How happy is the world?

By Harry

25 July 2025

The word Happy is everywhere and has become almost a cliche. What does ‘Happy’ mean? It has very much so been mixed up with peace. There are however some ways to quantify in a holistic macro sense how “happy” people are on average (by country). We’ve used a dataset from 2019 that looks at happiness per country via some key metrics; GDP per capita, Freedom to make life choices, Life expectancy and social support.

We’ve then mapped all these data points onto a map with appropriate visual encoding so you can easily inspect the datasets and insights You can try it out here.

Of course, there is a really strong correlation between a countries happiness and its financial situtation which we can see with the GDP per capita value, with the average at 1.3 for the happiest countries. When compared to the most unhappiest countries this correlation becomes very clear.

The correlation between GDP and happiness feel intuitive but something else we can see that is a key fundamental is liberty. Liberty or “Freedom to make life choices” as it is labelled on the map is incredibly important.

The definition of Liberty - freedom from physical restraint. Freedom from arbitrary or despotic control. The positive enjoyment of various social, political, or economic rights and privileges.

When we look at any cluster of countries for example the most happiest countries; Sweden, Norway, Finland, UK or the most unhappy one of the key differentiator in their total score is liberty. This becomes more clear as other factors like health, GDP, life expectancy go up.

Have a look at the happiness index map (click here) and let us know what you think.

See you soon :)