Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Increasingly Happy Russians Catching up to Americans

In the last 10 years, Russia is the 20th most improved country in terms of population satisfaction. With American happiness going down, the two may soon converge.
Is the world ready for melancholic Americans and smiling Russians?
This article originally appeared at Irrussianality

In recent posts I have linked to surveys showing that Russians are increasingly happy. Further evidence for this comes with the publication of the 2015 World Happiness Report. According to this, Switzerland is the happiest country in the world, while most of the top 20 countries are in Western Europe and North America. Russia is in the middle of the pack, being ranked number 64.
This is not a particularly high ranking, and indicates that Russians still do not enjoy the same quality of life as people in the West. However, the situation is getting better. A second table in the report measures changes in happiness relative to the time period 2005-2007. This places Russia 20th in the world in terms of improved happiness.
In the same period, according to the report, many Western states became substantially less happy, especially Italy and Greece, but also including the United States of America. Thus, while Russians are still not on average as happy as Americans, they are, according to this report, catching up.



http://russia-insider.com/en/yet-more-happiness/6188

No comments:

Post a Comment