World Happiness Report 2023 17 Concern for happiness and the alleviation of sufferinggoes back to the Buddha, Confucius, Socrates and beyond. But looking back over the first ten years of the World Happiness Report, it is striking how public interest in happiness and well-being has grown in recent years. This can be seen in newspaper stories, Google searches, and academic research.1 It can also be seen in books, where talk of happiness has overtaken the talk of income and GDP.2 Although this growth in interest started well before the first World Happiness Report in 2012, we have been surprised at the extent to which the Reports have appeared to fill a need for a better knowledge base for evaluating human progress.3 Moreover, policy-makers themselves increasingly talk about well-being. The OECD and the EU call on member governments to “put people and their well-being at the heart of policy design.”4 And five countries now belong to the Well-being Economy Government Alliance.5 The Basic Ideas A natural way to measure people’s well-being is to ask them how satisfied they are with their lives. A typical question is, “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life these days?” People reply on a scale of 0-10 (0= completely dissatisfied, 10= completely satisfied). This allows people to evaluate their own happiness without making any assumptions about what causes it. Thus ‘life satisfaction’ is a standard measure of well-being. However, an immediate question arises of what habits, institutions and material conditions produce a society where people have higher well-being. We must also ask how people can gain the skills to further their own long-term (or sustainable) well-being. The World Happiness Reports have studied these questions each year, in part by comparing the average life satisfaction in different countries and seeing what features in the population explain these differences.6 The findings are clear. The ethos of a country matters – are people trustworthy, generous, and mutually supportive? The institutions also matter – are people free to make important life decisions? And the material conditions of life matter – both income and health. These are broadly the conditions identified by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics.7 He identified a person who was high in these attributes – character virtues and sufficient external goods – as achieving “eudaimonia.” In particular, he stressed the importance of the person’s character, built by mentorship and habits, and he famously defined eudaimonia as “the activity of the soul according to virtue”. In other words, high eudaimonia required a virtuous character, including moderation, fortitude, a sense of justice, an ability to form and maintain friendships, as well as good citizenship in the polis (the political community). Today we describe the outward- facing virtues of friendship and citizenship as “pro-social” attitudes and behaviour. For the Greeks, and us, living the right kind of life is a hard-won skill. The Greeks used the term arete, which means excellence or virtue. Individual virtue Photo by Prince Akachi on Unsplash
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