India - a growing discontent?

There is an outfit that publishes the World Happiness Report.  The primary measure is the "Cantril Life Ladder" (from Hadley Cantril, Patterns of Human Concern, 1965).

As far as I can tell, some 1000-odd people of age 15+  in each of 156 to 158 countries are asked by Gallup polling each year the following question, which in English reads:

“Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”

The average for the country is supposed to reflect its level of happiness.   The Cantril Life Ladder is available for India from 2006 onwards.  The report also includes measures that one might think affects the answers given on the Cantril Life Ladder, such as per capita income and life expectancy, and survey measures such as perceived freedom to make life choices, perceived corruption, and so on.  India is generally improving on these measures over the 2006-2018 time period.  One interesting thing is that countries with poorer improvement on these measures can be happier than India.



Assume for now that the data is fine: that the surveys are comparable across years, a representative sample of the population is chosen, there are no language issues in translating the question into Indian languages, etc. etc.

India is increasingly unhappy. The dots show India's Cantril Life Ladder values; the line is a trend line inserted in Microsoft Excel; the numbers are India's rank (higher is happier) in the 156 countries covered in the world happiness report issued the next calendar year.  So, e.g., in the 2019 report, India is ranked 140th of 156 countries. (There have been 155, 157 and 158 countries in some years.).

Might it be the case that the aspirations of Indians are rising much faster than they can be met?   That is, they can increasingly imagine that a better life could be in reach, and so they rank their current personal situation lower?

If I have the time and energy, I will see if the data is there to make a similar chart for China.  Might make for an interesting comparison.

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GWP = Gallup Worldwide Polling
waves = rounds of polling
Data and captions taken from the World Happiness Report 2019.

GDP per capita is in terms of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) adjusted to constant 2011 international dollars, taken from the World Development Indicators (WDI) released by the World Bank on November 14, 2018.  The equation uses the natural log of GDP per capita, as this form fits the data significantly better than GDP per capita.

The time series of healthy life expectancy at birth are constructed based on data from the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Health Observatory data repository, with data available for 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2016. To match this report’s sample period, interpolation and extrapolation are used.

Social support is the national average of the binary responses (either 0 or 1) to the Gallup World Poll (GWP) question “If you were in trouble, do you have relatives or friends you can count onto help you whenever you need them, or not?”

Freedom to make life choices is the national average of binary responses to the GWP question “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?”

Generosity is the residual of regressing the national average of GWP responses to the question “Have you donated money to a charity in the past month?” on GDP per capita.

Perceptions of corruption are the average of binary answers to two GWP questions: “Is corruption widespread throughout the government or not?” and “Is corruption widespread within businesses or not?” Where data for government corruption are missing, the perception of business corruption is used as the overall corrup- tion-perception measure.

Positive affect is defined as the average of previous-day affect measures for happiness, laughter, and enjoyment for GWP waves 3-7 (years 2008 to 2012, and some in 2013). It is defined as the average of laughter and enjoyment for other waves where the happiness question was not asked. The general form for the affect questions is: Did you experience the following feelings during a lot of the day yesterday?

Negative affect is defined as the average of previous-day affect measures for worry, sadness, and anger for all waves.

This last chart is the only one that shows a trend in the direction that goes along with India's increasing lack of happiness.