World Happiness Survey Summary

Many happiness studies state that countries in South America and Scandinavia are among at the top of the “Happy list”, where more modernized countries are at the bottom. The question is, because these modernized countries have the ability to possess wealth, does accumulating wealth equal more happiness? We are led to believe with wealth comes happiness. Is that necessarily true? In this paper, I am going to use Sarah Ahmed’s critique for happiness and her viewpoint that not everyone is able to participate in “happy activity” because they simply don’t have the means to do so. Ahmed makes it clear to the readers that she isn’t focusing on the ways to be happy like so many other philosophers before her, in particular Aristotle. She has a very different approach on how …show more content…
Now this is ironic because many philosophers, including Sarah Ahmed, mention that this “happy economy” excludes certain groups of people and it’s built on suffering. Now how can countries that are considered third world, be the pinnacle of happiness? Like every country and society, if there are rich, then they will also be poor. But many of those countries are more or less poor in terms of their gross domestic product. Obviously, it is something more than just money, materialism, and capitalism that affects happiness. Could it be the way that we measure happiness for these countries are faulty or inaccurate? Ahmed response to this is that happiness isn’t a way to measure how well a country does. We already have measuring systems to quantify how a country is doing which is globally called the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). According to Ahmed GDP is the “ultimate performance indicator” and not happiness. Happiness is what society is condemning and using a very abstract concept to justify and explain a country 's success as well as an individual