When we wish someone well, we usually include our desire for them to be happy. Who doesn’t want their children or loved ones to be happy? Who doesn’t want to be happier? When someone we care about makes a decision we don’t understand, we tend to say or think that the important thing is for them to be happy. Similarly, some Enlightenment thinkers, such as Jeremy Bentham, concluded that what matters to a society is that its members be happy. The happier, the better. For Bentham, the decision-making rule for public affairs was to choose the option that results in “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.”
The Benthamite perspective holds that achievements such as higher income or prestige only translate into greater well-being when they contribute to people’s happiness. Given a given hourly wage, working more hours would translate into higher income, but not necessarily greater happiness. This form of well-being can only be assessed from within each individual. Objective indicators can be used to identify the sets of conditions that are most favorable for people to flourish and fully enjoy their life experiences, but the final decision rests with each individual, because only they truly know how they are doing, in terms of how much they enjoy their life. Therefore, if you want to know how happy people are, it’s very pertinent to ask them. Analyzing subjective well-being involves investigating what is happening in people’s minds.
It is a psychological approach, and it is therefore not surprising that some of its main proponents in the current era have been prominent psychologists such as Edward Diener, Martin Seligman, and Daniel Kahneman. It is a scientific study because it is based on the testing of hypotheses based on evidence, with peer review. This evidence often comes from polls and surveys in which carefully designed questionnaires are administered to extract information from people regarding various dimensions of their subjective well-being, some focused on more cognitive aspects, others on more emotional aspects, and others focused on eudaimonic issues related to purpose and meaning in life.
The world’s largest survey on the subject is the one conducted since 2005 by the statistics firm Gallup, which collects information from nearly 150 countries, conducting approximately 1,000 interviews per year in each of them. The Gallup World Poll is the source of information from which the World Happiness Rankings (WHR) are derived, which have been published as part of the World Happiness Report since 2012. Specifically, the ranking is constructed from responses to the question known as the “Cantril Ladder,” which presents a ladder with eleven rungs, the lowest representing the worst possible life and the highest the best possible life. From this ladder, the interviewee is asked to indicate which of those steps they consider their life currently falls on. The ranking is constructed from the averages of the Cantril Ladder responses for the three years prior to the RMF reference year. Thus, for example, the 2025 World Ranking shows the order, from highest to lowest, of the average Cantril Ladder responses for each of the 147 countries in the report, for the three-year period 2022, 2023, and 2024.
Over the years, the ranking has been led by countries that are relatively small in terms of population, highly developed, politically stable, with strong institutions, effective social safety nets, and democratic governments. The Scandinavian countries and some other Northern European countries stand out. On the opposite side of the table, that is, those with the lowest happiness averages, we have countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Central and Western Asia, which are generally violent, poor, undemocratic, unhealthy, with weak institutions, unequal, and insecure.
The 2025 ranking is no exception. As in the 2024 RMF, Finland (1), followed by Denmark (2), Iceland (3), and Switzerland (4), remain firmly in the top four positions. At the other end, the least happy country is once again Afghanistan (147), followed by Sierra Leone (146), Lebanon (145), and Malawi (144). On a scale from 0 to 10, the gap between Finland and Afghanistan is 6.37 points, revealing a huge gap in quality of life experienced at the extremes of the distribution.
Looking at the confidence intervals inherent in each country’s happiness estimate, we see that some, such as Finland and Afghanistan, are in a category unto themselves, while the vast majority of countries in the middle of the distribution report happiness averages that are not statistically different from many others. Thus, Costa Rica (6) is similar to five other countries (ranked 4th to 9th); Mexico is similar to eight countries (ranked 9th to 17th); Chile (45th) is similar to nineteen countries (ranked 35th to 54th); Argentina (42nd) is not statistically different from seventeen countries (ranked 33rd to 50th); Brazil (36th) includes twenty-three countries (26th to 49th) in its confidence interval; and Venezuela (82nd) is similar to seventeen other countries (ranked 70th to 87th). In this sense, for most countries, their ranking is diffuse, more indicative of an area or neighborhood of similarities than of a specific position. Changes in position are often more apparent than real.
However, in the interval from the first FMR in 2012 to the 2025 FMR, some statistically significant changes have occurred. The largest positive changes correspond to Serbia (+2.0 points), Bulgaria (+1.7), Georgia (+1.5), Lithuania (+1.4), and Romania (+1.4), highlighting the trend toward convergence of Eastern European countries, which, in the initial measurements, still close to the shock of the post-Soviet transition, tended to respond well below what would be expected based on their GDP per capita.
On the negative side, the case of Afghanistan stands out, whose happiness level fell by 3.0 points, a huge amount considering it was already starting from a relatively low level. This helps explain why it is currently the least happy country of the 147 countries analyzed. The prolonged conflict with the United States and the regression in many dimensions brought about by the restoration of the Taliban regime surely explain part of this drop.
Other countries with notable losses in happiness were Lebanon (-1.8), where violence, lack of governance, and political and economic instability have prevailed. Jordan (-1.4), with a significant refugee problem from Syria and Palestine, and Malawi (-1.4), one of the least developed and most densely populated countries in Africa. The fifth largest drop in absolute value corresponds to Venezuela (-1.2), whose economic instability, combined with the entrenchment of an oppressive and autocratic political regime, helps explain why it is the Latin American country with the greatest loss of happiness over the period. Ironically, Venezuela is one of the few countries to have established a government agency in charge of happiness, created in 2013 under the name “Vice Ministry for the Supreme Social Happiness of the People,” which shows how useless, if not counterproductive, such political overreach can be.
Another decline in happiness worth mentioning is that of the United States (-0.55), the fifteenth largest in absolute terms, which may contribute to understanding why American citizens opted for such a radical and risky populist option as the one offered by President Donald Trump.
This last point reminds us that the most powerful countries in the world are not necessarily the happiest. Consider, for example, the Group of Seven (G7), the exclusive club of some of the most developed and wealthy countries in the world, none of whose members are among the 15 happiest: Germany (22nd in happiness), the United States (24), France (33), Italy (40), Japan (55), Canada (18) and the United Kingdom (23). The situation is similar for the original BRICS, which are emerging economic powers that present themselves as an alternative to the G7: Brazil (36th in the ranking), Russia (66), India (118), China (68) and South Africa (95). The four Asian Tigers, countries that managed to grow rapidly and transition from underdevelopment to development in just a few decades: Hong Kong (88), Taiwan (27), South Korea (58) and Singapore (34) are also not among the top places in happiness. Economic and military power, high industrialization, and rapid economic growth undoubtedly provide a series of advantages for the countries that have them, but they do not necessarily translate into greater happiness for the population.
The 2025 report includes two Latin American countries in the top ten list for the first time: Costa Rica (6) and Mexico (10). Both countries had appeared at the top of the Latin American ranking over the years, but had never made it into the top ten. In the case of Costa Rica, which usually ranks very high in various well-being rankings, this news seems less surprising than it does for Mexico. What explains this progress?
- From the outset, it is worth recognizing that Latin American countries report greater happiness than would be expected given their GDP per capita, ranking above more developed countries. This places them in the middle of the table and above. Venezuela, the least happy of the Latin American countries in the study, ranks 82nd out of 147. Costa Rica and Mexico typically appear among the happiest countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. However, if GDP per capita were considered, Mexico would be ranked 62nd and Costa Rica 56th.
World Happiness Ranking
- The report includes an econometric model of happiness that, at the international level, explains approximately 75% of the variance. This model exploits the statistical association between happiness in countries, measured using the Cantril Ladder, and a set of six variables composed of a) GDP per capita, in logarithms; b) Healthy life expectancy at birth; c) Social support; d) Perception of corruption in governments and businesses; e) Generosity; and f) Freedom to make life choices.
While the model performs reasonably for the world in general and most of its regions, it falls short in the case of Latin American countries, in the sense that the subjective well-being values predicted by the model are systematically lower than those reported by the survey. This is most likely due to the fact that this model excludes idiosyncratic aspects of the Latin American region that would help explain its high responses in happiness surveys. Among the variables omitted from the model, which could be relevant for our region, the warmth of family relationships and the emotional networks established with relatives and friends stand out.
Mexico and Costa Rica score relatively low in relation to the variables in the model, suggesting that there are areas for improvement in the model specification. It is also likely that Costa Rica and Mexico’s positions in the ranking reflect unlikely outcomes at the top of their respective distributions. Therefore, it would be expected that the next survey surveys will see some reversal of the progress shown in 2025.
World Happiness Ranking
- The improvement in the ranking is, by definition, relative, resulting from the combined effect of the increase in happiness in Costa Rica (+0.32) and Mexico (+0.30) and the decrease in other countries.
a) Costa Rica went from 6.96 (12th place) in the 2024 RMF to 7.27 (6th place) in the 2025 RMF. Of the 11 countries that ranked above it in the 2024 RMF, only one improved its relative position, and none improved their happiness score (to two decimal places), while 8 decreased their score.
b) Mexico went from 6.68 (25th place) in the 2024 RMF to 6.98 (10th place) in the 2025 RMF. Of the 24 countries that ranked above Mexico in 2024, 11 dropped in the ranking and 8 increased; while 13 decreased their average happiness score and 7 increased it.
- In the case of Mexico, we have additional information from INEGI’s Basic BIARE, which measures life satisfaction, a cognitive measure of subjective well-being, similar in many ways to the Cantril Ladder. The Basic BIARE uses larger samples than Gallup’s, but restricts them to large urban areas. This measure records a variation of (+) 0.1 points both from 2023 to 2024, and for the period 2022-2024 compared to 2021-2023. In other words, it records a variation for Mexico in the same direction as the Gallup World Poll, but smaller.
- Considering the 95% confidence intervals, Costa Rica’s position in the 2024 RMF would have been between positions 8 (Luxembourg, with 7.12) and 19 (Lithuania, with 6.82), while in the 2025 RMF it is between positions 4 (Sweden, with 7.34) and 9 (Luxembourg, with 7.12). For Mexico, the range went from 17th (Ireland, with 6.84) to 33rd (El Salvador, with 6.47) in the 2024 RMF, to 9th (Luxembourg, with 7.12) to 17th (Austria, with 6.81) in the 2025 RMF. For both Costa Rica and Mexico, both ranges overlap, so we cannot rule out the hypothesis that the readings in the 2024 RMF sample were extraordinarily low and/or those in the 2025 RMF were extraordinarily high. That is, the hypothesis that the 2024 and 2025 readings for both countries are statistically equal cannot be ruled out.
- Considering the history of the RMF since 2012, we note that average happiness levels for Mexico had already been reached before. The level of 6.98 on the Cantril Ladder, which gave Mexico tenth place in the 2022 RMF ranking, is lower in specific terms than those reported in the 2013 RMF, when it registered 7.09, and the 2015 RMF, when it reached the maximum value of 7.19. It is worth noting that in the 2013 RMF, it held 16th place in the ranking, while in the 2015 RMF, it reached 14th place. In other words, ranking position does not translate into well-being. A country can improve its position in the ranking because its happiness level rises or because that of other countries falls.
In Mexico’s case, ranking 14 in the 2015 RMF implied a slightly higher level of happiness than that associated with ranking 10 in the 2025 RMF. Thus, the value observed for Mexico in the 2025 RMF is not extraordinary, since higher values have been achieved previously, and in fact, it is a level of happiness consistent with those historically reported, probably with the exception of what was observed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In terms of the region or time period for which Mexico reports data, no relevant changes are recorded. In itself, the improvement in the ranking should not be translated as an improvement in well-being.
The WHR’s message is more positive than normative. On the one hand, it reminds us that happiness is important and could well become the benchmark or touchstone for guiding many public policies, possibly moderating and shaping aspects of material progress that often entail high costs for people’s happiness, such as migration or job insecurity, school and work stress, family disintegration, and time poverty. Ultimately, social and economic achievements that do not result in a happier society cannot be called true progress, because they are failing or offer material gains in exchange for immaterial, but humanly significant, losses.
On the other hand, it is important to recognize that current measurements, such as the one used in the RMF, are far from perfect and should therefore be considered approximations, glimpses, or glimpses into the topic of happiness, rather than a specific reflection of it.
Even with the above, the question arises as to how it is possible for a country with a crisis of violence and insecurity as serious as the one Mexico is experiencing to see increases in the average happiness of the population. In this regard, in addition to acknowledging the imperfection of these measurements, it is important to recognize that behind the greater happiness of Mexicans, as well as many other Latin American populations, lies a very limited understanding of the relevant social environment, which implies a more tribal and less institutional, more traditional and less modern disposition for emotional attachment.
Statistical studies by INEGI (National Institute of Statistics and Geography) dedicated to subjective well-being provide evidence that, in their responses to happiness, interviewees are sensitive to issues of violence and insecurity when they experience them firsthand or when they occur in their immediate surroundings, but not so when they occur in other people. Their low civic culture, solidarity, and social responsibility ultimately free them from complications that would otherwise limit their experiences of happiness.
The RMF 2025 includes some indicators that are illustrative in this regard and reports within the framework of the study of “benevolence.” I particularly highlight three items from the Gallup World Poll related to the “wallet problem.” The idea is to investigate whether the interviewee believes a lost wallet would be returned to its rightful owner if the person who found it were i) a neighbor, ii) a stranger, or iii) a police officer. The interesting thing about this question is that, indirectly, through a mirror effect, it allows us to capture the prevailing values in each society, such as integrity, honesty, and solidarity. The following table compares the rankings of five Latin American countries.
Despite the differences in happiness levels, Latin American countries, especially Spanish-speaking ones, show relatively high levels of trust in other people, of whose social group they are part. As we all know from our daily lives, the countries of the region experience a special warmth in relationships with family and their immediate social circle. We may make extraordinary sacrifices for our loved ones, but that doesn’t stop us from double-parking. We are very loving, but we feel less secure among ourselves than in other societies. We are, on average, considerably happier than one might expect from GDP or from a specially designed multivariate statistical model, and that’s a very good thing. However, this is no reason for complacency. Definitely and by far, our reality is not a paradise.
National average figures are a good pretext to draw attention to the issue, but they are insufficient as a policy guide. Databases on subjective well-being should be as spatially and population-group-specific as possible and should include correlations that allow for meaningful cross-referencing of variables and help identify the mechanisms through which people’s happiness can be influenced. In Mexico, we have the BIARE and ENBIARE surveys produced by INEGI (National Institute of Statistics and Geography), as well as subjective well-being modules in the National Time Use Survey and the Retrospective Demographic Survey, which allow us to gain a deeper understanding of the topic. Just as a provocation for analyzing these sources, we can discover the association of subjective well-being (happiness) with variables such as mental health, work, poverty, income, free time, marital status, educational level, disability, quality of relationships, discrimination, violence, and much more. It’s worth investigating the topic further. Few things are as important as happiness. Or are they?
Source: animalpolitico
