World Happiness Report 2023 40 from the same respondents as the life evaluations and are thus possibly determined by common factors. This is less likely when comparing national averages because individual differences in personality and individual life circumstances tend to average out at the national level. To provide even more assurance that our results are not significantly biased because we are using the same respondents to report life evaluations, social support, freedom, generosity, and corruption, we tested the robustness of our procedure by splitting each country’s respondents randomly into two groups (see Table 10 of Statistical Appendix 1 of World Happiness Report 2018 for more detail). We then examined whether the average values of social support, freedom, generosity, and absence of corruption from one half of the sample explained average life evaluations in the other half of the sample. The coefficients on each of the four variables fell slightly, just as we expected.16 But the changes were reassuringly small (ranging from 1% to 5%) and were not statistically significant.17 Overall, the model explains average life evaluation levels quite well within regions, among regions, and for the world as a whole.18 On average, the countries of Latin America still have mean life evaluations that are significantly higher (by about 0.5 on the 0 to 10 scale) than predicted by the model. This difference has been attributed to a variety of factors, including some unique features of family and social life in Latin American countries.19 In partial contrast, the countries of East Asia have average life evaluations below predictions, although only slightly and insignificantly so in our latest results.20 This has been thought to reflect, at least in part, cultural differences in the way people think about and report on the quality of their lives.21 It is reassuring that our findings about the relative importance of the six factors are generally unaffected by whether or not we make explicit allowance for these regional differences.22 We can now use the model of Table 2.1 to assess the overall effects of COVID-19 on life evaluations. A simple comparison of average life evaluations during 2017-2019 and the pandemic years 2020-2022 shows them to be down slightly (-0.09, t=2.2) in the western industrial countries23 (for which the 2022 data are complete) and slightly higher than pre-pandemic levels in the rest of the world, where there are fewer available surveys for 2022. Our modelling suggests that the growth of prosociality cushioned the fall of life evaluations in the industrial countries, and made it a net increase in the rest of the world. Thus if we add an indicator for the three COVID years 2020-2022 to our Table 2.1 equation, using data only from the three COVID years and the three preceding years, it shows no net increase or decrease in life evaluations.24 This suggests, in a preliminary way, that the undoubted pains were offset by increases in the extent to which respondents had been able to discover and share the capacity to care for each other in difficult times. We shall explore other evidence on this point in the next section. Inequality of happiness before and during COVID Last year, we traced the longer-term trends in life evaluations and emotions as part of our review of the first ten years of the World Happiness Report.25 This year we dig deeper to search for trends in the distribution of well-being. Our main technique is to calculate trends in all these same variables separately for the more and less happy halves of each national population. We are thus able to show in Figure 2.2 the size of the happiness gap between the more and less happy halves of the population, ranking from the smallest to the largest gap. A higher ranking means a lower happiness inequality.26 The gap between the mean life evaluation among the top and bottom halves of the distribution has several notable features. First, the gap has a maximum value of 10 and a minimum of zero, Inequality measured by happiness gaps differs by a full five points between the most equal and the least equal countries.
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