A new “happiness” report organized by a left-wing academic reports that Denmark is the happiest nation on Earth. The least happy country is Burundi, and the US ranks 13th just behind Austria but ahead of Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, the UK, Spain and France.
Based on data developed by the Gallup World Poll, the survey looked at GDP per capita, healthy years of life expectancy, social support, corruption in government or business, personal generosity, and trust.
The report was organized by Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, who also runs something called the Earth Institute, a program at Columbia University dedicated to advocacy on global warming and “sustainable development.” Sachs has been deeply entrenched at the UN in advocating for abortion as a method of economic development. Very controversially the Vatican has been working with Sachs in recent months on development issues.
The big change in this year’s report is that is called happiness inequality. “We have previously argued that happiness, as measured by life evaluations, provides a broader indicator of human welfare than do measures of income, poverty, health, education, and good government viewed separately,” says the report. They “now argue that inequality of well-being provides a better measure of the distribution of welfare than is provided by income and wealth…”
The authors argue, “In the world as whole, in eight of the 10 global regions, and in more than half of the countries surveyed there was a significant increase in the inequality of happiness. In contrast, no global region, and fewer than one in 10 countries showed significant reductions in happiness inequality over that period.”
One of the most alarming aspects of the report, released this week in Rome, Italy, is that people are happiest who have no or fewer children. Children are a negative indicator for happiness all over the world but most especially in richer countries. The report does not explain why this might be so, sleeplessness and the common difficulties of having babies in the house, however, the survey also shows that happiness with children increases in old age and in widowhood. The new anti-child data will no doubt be used for further suppression of fertility.
Denmark, a nation of no more than 6 million citizens, has among the lowest fertility rates in the world.
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