a Global happiness It might seem crazy ‘The pandemic has changed the shape of global happiness WHE covib-i9 pandemic has done noth: ing good for the mood of Park Ha- young, an undergraduate at Seoul National University, She spent much of last year worrying about the disease, and her chanc- esofspreadingiit:"Iwas terrified of becom- ing the person to cause a huge outbreak Herfteedom has been drastically curtailed. The government determines whether she {an see friends or attend classes, leaving hher frustrated and unable to make plans. She is beginning to worry about finding a ic ar she graduates. serralticians and oficial Frequent talk About how covid-19 affects public health Gnd the economy. But for most people those are abstract considerations: nas they experience each day are moods nd sad, of, ifthey Sens of being anxious and sud oF if they arelucky, cheerful and ae ob as World Happiness Day 0? yo sustainable De- ess ork have tried to ed them. the pandemic has chang: A Heaters, a poster, asks the same Qs: B wuntries. The tionsin scores of © vvealing one tells people to imagine a lad~ der, with steps numbered nought to ten, ‘The top rung represents the best life you could have, the bottom rung represents the worst. What rungareyou on now? People's responses to that question, When you're happy and you know: “ow satised ae youth your life nowadays?™ Britain 1O=completey stig 80 zor 15 20 65 60 ep 50] Oe Aeon “0c 06S 207 9g te, ssc. ONS peep orege intr known as a Cantril ladder, suggest (rather surprisingly) that the world was about as. happy in the teeth of an awful pandemicas it was before the coronavirus struck, The average score across 95 countries, not pop ulation-weighted, crept up insignificantly from s,81n 2017-9 to 5.85 in2020. But the pattern of life satisfaction has changed Covid-19 has made old people more cheer~ ful. A few countries have had some of the happiness squeezed out of them; others haveamassed more ofit. Covid-ig threatens the old far more than the young, with the risk of death after contracting the disease doubling for every eight years of life. Yet the old have cheered. up. Globally, between 2017-39 and 2020 happiness was boosted by 0.22 points on the Cantril ladder among people over the age of 60. Celina Beatriz Gazeti dos Santos, a 64-year-old psychologist in So Paulo, ticks offalistof things that might dampen her mood—the pandemic, widespread cor- ruption, a dislikeable government, others misery. Yet she proclaims herself increas- ingly happy and optimisticall the same. InBritain, acountry with excellenthap- Piness data, everyone has slipped, but some more than others (see chart). There, and in other rich countries, the age profile Of happiness before the pandemic struck. ‘was roughly U-shaped when plotted on a ‘graph. People began their adult lives in a cheerful state. They became glummer in middle age. Then, after about the age of 0, they started to became happier again. 1f they made it to a very advanced age, how.48 |intermational ever. they fell back into the dotdrum: upward slope. less Satisfied than the mid: less satisfied than the ‘Today the pattern is a ‘The young are less satisfy dle-aged, wh abled many olf people to ven ie with their families—sometines (uct thatlocked down, they have the pleasure ot Knowing ta ene areas roe hem: aad at conomist at the University of British Co- lumbia who wrote par ofthe Won eggs, fown from an average of 46% in the three have dodged a disease that could kill them. a a ee BY ten one er aerobic Fe alee) i ns cea death rate of 190 per 100,000 people since cess-death rate is just 77 per 100,000, For excrete Huge Ost fe aro aE it has gone on to fluff the vaccination end Hast aewae sacar in February "Liebe Brite, we 1 et nnn strikingly, the counties that were 2 the top of the happiness chart before the pandetniremainthere-Thethree highest Tanking countries in 020—Finland, 1e- Tand and Denmark-vere among the 8 four in 201g, All thee have deat well with covidp, and have excess death rates Below 21 per ioo00 Iceland has 2 MEBs tive rate {thelpsto bea remot isan “The most intriguing suggestion in the World Happiness Reporsthat some inks between covidsg and bappines operat in both directions The authors do not Sus est that happiness helps countries resist ovidg. Rather, they argue that one ofthe {hings that sustains national happiness Somakes places better at dealing wth pan~ semics That things trust Poll by Gallup show that many ofthe places that have oped best with covid, sich asthe NO* Siecountres and New Zealand, have wide- Spread faith in institutions and stanges- Lirge majorities of their inhabitants Be- lieve that neighbour would return wal lett they foundit Counties have failed to se offcovid19 for many obvious reasons. Some ae poor up, who's down am Lie evluaton 10=happiet Wh North Ames Stata amet ocsns a areeemeeeTEnoORse Maren aot 202 ae eso aa ee eae ete and fi a ay cy to {until the situation grew desperate. Peoplewho don'tneed people ifhatisright, itmight help explain abroad fegional change: the falling happiness of atin America and the rising happiness of Fast Asia, Argentina, Brazil, colombia and Mexicoail became less happy in2020; Chi- nna, Japan and Taiwan became happier, al- though South Korea slipped a bit. It is as though Latin American countries had the wrong kind of happiness before 2020, says Mr Helliwell—a happiness sustained by people's close social connections, not by high levels of socal trust. global poll in 2019 found that only 52% of peoplein atin ‘America and the Caribbean. thought a neighbour would return a wallet; just 41% thought a cop would. That is the lowest share of any region, “The pervasive lack of trust made it har- der for Latin American countries to tackle covideig in a comprehensive way. People can and do keep their distance from each other, but that is emotionally tough in countries where people are normally s0so- ciable. Mexicans have been deprived of their leisurely Friday lunches and Sunday family gatherings (though some carry on anyway). “The pandemic has changed a lot; laments Edmilson de Souza Santos, a builder in Barueri, a Sio Paulo suburb. "You have to stop living your life” There remains a big national puzzle. ‘America responded poorly to covid-19 and hhas suffered more than 500,000 excess deaths. Yet the Gallup poll detects a slight rise in Americans’ happiness level in 2020. Apanel survey by the University of South- em California shows that mental stress and anxiety shot up in America last March and Apri but then subsided, Two subse waves of infection and death ap- Deared otto disturb them further. i iy American states have had rather lackadaisical lockdowns, at least. for adults—for «schoolchildren restrictions an seem unbending. That could have kept People's spiitsup. Abi Adams-Prasslof Ox- ford University and other researchers found thatthe first wave of lockdowns, last Spring, lowered women's moods It could also be that extreme partisanship helps. Many Ameri ty Americans have spent the past yeat in an alternate information universe in which covid-g is just ike flu. Itis hard to Bet tooworked up about fake news. m