Happiness and Community: An Overview
John F. Helliwell Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia, and Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
Richard Layard Wellbeing Programme, Centre for Economic Performance, at the London School of Economics and Political Science
Jeffrey Sachs Director, SDSN, and Director, Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University
Happiness and Government
Governments set the institutional and policy framework in which individuals, businesses and governments themselves operate. The links between the government and happiness operate in both directions: what governments do affects happiness (discussed in Chapter 2), and in turn the happiness of citizens in most countries determines what kind of governments they support (discussed in Chapter 3). It is sometimes possible to trace these linkages in both directions. We can illustrate these possibilities making use of separate material from national surveys by the Mexican national statistical agency (INEGI), and kindly made available for our use by Gerardo Leyva, INEGI’s director of research.[1]
The effects of government actions on happiness are often difficult to separate from the influences of other things happening at the same time. Unravelling may sometimes be made easier by having measures of citizen satisfaction in various domains of life, with satisfaction with local and national governments treated as separate domains. For example, Figure 1.1 shows domain satisfaction levels in Mexico for twelve different domains of life measured in mid-year in 2013, 2017 and 2018. The domains are ordered by their average levels in the 2018 survey, in descending order from left to right. For Mexicans, domain satisfaction is highest for personal relationships and lowest for citizen security. The high levels of satisfaction with personal relationships echoes a more general Latin American finding in last year’s chapter on the social foundations of happiness in Latin America.