The Nature of Things

It's always interesting to peruse research about which countries have the happiest, healthiest, most contented citizenry, and so, when I saw this headline about Switzerland , of course I had to read the story. Switzerland is a small, landlocked central European country with few natural resources, and yet it has a strong and thriving economy and, according to all measurements, one of the happiest populations on Earth. How does it achieve this success? The answer seems to be that it invests strongly in the main natural resource which it does have - its people. According to the World Economic Forum's 2013 Human Capital Report, Switzerland invests more in the health, education, and talent of its people than any other country in the world . To determine this, the Forum examined 51 indicators of how various countries invest in their people and how they are leveraging those investments in terms of productivity and a robust economy. Their director, Saadia Zahidi, says, "Countries...

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has released its report that measures the happiness of its member countries .  The report is titled "How's Life?" and it used surveys to measure eleven specific aspects of life that are believed to contribute to individuals' feelings of overall well-being. Among the factors measured in the surveys were such things as income, jobs, housing, health, clean environment, safe neighborhoods, and work-life balance.  While income proved to be an important factor, less obvious aspects of life, including health, safe neighborhoods, and clean environments proved extremely important, also. Here, then, is a countdown of what the OECD found to be the ten happiest countries in the world. 10. Austria 9.   United Kingdom 8.   China 7.   Sweden 6.   Norway 5.   Netherlands 4.   Indonesia 3.   Japan 2.   Iceland 1.   Denmark Interestingly, seven of the ten are European countries and four of th...

If you had to guess which is the happiest country in the world, what would you say? Do you think it would be the United States? Actually, considering all the bitching and griping that Americans do, I would have thought that this country would rank somewhere close to the bottom, but, in fact, according to a recent report from the Gallup polling organization , we do rank as one of the fifteen happiest countries in the world. We are near the bottom of the fifteen, though, ranking number 12. So what are the happiest countries in the world and what makes them so happy? If you look at what they have in common, for one thing they each have a strong social safety net. They have stable governments that generally work to make the lives of their citizens better. They are all democracies of one stripe or another. They have cohesive societies where citizens take their responsibilities rather seriously. There are other factors, individual to each country, of course, but these are some of the ...