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Too bad that extra income isn't reflected in national happiness scores [1], the ultimate KPI that anyone really cares about, deep down.

[1] https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2023/WHR+23.pdf



Would you care to precisify which part of those two-column 166 A4-pages supports your claim?


Page 36, "Figure 2.1: Ranking of Happiness based on a three-year-average 2020–2022"


That chart doesn't support your claim that higher household income isn't reflected in happiness scores. Multiple factors are at play in those scores. The report mentions a few, but I couldn't find how much each correlates with the self-reported life evaluation.

As a funny BTW, the country used in this thread as a direct comparison, Germany, is indistinguishable from the US in this table.


His point was that it's not the only factor, and if you read that paper he cited there is a breakdown of exactly what factors contributed to happiness.

A social support network was one of the highest ranked, much higher than GDP per capita (the wealth of a nation, which can be used as a proxy for personal income if you have a Gini index to weight it against).

Finland comes out well ahead even if you weight it against Gini, and Finnish developers aren't earning more than US folks by a country mile.




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