Post by account_disabled on Feb 20, 2024 5:30:48 GMT
Freezing temperatures, dark winter days, an incredibly high cost of living – who would want to live in a place like that? Turns out the happiest people on planet Earth. According to the UN, quality of life is the key. This can be reliably assessed by a variety of measures of well-being, income being only one of them and not necessarily the most important. Among other variables that are linked to happiness are: The freedom to make life decisions. Trust in social and political institutions. Healthy life expectancy. The level of support available from friends and family in times of need. Generosity as a sense of positive community participation. Could this be a lesson for a new post-COVID-19 world? Take a look at the happiest countries in the world and the factors that can lead a country to this point. Looking for happiness… An example of happy places is undoubtedly the Nicoya Peninsula, which apart from being beautiful, its inhabitants, especially men, live one of the longest lives in the world. The men of Nicoya have a life expectancy of almost 84 years, rivaling even the life expectancy in Japan, a country famous for its long-lived citizens. Interestingly, this marker of human resilience has been achieved in a region that is not wealthy, where most people survive on traditional subsistence agriculture. Researchers investigating the reasons for Nicoyans' longevity have noted the value of strong social ties and a deep sense of community. In Nicoya, the pace of life is different, it is not a materialistic society.
But it's not just Nicoya. Great happiness is everywhere in the country. Mariano Rojas, a happiness expert from Costa Rica who is an economics professor at the International University of La Rioja in Spain. For those who believe that money equals happiness, Costa Rica is a paradox. The small Central American nation is not rich . The middle-income country has only a fifth of the per capita Europe Cell Phone Number List wealth of the United States, but it outperforms its giant North American neighbor on many indicators of well-being, not just life expectancy. Costa Rica spends a higher proportion of its gross domestic product on education than almost any other country: 8% compared to 5% in the United States. The best university in the country is public and funded by the government. And it manages all of this with a per capita environmental footprint one-third the size of the US. The government's investment in health, education and affordable housing is a big part of Costa Rica's success, Rojas said. The country has the funds for such investments thanks to a radical decision it made in 1948 to dismantle its army, reorienting the budget toward public services.
Costa Rica is certainly not perfect - it still has relatively high levels of poverty and income inequality - but the country shows what can be achieved when an economy is configured around the idea of improving people's lives rather than seeking of endless growth. It blows huge holes in the conventional wisdom that GDP, a broad and crude measure of economic success, is the only metric that counts. It's a lesson some economists hope the world will hear as countries embark on the monumental challenge of recovering from our current pandemic-related economic collapse. It is an opportunity to rethink who economies are for and how to rebuild them; to give people meaningful lives and get us off the path of climate destruction. The GDP error The idea of GDP emerged at a time not very different from today. Economist Simon Kuznets devised the metric in the 1930s, a period characterized by rising unemployment and deep inequality, to help measure countries' progress in recovering from the Great Depression. GDP counts the value of goods and services exchanged within a country. Since World War II, virtually all countries have analyzed GDP to track their development. GDP became synonymous with the success of a country. Diane Coyle, co-director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. But even Kuznets knew that it was an imperfect measure, which overlooks very important areas of economics such as: Unpaid work. Care of children. The volunteering.