Dominic Lawson: From Pentecost island to modern Britain, the futility of trying to measure happiness

It's good to know that the BBC has not forgotten the great cause of cheering us all up. This week it managed to find space in its main nightly news programme for an item which was not about war, pestilence and famine. Instead we were treated to a lengthy report from Pentecost, one of the 83 Pacific islands which make up the nation of Vanuatu. According to the BBC - and this was the ostensible reason for carting a film crew to such an obscure and remote spot - Vanuatu is "the happiest country on earth".

The natives of Pentecost certainly looked happy, despite the absence of all the things which we hold dear in the developed word, from broadband to banknotes. According to the BBC's reporter, they don't have much in the way of unemployment or taxes, either - a bit like the Channel Islands, only much further from Television Centre.

I couldn't help wondering why the BBC had nominated Vanuatu rather than Guernsey - other than the fact that the natives of Pentecost have a much more photogenic line in tribal dances. A few minutes of Googling provided the answer. A year ago there was a spate of articles declaring that Vanuatu is "the happiest nation on earth". All of them seem to stem from one survey, The Happy Planet Index, produced by a London-based think-tank called the New Economics Foundation.

The NEF's methodology was based on three measures. The first two were standard, based on the assumption that "happy" people are those who have a long life-expectancy and who identify themselves as generally satisfied with life. To those the NEF added something quite different - the extent to which a nation's inhabitants used "an appropriate amount of natural resources". Here's the giveaway: the research was partly funded by The Friends of the Earth.

In a press release announcing that Vanuatu had come top of the Happy Planet Index, the NEF declared that the results of its survey were "surprising, even shocking. The ranking unmasks a very different world order to that promoted by self-appointed global leaders, the G8. For example the UK is a disappointing 108th and the USA fares still worse at 150th on the Index".

Yes, it would be "surprising, even shocking", but only if the New Economics Foundation's Happiness Index had not been deliberately skewed in favour of countries with low carbon footprints. In that respect, what the survey measures is nothing more than the good opinions of the people paying for it.

In fact the NEF did not even consult the people of Vanuatu as to how happy they actually felt. All its "satisfaction" scores were bought in from the World Values Survey, an earlier piece of research. The people from the World Values Survey never got round to visiting Vanuatu - and a telephone poll was hardly an option. So presumably the friends of the Friends of the Earth have done what statisticians term "extrapolation" and what the rest of us call "making it all up".

In short, the BBC has been had. On the other hand, there is a more fundamental and less "surprising" truth beneath the NEF's statistical sleight of hand. The idea of an innocent bucolic existence devoid of unwholesome knowledge is deep in our psyches: it's called the Garden of Eden, and the biblically-named Pentecost does very nicely as a vision of what it should be. You or I might not be happy to be transported to Pentecost and spend our days working barefoot in the fields, but that's because we would understand what we'd be missing.

This sense of the subjectivity of happiness is at the heart of a much more important very recent survey than the dodgy dossier publicised so successfully by the New Economics Foundation. It was published this week in The Lancet and, so far as I can see, The Independent is the only newspaper to have had the wit to follow it up, under the headline: Children with disabilities "as happy as classmates".

Researchers from Newcastle University had applied standard self-assessment techniques used in asking children about their levels of happiness to 500 young people with cerebral palsy in seven European countries. The results, said Professor Allan Colver, who led the research "demonstrated that children with cerebral palsy have levels of happiness not significantly different from those of the general population".

In an interview on The Lancet website, Prof Colver explained why this was a much less surprising result than many seem to have found it: "Someone without a disability would say that he would be unhappy if he was disabled; but for the person with cerebral palsy - that's who they are, and as they grow up and develop their sense of self, that disability is indistinguishable from their identity as human beings."

This insight is particularly valuable for parents-to-be or new parents. There is still a tremendous fear about giving birth to a child with a disability, based on the assumption that such a child will be wretchedly unhappy, someone to be pitied. Parents who actually have such a child - as I do - know that this is a false assumption, but are often dismissed as "making the best of a bad job".

As Professor Colver points out, following the publication of his research, "parents whose child is diagnosed with cerebral palsy can now be reassured that most children with the condition who are capable of providing information have a similar quality of life to other children".

His use of the phrase "quality of life" is especially telling: it demonstrates that this term is often wrongly thought to be made up of objective criteria, when in fact it is entirely conditional on the view of the subject. For example, if I were to have a stroke and find myself unable to leave a wheelchair for the rest of my life, I would grieve for what I had lost; but if I had known no other existence I would not feel misery at my inability to walk - just as I do not now feel grief at my inability to fly.

Nobody has yet come up with an entirely satisfactory definition of what constitutes happiness - although I think that Sydney Smith's "To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence" will do to be getting along with. A state of unhappiness could be described as the opposite of that, but we might also define it as a life whose reality falls far short of its owner's expectations.

That is perhaps at the heart of the modern malaise, which has resulted in an unprecedented growth in clinical depression in countries such as the USA and the UK. We have increasingly allowed ourselves to think that happiness is ours by right - it's written into the American constitution - whereas in fact we can't find it: it finds us.

"Ask yourself whether you are happy," wrote John Stuart Mill, "and you cease to be so." I'm sure the islanders of Pentecost spare themselves that self-indulgence.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk

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