Nonsensical comments, abuse, baiting, ranting and leftist stupidity will not be tolerated.
Puerto Rico aught to be happy as it's just about entirely funded by US taxpayers for nothing in return -unless you count PR crims exported to the US.
The impossibility of putting calipers on happiness apparently doesn't impede such "research." But were we to ask the researchers for their metrics and base definitions, what do you think they'd be willing to show us?
They called at 6.30pm, just as I was sitting down to dinner. Damned right I wasn't happy.
I did a little digging and found some other reports on this survey. According to University of Michigan press release (http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/
story.php?id=6629), "The results clearly show that the happiest societies are those that allow people the freedom to choose how to live their lives." It also noted that countries like Russia and the Ukraine have shown the greatest change for the better. Of course "most ex-communist countries show low levels of happiness", which the researchers blame on the "sharp decline in well-being" after the collapse of communism, not on the fact that communist dictatorships were hellholes to start off with.
I seriously doubt that the people were very happy to start of with under the communist dictatorships, but that isn't offered as a reason. Still they did manage to make a connection with freedom and happiness. What's interesting is that they found this surprising.
You can view trend line charts from 24 of the countries here: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org...appinesstrends/
One thing that you will notice is that many are missing allot of data. The chart for Australia shows a downward trend since 1945, but it also shows that there were samples taken in only 6 out of the last 63 years. Great Britain also shows a downward trend as does the US for that same time period, but both countries show an upward trend since 1980. Why is that? The only thing that is said is that there is improved "economic development". However, it also corresponds to the time frame that Reagan and Thatcher managed to change some of the terrible economic policies that the left had managed to implement in the preceding years. Still, we can’t say much with out the report.
Commenting by HaloScan
