What makes us happy? GDP or Generosity

World Happiness Report

The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey on the state of global happiness. It ranks 156 countries by their happiness levels, reflecting growing global interest in using happiness and substantial well-being as an indicator of the quality of human development. (Source – Wikipedia)

The report contains various quality of life factors such as Social Support, Healthy Life Expectancy, Freedom, Generosity, GDP per Capita, Absence of Corruption along with the global Rank and Happiness Score.

The World Happiness Report is a global initiative of the United Nations where the rankings are based on Cantril Ladder survey. The report is published by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Analysis of the World Happiness Report

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

My project analyses the reports from the years 2015 to 2019. The dataset has been downloaded from the Kaggle Website (https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/unsdsn/world-happiness).

The changes in Quality of Life factors are compared over the 5 years span. Also, the correlation between the Happiness Score and other factors is analysed.

Based on the given data, I would like to know the answer to one of the most important questions:

"Does our happiness depend on money or generosity?"

Cantril Ladder

The Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale was developed by Dr. Hadley Cantril. In the survey, the respondents are asked to think of life as a ladder (Cantril Ladder) and evaluate it from 10 to 0.

At a high level, the areas are divided into 3 categories:

Thriving
Struggling
Suffering

The score of 0 means the worst possible life.

One can refer to the below links for more details on the Cantril Ladder and Gallup Survey for Happiness Report:

Cantril Ladder: https://innobatics.gr/en/cantril-ladder/
Gallup Poll: https://news.gallup.com/poll/122453/understanding-gallup-uses-cantril-scale.aspx

# Import display library
from IPython import display

# Load the image
display.Image("https://innobatics.gr/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Cantril-Ladder-english.png", width = 800, height = 300)