camberiu said:To complement,
According to your survey, Yemen is a place as happy as Canada. Yemen! Saudi Arabia and Iran too, by the way. If you are a woman, you should definitely move there and enjoy a life of full happiness under a burka.
If that does not spell bullshit to you. I do not know what else will.
Are you so blinded by ideology that you can't read ? The index is a composite of more factors than happiness:
http://www.happyplanetindex.org/data/#table-view
Go there and sort by "Experienced well-being". Now, show me where any of those countries are higher than Canada, at number 2 after Denmark???
To be honest, what the study shows is that people generally can be happy or miserable with no direct correlation to economic policies or performance.
You'll also notice that all the countries in the top dozen or more have very strong welfare states and high levels of social spending. Not everything in life can be measured in dollars and cents, and not everything is black and white.