Imagethief was not entirely surprised to read the following this morning in the Straits Times online:
Singaporeans the least happy people in Asia
       
LONDON - OF ALL the countries in the Asean region, Vietnam has the most to smile about and Singapore the least, according to a list of the happiest countries on the planet.

A new study published yesterday ranked the small South-east Asian country as 12th on a list of 178 nations, beating big-economy behemoths such as Britain and the United States in a survey that measured people's well-being and their impact on the environment.

Singapore, on the other hand, fared the worst of all the Asean and Asian nations ranked, coming in at 131st.

Compiled by the British think-tank New Economics Foundation (NEF), the Happy Planet Index painted a different order of world wealth.

Abandoning what it termed 'crude ratings' of countries according to economic indicators like gross domestic product, the NEF intended the new index to strip life back to the basics - measuring life satisfaction, life expectancy and environmental impact.

Island nations did well in the rankings, with the tiny South Pacific nation of Vanuatu topping the list. 'People are generally happy here because they are very satisfied with very little,' said Mr Marke Lowen of Vanuatu Online, the republic's online newspaper.

Industrial countries, perhaps unsurprisingly, fared badly on the index - Britain came in at 108th while the US ranked 150th. Most of the bottom 10 countries were African nations, with Zimbabwe coming in last.

'The order of nations that emerges may seem counter-intuitive. But this is because policymakers have been led astray by abstract mathematical models of the economy that bear little relation to the real world,' said NEF's policy director Andrew Simms.
Now forget for a moment that the NEF sounds like a slightly flaky entity and that they've given their index a truly zany name. And forget for a moment that their "HPI" Happy Planet Index is calculated by multiplying life satisfaction* x life expectancy and then --and this is the kicker-- dividing the product by "ecological footprint", which seems like an engineered way of discounting the happiness of more developed economies. (This suggests that "happy planet index" should not be confused with individual happiness, a point that is clearly illustrated in table 1 of the report (page 14 of the PDF), but which the sub-editor seems to have conveniently discarded in writing the headline of the story above.) And forget for a moment that the United States, thus, ranks rock bottom of the developed world on the index, which definitely makes the study seem more like a political statement than, well, a study. And forget for a moment that Singapore's "life satisfaction" and "life expectancy" both rank near the top of their peer group (fourth and second respectively out of twenty-four). And forget for a moment that China, a dankly polluted country with a phenomenal wealth gap, repressive government and 800 million people still trapped in dire poverty, ranks sixth in Asia and higher than the entire western world in this study. And forget, for just one second, that corrupt Vanuatu and rebellion and drug-lord torn Colombia are first and second in this study's global rankings. And forget that this whole study is really, when push comes to shove, about environmental impact more than happiness. And forget that the news article --derived from wire reports-- describes Vietnam, a country of 82 million people and the 13th largest nation on earthy by population, as "small" (yes, that referred to Vietnam, not Singapore). Just forget all that.

Yeah, thinking back on my years in Singapore, seems reasonable. Everybody was pretty stressed out all the time.

Thanks to Steve Schwankert for pointing out the article. The actual study is here.