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Notes -
Here is the happiness list (younger age 30):
https://worldhappiness.report/assets/images/2024/ch02/Figure_2.2_1.webp
1 Lithuania (7.7)
2 Israel
3 Serbia
4 Iceland
5 Denmark (7.3)
And
62 United States (6.39)
Unhappiest youth are predominantly in African countries beside Lebanon on second last place and Afghanistan (1,82) on last place.
Why do people put any stock in happiness statistics? To me it looks like what it would be if we measured national temperature by feeling before the invention of the thermometer. Is Il Cairo very cold, cold, hot or very hot? In fact, it's even worse, because you have at least the possibility of moving somewhere else and experiencing another climate while you don't have the option of moving into somebody's else's head.
No idea. It's interesting how this kind of metric (self-reported on presumably a Likert scale of a subset of a population, probably only surveyed once) is typically ridiculed on the Motte, but here it seems to be just accepted.
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Israel is second place in world youth happiness?! Israel is at war. Am I missing something or shouldn't this be hot-take level shocking?
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Israel is winning a war (insofar as shooting fish in a barrel and tampering with Taiwanese pager shipments constitutes a war); what surprise is it that hot-blooded youngsters rejoice in seeing their enemies driven before them, and hearing the lamentations of their women?
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Happiness in general doesn't seem to work the way modern people think it does. From my view, among the best predictors are is a) there are real, serious problems + b) we feel confident to handle them well.
Yes, if there is no challenge one can master it often is just a hedonistic treadmill.
There were a few posts last month on Reddit about American Beauty, the 25 year old Oscar movie with Kevin Spacey, and how weird not only the movie but the past time now feels. Together with Office Space and Fight Club artists struggled to find something to rebel against. Cold War was won, war against terror didn’t start yet, economy was great, racism solved, the environment ostensibly protected, peak oil unknown, feminism a joke, and gayness widely accepted by enlightened centrism. So the only way was to attack the mundane boringness of a secure middle class existence.
This is Lester Burnham‘s House in which he lived in 1999 with a wife and daughter and got deeply unhappy:
https://filmoblivion.com/2019/01/15/american-beauty-1999/
Sept 2024 the U.S. housing deficit has increased according to Zillow to 4.5 million.
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I mean I’m probably claiming too much, but it looks to me like ethnic homogeneity is a better predictor than income for happiness.
Lebanon and Afghanistan are pretty homogenous as well.
This is extremely inaccurate. Lebanon is famously split between feuding Sunni, Shia, and Maronite christian groups to the degree that their constitution sets ethnic quotas for power-sharing. Afghan is also split between many warring tribal-ethnic groups as well, including Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazara, and Uzbeks.
I admit I put my foot in it re: Afghanistan but I don't think Lebanon is a slam dunk. We're talking about ethnic differences here, so we have to look beyond "well Israel is 75% Jewish so it's homogenous". Those Jews come from all kinds of places with all kinds of ethnic backgrounds.
So, first off, I don’t believe I have ever heard a single person describe Israel as homogenous. Any country where a full one in four of its citizens is from an ethnolinguistically and religiously different group from the other three is, by definition, not homogenous.
And yes, you note that even within the Jewish Israeli population there are significant divisions. That’s also true, and also a source of political and cultural tension within Israeli society! My understanding is that the tensions between the Ashkenazi founding stock and the later waves of Sephardic and especially Mizrahi Jews produced massive friction in Israel for the first decades of its existence. Israel is also still to this day having major issues with the differences between its Ultra-Orthodox/Haredi population versus the other strains of Judaism.
So yes, you have correctly noticed that Israel is not in fact a homogeneous country.
Cool, sounds like we agree that at best the homogeneity /happiness relationship is not entirely straightforward.
Israel has been engaged in a decades-long violent campaign, with periodic mass-casualty events on both sides, against a hostile ethnic group within its own borders. This is your example of a happy country?
Weirdly enough, I recall reading an article that basically said exactly that; a Jew found he was much happier living in Israel than he was in America, despite the issues you outlined.
He basically concluded that it was a mix of close proximity, similar culture, and a sort of espirit de corp - a type of shared experience leading toward tighter and closer bonds.
I wish I could remember the name of the article, though. I hate how my brain works, sometimes.
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You have actually seen the post we are discussing, correct?
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I mean that’s just not remotely accurate. Lebanon has several religious groups who have been in open conflict many times over its history. Maronite Christians, Orthodox Christians, both Sunni and Shia Muslims, Druze, Alawites, and that’s to say nothing of the masses of refugees from the Syrian conflict currently residing within its borders.
Afghanistan, meanwhile, has always been an incredibly ethnically diverse and fractious region. Pashtun, Balochs, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Hazara, plus all kinds of obscure insular groups that still practice otherwise dead religious traditions, or who credibly claim direct descent from Alexander the Great’s wars against the Parthians a few thousand years ago.
Like, you’ve picked two of the least homogenous countries in the entire region.
I feel like this is going to be biased toward declaring groups that get along to be "homogeneous", and those that don't are subdivided into smaller groups until they do, with the broader discording factions declared "heterogeneous". You could divide the English into Anglos, Saxons, Normans, and so on, but they still mostly get along so you'll call them all "English".
What is homogeneity if not ethnic cohesion? Everyone is their own group of one and human divisions are fractal. Boundaries exist because we decide they do.
Ethnic groups only exist insofar as they are willing to exclude. Which is why Anglos, Saxons and Normans no longer exist, but English do. Fusions and splits are common methods of ethnogenesis.
It's not a bias, it's the phenomenal definition of ethnic groups.
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Part of homogeneity is common ethnic consciousness, commonality in language, religion, ancestry, insufficient history of remaining grudges and bad blood, etc. The later element, if it existed in the past, has declined today. The English are one ethnic group, even with some heterogeneous elements and diversity in their history.
Ethnic groups have some heterogeneity in them. As with most things, the amount matters. Increase substantially differences, and you get a nation comprising of different groups. This is a genuine difference that relates to accurately separating ethnic groups.
This doesn't bias things, since you still got a homogeneous situation if the divisions are sufficiently irrelevant and have a robustly common identity. Conversely you get heterogeneity when divisions are significant and ethnic groups don't get along. You are getting an accurate message that proves the advantages of a homogeneous country and of small enough differences among the people, so much so that they can be identified as a common ethnic group.
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The distinctions between Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Britons, Normans, etc. washed out hundreds of years ago, though. Nobody in England has spoken Norman French in over 500 years. Back when these groups were still linguistically and culturally distinct, they absolutely did not get along - see the wars between the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and then famously the conquest and subsequent violent subjugation of the Anglo-Saxons by the Normans. It’s only in hindsight, after a centuries-long process of mixing and integration, that we consider these to be constituent ancestries of a unified population. (And of course the existence of Wales as a separate entity, and the revival of the Welsh language, are testaments to the fact that the pre-Anglo-Saxon Britonic people were in fact never fully integrated, despite centuries of effort.)
Meanwhile, in Lebanon and Afghanistan these groups are still very distinct, generally geographically segregated, and - again, most importantly - have been in open violent conflict at various times even within your and my lifetimes.
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