The Pursuit of Happiness. In 1776, 13 colonies adopted this statement into their Declaration of Independence. In 2006, Will Smith portrayed a man wholeheartedly focused on this journey in a movie with this title. On March 20, 2020, the World Happiness Report published their eighth edition in their pursuit of explaining global happiness.
And yet, many scholars have highlighted the issues that follow attempts to quantify happiness, arguing that the fickle term is rarely representative of the concepts being measured. Others further stress the significance of recognizing and adopting more inclusive ontologies. By visualizing and contextualizing happiness data in terms of existing literature, our project challenges the notion that a universal definition/quantification of happiness even exists. We explore the influence of the World Happiness Report on global perceptions of happiness and how power and silence interact with the factors in the report to explain “happiness.”
This heat map visualizes the relationship between a country’s happiness score and its geographic location for the 2020 World Happiness Report. We use diverging colors centered at the average global happiness score (~5.473), to more easily identify and compare countries’ happiness relative to each other.
To get an idea of what we aim to explore, consider the video above which provides an overview of what the World Happiness Report covers by asking the question, “Is Finland really the happiest country in the world?” Similarly, is happiness really the right word for what the report examines?