Wine and world happiness

Some of you may have noted the recent release of the 2019 World Happiness Report. This is sponsored by The Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and The Global Happiness Council (GHC). Reports have been produced yearly since 2012 (except 2014).

The 2019 Report describes itself as:

a landmark survey of the state of global happiness that ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be. This year’s World Happiness Report focuses on happiness and the community: how happiness has evolved over the past dozen years, with a focus on the technologies, social norms, conflicts and government policies that have driven those changes.

This is a very interesting document. However, my point in this blog post is that it contains no mention of wine, which seems to be a serious oversight.

The group of independent researchers who compiled the report quantify happiness for each of the 156 countries using four measures of subjective well-being:

• Cantril Ladder life-evaluation question in the Gallup World Poll — asks the survey respondents to place the status of their lives on a “ladder” scale ranging from 0 to 10, where 0 means the worst possible life and 10 the best possible life
• Ladder standard deviation — provides a measure of happiness inequality across the country
• Positive affect — comprises the average frequency of happiness, laughter and enjoyment on the previous day to the survey (scaled from 0 to 1)
• Negative affect — comprises the average frequency of worry, sadness and anger on the previous day to the survey (scaled from 0 to 1)

The authors try to explain these measures of subjective well-being by relating them to six possible “explanatory” variables: Social support; Freedom; Corruption; Generosity; Gross Domestic Product per capita; and Healthy life expectancy. Wine is not explicitly mentioned here, but I figure that it might fit in under several of these variables, particularly the last two.

Obviously, I need to evaluate this for myself.

One simple way to do this is to look at the value of wine imports for each country. I need to look at value, not volume, because a lot of cheap wine can be just as “happy” as a smaller amount of expensive wine. I need to look at imports, because most countries import most of the wine they consume. This potentially disadvantages the bigger wine-producing countries, where people mostly drink the local wines; but, as you will see in a moment, this does not have much effect on the results. Also, predominantly Muslim countries are also disadvantaged; but (sadly) the World Happiness Report does not list many of them as particularly happy places.

The wine import data come from Comtrade, which is the United Nations International Trade Statistics Database. This database lists US$ values for wine imports in 111 countries; but only 92 of these overlap with the 156 countries in the World Happiness Report.

The comparison of happiness with wine imports is shown in the graph. Each point represents one country. I have excluded two outliers (Kuwait and Pakistan), both of which have medium happiness scores but extremely small imports (off the bottom of the graph).

As expected, there is a concurrent increase in both characteristics — happy countries import lots of wine, and wine-importing countries have generally happy people. The line on the graph shows you that the relationship between the two variables is exponential (note that the vertical axis uses a log scale).

I will leave it to my readers to decide which way around cause and effect works in this instance. Does drinking wine make you happy, or does being happy make you drink wine? Or does being relatively wealthy, on a global scale, make you both happy and prone to consuming wine? The World Happiness Report could usefully have addressed this issue.

---

Appendix

For those of you who do not check out the World Happiness Report for yourselves, I will note the following:

• The Nordic countries are the ones whose people think they are the happiest: 1 = Finland, 2 = Denmark, 3 = Norway, 4 = Iceland, 7 = Sweden — I live in Sweden for a reason, obviously
• The 36 member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) dominate the top of the list, occupying 19 of the top 20 spots — wealth is clearly associated with happiness
• The English-speaking countries do pretty well: 8 = New Zealand, 9 = Canada, 11 = Australia, 15 = United Kingdom, 16 = Ireland, 19 = United States
• The focus of parts of the Report is on the USA, where happiness took a nose-dive during the 2007 recession, and has not really recovered since then — the USA was a much happier place from 1973–2003 (the period for which the Report has data) than it is now
• Among adolescents in the USA (13–18 years), the happiest time in the USA was 1998–2012
• The recent decrease in happiness of US adolescents is highly correlated with the rising use of the internet — particularly the time spent on social media rather than in-person social interactions.