Despite everything going on in this part of the world, Israel has made the top ten of the World’s Happiest Countries list, based on the following methodology.
Quantifying happiness isn’t an easy task. Researchers at the Gallup World Poll went about it by surveying thousands of respondents in 155 countries, between 2005 and 2009, in order to measure two types of well-being.
First they asked subjects to reflect on their overall satisfaction with their lives, and ranked their answers using a “life evaluation” score between 1 and 10. Then they asked questions about how each subject had felt the previous day. Those answers allowed researchers to score their “daily experiences”–things like whether they felt well-rested, respected, free of pain and intellectually engaged.
Subjects that reported high scores were considered “thriving.” The percentage of thriving individuals in each country determined our rankings.
See the full list here.
Note:
- Israel is in equal 8th place with Canada and my birthplace, Australia.
- The only Arab country in the top 20 is the UAE, which just snuck in (I guess this guy wasn’t surveyed).
- The palestinian territories are in 96th place, which puts it above 50+ countries including Turkey (103), Iraq (110), Egypt (115), and Syria (115).
