Happy Planet Index is a crying shame

The Happy Planet Index, compiled by a British think-tank, has listed the tiny South Pacific nation of Vanuatu as the happiest place on Earth. Virtually all the newspapers in the Philippines carried the story.

I don't know anything about Vanuatu other than that it is almost invisible on the map. Also that its capital is Vila, according to my daughter, whose high school yearbook described her as having the uncanny ability to memorize the capitals of all the countries in the world.

My point is this. The newspapers would not have carried the story solely on the strength of Vanuatu having been named the happiest place on Earth. They carried it because there, quite strangely at 17th place, is our very own Republic of the Philippines.

Until I read the report, I never had the vaguest inkling that the Philippines would rate so highly in any happiness index. Why, the United States of America, to where most Filipinos are making a beeline for, is ranked at 150th place.

I don't know what the people at the British think-tank were thinking. But given the measurements they used in their study, I think they were a little mixed up about how to arrive at any conclusion on what makes people happy.

The index combined life satisfaction, life expectancy and environmental footprints - the amount of land required to sustain the population and absorb its energy consumption - to come up with its conclusions.

No wonder those conclusions are fallacious, to say the least. They were culled from mere statistical impressions. The report did not say anything about anyone from the think-tank setting foot on, say, Vanuatu to shake the hand of even one islander and ask him if he was happy.

Happiness is an emotion, a state of being. You cannot describe happiness as the sum total of statistics, no matter how favorable or impressive. And because happiness is a feeling, it is contagious. If you see it in another person you feel happy too. That is how you know it exists.

Happiness is about people. To know how people feel, you have to be among them. With too many intangibles making up for happiness, it is grossly misleading to pin it down with a fixed set of only three factors seeking matches from a huge data base of infinitisimal statistics.

Given such a fallacious process of simply poring over data before ascribing happiness, it comes as no surprise that the index would, in addition to Vanuatu, come up with such countries as Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominica and Panama as the next four happiest places on Earth.

There are roughly two hundred countries in the world. To know how happy the people in these countries are, you have to visit each one of them. There is no doing it by remote control or mental telepathy, which is apparently what those who coughed up the index did.

You cannot just stand before a map, put a finger on, say our beloved Philippines, then go to a computer and search the Internet for data on the Philippines' land area, population and life expectancy and then declare it to be the 17th happiest place on Earth.

To know whether Filipinos are happy, you have to come to the Philippines. You have to sit with them in jeepneys caught in a traffic jam, go to lunch with them on what they can afford for less than two dollars a day, or scamper with them to safety, away from a daylight robbery.

To know whether Filipinos are happy, you have to find out why at least 2,500 of them are leaving their families behind each day to work in other countries, or why one out of every four of them would also leave if they have the chance.

Only when members of the think-tank manage to gather first-hand information and make personal observations in all the 200 or so countries in the world can their Happy Planet Index make valid claims about happiness and be credible. If not, their index is a crying shame.