Bolivia & global happiness indexes

There’s been much talk recently of operationalizing & measuring “happiness” around the world, as a way to look beyond GDP, HDI, and other measures of social well-being. This is the new “happiness economics.” This week’s Economist had another feature on two surveys (one by Gallup, the other by Ipsos) that looked at people’s happiness around the world. But there’s even a Happy Planet Index (HPI) website, which looks at environmental factors (basically, not how happy people are, but how happy the planet is about such people). No surprise, in most of these, Bolivia doesn’t fare well.

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