According to the Happy Lives Institute, happiness is highly correlated with GDP, with everyone's favorite outliers being the Nordic countries. Maybe happiness is inversely correlated with temperature? On a global population-weighted basis, happiness has been recovering sharply in the last according to self-reported data, especially in Europe and Latin America, although the trend has been down in N. America, especially among youth (consistent with your friend's son). Possibly this is Haidt's theory about the deleterious effects of social media on young people. Not surprisingly, low levels of happiness are associated with countries experiencing civil war. Is professor Callard's theory based on this or other data, or does it reflect her own take on the world?
Great question Ken. My understanding is that Professor Callard isn't presenting an empirical theory based on happiness data in the way Jonathan Haidt or the World Happiness Report might. She's offering a philosophical framework for understanding modern life. Derek Thompson spends much of the interview asking whether the framework helps explain observations like negativity, identity, comparison, and attention. Whether the framework ultimately proves correct is an empirical question, but I don't think she presents it as a statistical model so much as a conceptual lens through which to interpret many of the patterns we're seeing today.
According to the Happy Lives Institute, happiness is highly correlated with GDP, with everyone's favorite outliers being the Nordic countries. Maybe happiness is inversely correlated with temperature? On a global population-weighted basis, happiness has been recovering sharply in the last according to self-reported data, especially in Europe and Latin America, although the trend has been down in N. America, especially among youth (consistent with your friend's son). Possibly this is Haidt's theory about the deleterious effects of social media on young people. Not surprisingly, low levels of happiness are associated with countries experiencing civil war. Is professor Callard's theory based on this or other data, or does it reflect her own take on the world?
Great question Ken. My understanding is that Professor Callard isn't presenting an empirical theory based on happiness data in the way Jonathan Haidt or the World Happiness Report might. She's offering a philosophical framework for understanding modern life. Derek Thompson spends much of the interview asking whether the framework helps explain observations like negativity, identity, comparison, and attention. Whether the framework ultimately proves correct is an empirical question, but I don't think she presents it as a statistical model so much as a conceptual lens through which to interpret many of the patterns we're seeing today.