Who are the happiest people in the world? According to the World Happiness Report, it’s the residents of Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Israel and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Palestinians, who have lived for decades under Israeli military occupation, rank 99th.Every year, a United Nations-backed organisation publishes a report that ranks countries based on “happiness”. The rankings themselves are based on Gallup surveys of a few thousand participants in each country who are asked to personally rate their lives on a scale of 0 to 10. This “life evaluation”, in other words, is someone’s stated personal opinion of how content they are with their life at that particular point in time. That information is then coupled with some other factors and presented in the annual World Happiness Report.But critics have pointed out glaring contradictions, blind spots and biases, including a seeming inclination towards rich Western nations – the Global North – that ignores centuries of colonial exploitation that enabled them to gather that wealth.
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