This
is official - Denmark is the happiest country in the world and our school
friend Elsa is soaking it all up
Peter Wu & Others
19 September 2013
| Peter Wu: | Our school friend Denny has just been to two of the happiest countries in the world, namely Denmark and The Netherlands. No wonder he is grinning from ear to ear. They say that if you mix with positive people, you become positive too so mixing with happy people must make you happy too. Interesting the top 10 countries are what I call affluent countries so money must to some extent contribute to the feeling of being happy. Do you not feel happy when you have tens of millions of Euros in your pocket as petty cash? Shhhhh…I can quietly tell you Elsa has more – much much more. I know, I just hacked into her bank account in Switzerland to have a look. Note that Mexico has piped the US by one rank in the happiness scale. I have no idea why. Mexico is what I call the Basket Case country so for them to pip the US says something about the state of mind of the Mexicans. May be the Mexicans who were interviewed for this survey had a few Tequilas too many! The bottom-dwellers are almost all in Africa. Why? Is Africa the unlucky continent? Why do African children always feature in adverts for aids, relief and human suffering, year after year, for ever? Has God been unfair to them by assigning them to be born in Africa?Are they not capable of self-help and self-strengthening like the Chinese have? Syria is second last in the list. I am sure when President Bashir al Assad finally gets rid of the human cockroach infestations, the country will be happier. To see the details, follow this link… www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/revealed-the-worlds-happiest-nations-as-political-upheaval-sees-egypt-fall-in-rankings-8806336. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/revealed-the-worlds-happiest-nations-as-political-upheaval-sees-egypt-fall-in-rankings-8806336.html
Ranking of happiness: Top 20 |
| Bob Choi: | I used to conduct surveys for a living, so believe me when I say: surveys (especially opinion surveys) are as reliable or meaningful as sales talk from a used car salesman. With some skills, one can design questions that will get whatever kind of results that one wants. Forget about "happiness surveys". How do you define "happiness" anyway? We can learn more about the state of mind of the people by looking at some hard data such as suicide rates or incidence of violence. If we use these data as a guide, we will see very different rankings. |
| Simon Tham: | How come the U.K does not figure in either being happy or unhappy? Is it their stoic character or is it simply they can't be bothered to be happy or miserable? |
| Peter Wu: | Like Bob said, you can be whatever you want to be when you conduct a sample survey. This is made worse by survey interpretations. If 50% each of the respondents say they are happy or unhappy, how do you interpret the findings? Is it a case of the glass being half full or half empty? In this survey, I believe they interviewed half of the UK respondents in the pubs (where people are mostly tipsy to punch drunk) and the other half outside the pubs (where they are either on party drugs or half stoned out of their brain). The survey results therefore became ‘un-interpretable’, hence their mediocre ranking. One fatal flaw about sample survey is non-response errors which nobody – I mean nobody – addresses. In order to give it a scientific ring, the survey reports always tell you about sampling error, precision and degree of confidence but I’ve never come across one which tells me about non-response errors. Tell you what, I have used this fatal flaw to attack a couple of market research companies at their presentations, to really put them on the spot. So keep this trick under your sleeve and only use this when they are an ass-hole to you. I can assure you that you will blow them away – every time. |
| Bob Choi: | Well, there is a seldom-used procedure called "non-response adjustment" that can be applied to the survey data.It requires the researcher to re-visit or recall a sample of those who refused to respond in the main survey.Using the data from this "previous non-responding respondents", one can adjust the data of the main survey.Throughout my career as a market researcher, there were only a handful of times when I needed to mention this procedure at a presentation.None of the clients had ever insisted on having it done.In other words, none of them called my bluff...ha! |