Norway is officially the worlds happiest country according to the World Happiness Report 2017, released last week. The Norwegians replace fellow Nordics the Danes, who come second this year. The high levels of trust in the Nordic societies is widely credited with the happiness of the Scandinavians, and not social democracy which is of course what the left would like us to believe (in fact, Scandinavian countries are among the most free-market in the world, as we discuss here).
So, there is not much news in the rankings. Perhaps more interesting is the section which looks at how life evaluations have changed over time: the report considers the changes from 2005-2007 before the onset of the global recession, to 2014-2016, the most recent three-year period for which data from the Gallup World Poll are available.
Nicaragua comes out on top, as the nation which has had the largest gain in happiness, but it is another South American nation which is last: Venezuela. And it is a large drop in happiness which the victims of Hugo Chavez’ Bolivarian revolution have had to endure:
For each of the 10 countries with the biggest drops in average life evaluations, the losses were more than would be expected from a halving of GDP per capita. Thus the changes are far more than would be expected from income losses or gains flowing from macroeconomic changes, even in the wake of an economic crisis as large as that following 2007.
In other words, the socialist regime of the last two decades has brought havoc to Venezuela; they have done much more than just destroy the economy (despite being endowed with the world’s largest oil reserves), they have damaged the very fabric of society to leave the people without joy or hope. There is no surprise here, those who have followed the news from Venezuela will be aware of the desperate situation the country finds itself in and the dizzying fall in living standards which the Venezuelans – not least the poorest among them – have experienced. But it serves as yet another damning indictment of socialism, if anyone needed a reminder.