be a great intellectual breakthrough, precisely because it translates feelings into figures.

If the political interest and the sales of popular "happiness economics" books are a guide, Oswald has provided a tool that will change the way people think, as his once sceptical colleagues are beginning to realise.

"I just have to click on the internet now, and every week there are new papers on happiness written by people I've never met, never heard of," he says.

Indeed.

Here's the World Database of Happiness. Here's Happiness and Public Policy.

I'm feeling postively chipper.