Why Is Pakistan Happier Than India? (And Other Such Questions) — Part 1
The World Happiness Report is an annual publication that ranks over 150 countries based on how happy the citizens living in them are.
But what does it mean to be happy? How do you even begin to quantify such an abstract concept that the Greeks and Absurdists alike have struggled to define for years?
And even if one is able to quantify happiness, how does one explain that the average Pakistani (rank #67) is 33% happier than the average Indian (rank# 140)?
And what is the secret to happiness anyway? Do the Nordics know something we don’t?
Are poorer countries happier, or is the adage false— money can buy you happiness?
I take a data-driven approach to answering these questions and more in the following two-part blog.
#1 What Does It Mean To Be Happy?
The Dutch sociologist, Ruut Veenhoven, has defined happiness as an “appreciation of one’s life as-a-whole,” while Aristotle has called it an activity rather than a state of being. Camus has deemed it the inevitable — we must “imagine Sisyphus happy!” — but what does it mean, really, to be happy?
According to the World Happiness Report, happiness is a quantity that can be broken down around the following six features:
- GDP per capita, which is defined in terms of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) and adjusted to constant 2011 international dollars.
2. Social Support, which is the national average of answers to the binary (yes/no) question:
“If you were in trouble, do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them, or not?”
3. Life Expectancy, which is a value based on information from the WHO Global Health Observatory data repository, with data available for 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2016.
4. Freedom to make life choices, which is the national average of answers to the binary question:
“Are you satisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?”
5. Generosity, which is the national average of answers to the binary question:
“Have you donated money to a charity in the past month?”
6. Perceptions of corruption, which is the national average of answers to two binary questions:
“Is corruption widespread throughout the government or not?” &
“Is corruption widespread within businesses or not?”
The happiness score (0–10) itself is not based on these six quantities, known as “sub-factors,” but is instead based on what is called the Cantril Ladder. The Cantril Ladder is a theoretical question posed thus:
Linearly Modeling Score & Sub-Factors
I have created an OLS regression model to see how these sub-factors interact with each other, and most importantly, with the happiness score itself. My findings are presented below:
What do these numbers mean? And how accurate is this model?
Let me begin with the second question first: This model has an R-squared value of 77%, which means that this model is able to predict 77% of the variability in the data. Put simply, the accuracy of this model is 77%.
Though this isn’t the best model out there, it is certainly good enough for our purposes, i.e., to understand the relationship between score and sub-factors.
Now, the first question: what does it all mean? Let’s go step-by-step.
- Intercept: The intercept is the score value for what is known as a “Dystopian” country. In other words, a country with zero GDP, no social support, terrible life expectancy — and so on — will have a happiness score of 1.86 out of 10.
You might be curious about the average score for all countries at this point. Well, the mean value for all countries is 5.407 with a variance of 1.23. For context, the United States (rank #19) has a happiness score of 6.89, and Finland (rank #1) has a score of 7.76. South Sudan (rank #156) has a score of 2.85. - Estimates: Every variable has an associated estimate value, which is shown in the second column above. The way to understand estimates (also known as coefficients) is this: for each unit increase in a variable, let’s say GDP per capita, the score increases by the estimate value.
For GDP per capita, the estimate is 0.74, which is also the lowest of all estimates. This tells us two things: first, each time the GDP goes up by one whole unit, the happiness score increases by 0.74 points; and second, when it comes to happiness, GDP is actually the least important factor out of the six sub-factors.
To contrast, Freedom to make life choices, which has a coefficient of 1.53, is the most important when it comes to predicting happiness.
I have also built an Artificial Neural Network model to predict happiness scores with an accuracy of nearly 90%. For those interested, this model can be found here.
#2 Why Is Pakistan Happier Than India?
India and Pakistan, a story that began in 1947 when a new Pakistan was born out of newly independent India. The two countries, almost like brothers, have always been compared. So, it is apt that there be a comparison also when it comes to happiness.
It turns out that Pakistan (rank #67), a nation so often in the headlines for the wrong reasons, is happier than India (rank #140). I found this so odd for multiple reasons.
- GDP: India has a GDP of $2.86 Trillion. Pakistan, on the other hand, has a GDP of $278 Billion. India is the economically superior country — by a long shot. Then is it so that money can’t buy you happiness? We’ll see…
- Democracy: India is also the world’s largest democracy, but more importantly it is also a stable democracy.
Pakistan is a democracy, but one that has so often had to fight against military coups that have tried to rob democracy away from Pakistan.
The fact that a stable democracy is unhappier than an unstable one is something odd, to say the least. - Life Expectancy & Freedom: You’d expect the life expectancy to be low in India — and it is, if you compare it to the United States for instance — but compared to Pakistan, India offers a higher life expectancy and better freedom to make life choices, which as we’ve established, is the most important factor when it comes to happiness.
Let’s take a closer look at the two countries and their respective sub-factors:
The next natural question would be: has Pakistan always been happier than India?
To answer this, let’s look at the rankings for these countries for the past five years:
It is clear from the above graphs that not only is Pakistan happier than India, but that general happiness is decreasing at a steady rate in India, while it seems to be going up in Pakistan.
If I plug information into my OLS model from the previous section, the results I get are interesting, too.
According to my model, India should have a happiness score of 4.78 based on five of six sub-factors. Just to remind you, India currently has a score of 4.015 — so, the prediction isn’t too off.
Pakistan, on the other hand, should have a score of 4.53 according to my model. 4.53 is lower than India’s predicted score of 4.78, and it is significantly lower than Pakistan’s actual score, which is 5.63.
Therefore, Pakistan is actually happier despite the data being in favor of India.
So, what’s going on?
My gut tells me that Indians are just more cynical than Pakistanis. Therefore, despite having a better socio-economic environment, they are unhappy. I say this since the happiness score is based on the Cantril Ladder and not on the six sub-factors themselves.
But this can’t be it! It’s just too outlandish.
The data I have is clearly incomplete and there’s another factor that I am missing. What factor? I wasn’t sure, so I had to look elsewhere.
According to Forbes, the answer is income inequality:
Over the last four decades, India’s top 1% earners’ share of the country’s income rose from roughly 7% to 22%, as of 2014. Meanwhile, the income share of the bottom 50% earners declined from roughly 23% in the early 1980s to 15% in 2014.
And secondly, “Pakistan has been getting ahead of India in spreading the wealth to the masses.” Pakistan has done this through strategic government spending in areas of public welfare programs.
This is information that I obviously have no expertise in, and I don’t really have the data to explain why Pakistan is happier, but after some research it appears that it really boils down to these two things: government spending and income inequality.
Though personally, I think my idea of Indians being a more cynical people is the more interesting argument— but again, I don’t have the data to begin to support that argument.
So, that’s it as far as India and Pakistan go.
In the next installment of this blog, I will talk about Nordic countries and why they have consistently been in the top ten of the World Happiness Report. I will also talk about the relationship between economic prosperity and happiness.
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Thanks for reading, folks.
