Looking for happiness? Try Bhutan

January 06, 2008|Eric Weiner, Globe Correspondent

To the long list of maps - topographical, political, demographic - you can add one more: attitudinal. Researchers at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom recently published the first world map of happiness. Using data from the emerging science of happiness, they created a color-coded atlas of bliss, a topography of the human spirit, from Algeria to Zimbabwe.

After ignoring the subject for a century or so, psychologists and other academics are going gaga over happiness, or subjective well being, to use the preferred term. They're churning out hundreds of papers on the subject each year. There are conferences, a Journal of Happiness Studies, and a World Database of Happiness. So why not a map?

To ascertain a person's happiness level, the bliss-ologists employ a rigorous and empirically unassailable method: They ask, "Overall, how happy would you say you are these days?" The results are remarkably consistent over time and, the researchers insist, are accurate. After all, they argue, who better to gauge your happiness than you?

Plot the results, throw in some color coding and - voila! - you have a map. The results are at once expected and surprising. For one thing, it turns out that, newspaper headlines notwithstanding, most of the world is relatively happy, scoring 5 on a 10-point scale. Yet happiness, like oil and other natural resources, is not distributed evenly. Some places are blessed with an abundance. Others . . not so much. At the bottom of the ladder are countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the former Soviet republics, and parts of Eastern Europe.

And the happiest nations? They are, quite literally, all over the map. I spent a year exploring the world's happiest places for my book "The Geography of Bliss." I used the science of happiness as a guide, as well as some hunches I had. Here are some random thoughts on the world's hot spots of happiness.

Switzerland