World Happiness Report 2023 52 social support and cut the size and eliminated the significance of the unemployment interaction. The general conclusion remains, in the light of three years of pandemic experience, that for the major demographic groups surveyed, the pre-pandemic distributions were unaffected by COVID-19, except as reported above. But it is important to remember that some of those most affected by COVID-19, including the homeless and the institutionalized, are not included in the survey samples. Should we be sceptical about this relative stability of the distribution of well-being in the face of COVID-19? Is it possible that the relative stability of subjective well-being in the face of the pandemic does not reflect resilience in the face of hardships, but instead suggests that life evaluations are inadequate measures of well-being? In response to this possible scepticism, it is important to remember that subjective life evaluations do change, and by very large amounts, when many key life circumstances change. For example, unemployment, perceived discrimination, and several types of ill-health, have large and sustained influences on measured life evaluations.34 Perhaps even more convincing is the evidence that the happiness of immigrants tends to move quickly towards the levels and distributions of life evaluations of those born in their new countries of residence, and even towards the life evaluations of others in the specific sub-national regions to which the migrants move.35 In the next section we shall show that the post-2014 conflict in Ukraine was accompanied by a 2-point increase in the life evaluation gap between Ukraine and Russia. This demonstrates again that life evaluations can indeed shift in the face of material changes. Further, there is also evidence of increasing levels of pro-social activity during COVID-19, as shown in Figure 2.6 in the next section. As discussed later in Chapter 4 of this report, and in Chapter 2 of World Happiness Report 2022, these increases in benevolence are likely to have cushioned life evaluations during the COVID-19 years. Fig. 2.4: Regional trends in life evaluations for the more and less happy halves of each country (population weighted to calculate regional averages) continued Note: 95% confidence intervals calculated by nonparametric bootstrap (with 200 draws) clustered at the country-year level. 0 .1 .2 .3 .4 .5 .6 .7 .8 .9 1 Misery share 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Cantril ladder 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2020 2022 Sub-Saharan Africa Top half mean Bottom half mean Overall mean Median Share <= 3 Share at 4
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