World Happiness Report 2023 45 this spectrum, spanning about 40 places, from the most unequal relative to life evaluations (the United States, with an equality gap 19 places below the life evaluations ranking), to Greece at the other end, with an equality ranking of 36 and a life evaluations ranking of 58. The Nordic countries are even more closely aligned, with all having high rankings for both equality and life evaluations. Figure 2.3 has several panels showing global inequality trends for life evaluations, emotions, and other key variables from the outset of the Gallup World Poll in 2005-2006 through 2022. For life evaluations, in Panel (a), we present the median response along with the means of happiness in the happier and less happy halves of the population. We also present two measures of the frequency of misery, which we define in two alternative ways. The first is the share of respondents giving answers of 3 and below, while the second is the share giving answers of 4 and below.30 Growth in either of these shares reflects a general lowering of life evaluations or an increasing concentration of responses at the bottom end of the distribution. The happiness gaps between the two halves of the population provide a good measure of trends in the inequality of well-being, while the misery ratios reveal the extent of very low life evaluations. The overall mean, illustrated as a dashed green line, shows how remarkably resilient global happiness has remained throughout the pandemic. For emotions, as shown in panels (b) to (d) in Figure 2.3, we pair one positive and one negative emotion in each panel. The fact that all of the positive emotions are more frequent than the negative ones helps to keep the two parts of each panel separate. Even for the less happy half of the population the frequency of each negative emotion is less than the frequency of the corresponding positive emotion. In panels (e) through (g) we pair one social pillar of well-being and one measure of benevolence in each panel, again contrasting the mean response in the more and less happy halves of the population.31 The measures of benevolence illustrated by dashed lines in these panels have surged worldwide in the last 3 years—especially helping a stranger. Year after year we have found that generosity is a meaningful predictor of happiness. Our measure of generosity is based on the frequency of charitable donations in a given country, shown in panel (f) (see Technical Box 2). The growth in the broader set of benevolence measures helps explain the resilience of life evaluations during the pandemic. We expand on this theme further in the third section of this chapter. Figure 2.4 disaggregates Figure 2.3 Panel (a) by region to show, for each of ten global regions, the mean life evaluations of the happier 50% and the less happy 50%, and our two measures of misery. The first panels show continued convergence between Western and Eastern Europe, mainly comprising rising life evaluations and falling misery shares in Central and Eastern Europe, with the gaps between the top and bottom halves fairly constant, except for a recent widening of the gap in Western Europe. Among the Asian regions, misery shares have been falling in East Asia, fairly constant in Southeast Asia and growing in South Asia. Misery shares are lowest in Western Europe and the other group of Western industrial countries. There have been numerous studies of how the effects of COVID-19, whether in terms of illness and death or living conditions for the uninfected, have differed among population subgroups. The Gallup World Poll data are not sufficiently finegrained to separate respondents by their living or working arrangements, but they do provide several ways of testing for different patterns of consequences. In particular, we can separate respondents by age, gender, immigration status, income, unemployment, and general health status. Previous well-being research has shown subjective life evaluations to be lower for those who are unemployed, in poor health, and in the lowest income categories, with the negative effects being less for those living where social trust is The Nordic countries all have high ranks for both happiness and equality.
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