World Happiness Report 2023 44 sharing the same scale as individual life evaluations. Second, the overall mean life evaluation in a given year is equal to the arithmetic average of the top and bottom half means. This permits the evolution of inequality and mean life evaluations in a region to be shown in the same figure. Third, the gap shows a lot of variation among countries, covering a full five point range between the most and least equal countries.27 The equality rankings shown in Figure 2.2 are quite different from the life evaluation rankings shown in Figure 2.1. There is of course a positive correlation in general between the two rankings, since greater equality of well-being is something valued by survey respondents, and hence influences average life evaluations.28 But there remain substantial differences, since inequality is only one among many factors influencing how people evaluate their lives as a whole. When the rankings in the two figures are compared, there are eighteen countries where the equality ranking is 35 or more ranks below their ladder ranking. At the other extreme, there are another eighteen countries where the equality ranking is 35 or more places above their happiness ranking. The former group, where equality of happiness is lower than indicated by the happiness rank, includes Mexico and all six Central American countries in the rankings, three Persian Gulf states (the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia), and eight from four other global regions. The contrasting group, where the equality ranking is 35 or more places higher than the ladder ranking, includes Afghanistan and Lebanon, the two least happy countries, where almost everyone is very unhappy, leading to low values for both life evaluations and the gap between the two halves of the population. The group also includes four countries in Southeast Asia, three current or former members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, six African countries, of which three in North Africa, plus Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, and Iran. The 24 WEIRD countries29 are all located towards the middle of Photo Marivi Pazos on Unsplash
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