“Contra Yascha Mounk on ‘The World Happiness Report is a Sham’” by huw

Here is Yascha's original article. For context, the WHR aggregates 1,000 sampled individuals from almost every country on Earth, who are asked to rate their lives on a scale of 1–10 (known as the Cantril Ladder). It produces a ranking with Nordic countries quite high, and developing countries quite low, with some surprises in between. Yascha's main critiques seem to be: The Cantril Ladder measures life satisfaction rather than momentary happiness There is a seeming inverse correlation between life satisfaction and depression prevalence The Cantril Ladder may bias toward feelings of ‘success’ and ‘wealth’ Therefore, wellbeing is hard to measure and replacing GDP with wellbeing metrics ‘may do more harm than good’ Before jumping into these points, I think that Mounk's piece is a little rheotorical and you need to read around that. His audience seemingly responded to trigger words like “elite misinformation”, although Mounk doesn’t delve into why or how that might be the case. The WHR are extremely clear throughout their report about their methodology, and present explanations of it in a long preamble before presenting their annual table; it is simply not their fault if media outlets [...] ---Outline:(01:28) Life satisfaction vs momentary wellbeing(02:22) Life satisfaction and depression prevalence(03:10) Biases in the Cantril Ladder(04:17) Concluding that self-reported wellbeing cannot replace GDP(05:16) I actually like self-reported wellbeing --- First published: December 17th, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nnSDJeRZSbD82aDJS/contra-yascha-mounk-on-the-world-happiness-report-is-a-sham --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

There are no comments yet.

Please log in to write the first comment.