Is the world getting less miserable?

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Hello and thanks for downloading the More Orless podcast.

With a program that looks at the numbers in the news and in life and in international polling.

I'm Tim Harford.

Things sometimes feel a little bleak when we look at the news.

Wars rage, robots rise, Marvel continues to make superhero movies.

So we were somewhat surprised when we saw a recent piece of analysis by the polling firm Gallup.

Here's the first line.

Worldwide, people in more countries are living better lives and expressing more hope for the future than they have in years.

Better lives?

Hope?

What's not to like?

But does this research add up?

So I guess the headline finding finding of our most recent research is that global levels of thriving, that is a measure that evaluates people's overall subjective well-being, that level of thriving has hit a record high in our most recent measure from last year of 33% as a global median of adults.

This is Benedict Weigers from Gallup.

He wrote that analysis.

And that has been on a steady upward trend for much of the last decade and is now 10 points higher than where things stood 10 years ago.

On what basis are they making this surprising claim?

Where are these numbers coming from?

The Gallup World Poll surveys 140 plus countries every year.

Those are typically consistent and in about 100 of them that involves working with local interviewing teams, sending people out, knocking on doors.

They are basically done face-to-face interviews, all randomly sampled so that they can be nationally representative.

In the other handful of countries, which are typically more Western, economically advanced countries, we survey those by telephone through random digit dialing.

Gallup are confident that these 140 national polls are not only large, but representative, which, well, it's never really true, but they do seem to be doing a serious job.

And the questions being asked around the world, there are lots, but only a couple of them are used to come up with this thriving measure.

To understand how Gallup think about this word thriving, which forms the core of our analysis, you've got to go back around 60 years to the east coast of the United States and a psychologist named Hadley Cantrell.

And what Mr.

Cantrell did was create the self-anchoring striving scale.

It's not the catchiest term, it sounds a little bit perhaps complicated, but it's actually quite a simple question.

It asks people to imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top.

And at the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, while the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.

And this is a really important thing about the self-anchoring name of the scale.

It gets people to think about their lives, stepping back and how they judge them in their own terms.

And these can be affected by people's cultures, their own experiences.

And what we then do is we ask two follow-up questions.

We ask on which step of the ladder people think they would stand today and on which step they would expect to be standing in five years.

And the way in which Gallup grouped people into those three categories, thriving, struggling and suffering at the bottom, is based on extensive empirical research and sort of quite logical groupings based on thousands and thousands of interviews in the United States and worldwide.

So that's the poll and the thriving.

But there is a question in our minds, because the way Benedict cut up this data, well, raises questions.

He and these headlines describe the global median of happiness.

You get this median by working out the average rate of thriving in each country and the pole, and then arranging them in a league table from most thriving to least.

The median countries are the ones in the middle, halfway between top and bottom.

That is the global median.

And the median there is currently 33%.

So what that actually looks like is Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Cyprus and Malta in 2024, those all fell at 33% thriving.

10 years previously, the countries at the midpoint, the median, were of course different.

Countries like Serbia, Mauritius, Sierra Leone, Moldova and a handful of others, all of which then stood at 23%.

Now, this way of finding the average can be very useful, especially when you have big outliers in the data set.

But in this case, it means that you're ignoring the fact that some countries are tiny and some countries are massive, and so the number of actual people thriving or not may not be well linked to this particular measure.

Reporting the global median country means treating Luxembourg and Iceland as being just as significant as India and China.

But there are many, many more people in India and China.

Shouldn't they count for more?

Why not do the average in the normal way and use population-weighted figures to work out the mean, the average thriving per person in the whole world?

I mean it's certainly a fair question

and I think you have to step back and consider what the real value and nature of the story you're trying to tell is.

And in this case, we're not trying to tell the story of a point in time measurement from one year about how happy the world is.

What we're trying to do is show how the world and countries that contribute to it have changed over time.

The global median this year was 33%.

The population-weighted average, so that's giving more weights to respondents from places like India and China, was 28%.

And that is a little bit more stable compared to the previous few years, where it's been around 27 to 28% since COVID.

But really, we see that in the years before COVID, if you take a longer-term view across either metric, whether that's the global median or the population-weighted mean, we do still see global levels of of thriving higher now than they were many years ago.

So the population-weighted average, the mean, tells you a somewhat similar story, except you don't see the improvements since COVID, and the overall thriving percentage is a bit lower.

But the broad picture, that the world is getting happier, remains.

Why?

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised.

Really, the World Poll and the measure of thriving isn't the only statistic that shows that in many respects life is getting better.

The United Nations Human Development Index is a similar sort of thing, which uses more objective measures of years of schooling, life expectancy, and living standards.

And if you look at the Human Development Index in the same countries where the Gallup Poll is measured, in many cases you see similar increases over time.

So when you dig under the hood a bit of the trends in how median thriving has changed, you find actually across much of the world in the last decade, we've seen very steady continued increases, whether that's in Eastern Europe, in East Asia, post-Soviet Eurasia, or even Latin America.

Now, those of our listeners who are listening from the UK will, I think, be raising an eyebrow at the idea that the world is getting better.

I get the impression that the Americans are not feeling particularly optimistic over the last 10 years or so.

Is that just me getting the vibes wrong?

Or do your data also suggest that the UK and US are

bucking this global trend?

No, your intuition is entirely spot on, really, because although most global regions and continents that I just mentioned have seen increases, there are a few notable

regions that buck the trends.

Those are places like North America, Western Europe, and Australia and New Zealand, all of which home to typically higher income countries.

So although the overall proportion of adults in those places who can be considered thriving is still higher than much of the rest of the world, the longer-term trend in those places is one of quite a downward trend.

Thanks to Benedict Feigers from Gallup.

That's it for this week.

Be sure to get in touch if you've seen a number you think we should take a look at.

The email is more or less at bbc.co.uk.

Until next time, goodbye.

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