Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
We really are a nation of sad sacks
South Africa is 101 on list of happy countries
THE sun shines most of the year, we have an awesome cricket team and our girls (and boys) are hot, but South Africans are just not happy.
We are not as happy as those northern Europeans with their endless grey skies and temperatures which dip well below freezing.
We are not even as happy as the Libyans, who manage to find more joy in their uncertain post-Muammar Gaddafi world than we do.
The World Happiness Report 2017 has been released and out of 155 countries, South Africa is 101st. Good going, considering we moved up 15 places from last year. At No 1 is Norway, followed by Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland.
Those countries, according to the report, ranked highly on factors found to support happiness: caring, freedom, generosity, honesty, health, income and good governance.
And it is not just this report which has pegged South Africans as a nation of sad sacks. The Bloomberg economy misery index had us at No 3 in 2015. Last year, the Cato Institute in the US ranked SA at five on its misery index.
Our misery is blamed on high unemployment and a faltering economy.
The World Happiness Report relied on 3 000 respondents from 155 countries. They were asked questions that evaluate their lives related to six factors: GDP per capita, healthy years of life expectancy, social support, corruption, perceived freedom to make life decisions and generosity.
The problem, believes Steuart Pennington, who runs the sagoodnews website, is South Africans are unlikely to give a true reflection of themselves in a survey. “We think that things that happen here don’t happen elsewhere. But I don’t think we’re an unhappy lot,” he said.
Professor Darma Mahadea, of the school of accounting, economics and finance at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said it was surprising SA had improved its ranking.
“There is also a deficit on level of trust with policy-makers and the government on service delivery and corruption, high levels of crime, all of which detract from happiness,” Mahadea said.
Measuring the state of happiness is becoming the next frontier among economists, who are finding that crunching numbers from GDPs and plotting the rise and fall of currency values aren’t enough to provide a full picture of a country’s economic well-being.
“Increasingly, happiness is considered to be the proper measure of social progress and the goal of public policy,” the report states.
“As demonstrated by many countries, this report gives evidence that happiness is a result of creating strong social foundations. It’s time to build social trust and healthy lives, not guns or walls,” said co-author Jeffrey Sachs.
Mahadea believes happiness and economic growth are strongly linked: “As a country gets richer with progress of economic growth, its citizens are happier, more so if they have warm family, social and community relationships.”
The problem, he believes, is that SA has an economic growth rate less than 0.5%, lower than the population growth rate and where a quarter of the labour force is unemployed.
Pennington, however, reckons that often it is the questions asked in these surveys that elicit pessimistic answers.
“They will ask questions like are you more optimistic of the future than you were five years ago?” he said.
But it’s not only income that buys joy. “Material things and sensual, hedonistic pleasures cannot give permanent happiness,” said Mahadea. “The search for happiness goes on.”