Unhappy Arab Emirates

These surveys on happiness and the like are always treated with scepticism, especially when the country in question comes out in a negative light. But this latest index, the happiness "planet" index, paints a scathing picture of the UAE as an unhappy place, both for the people living there and as usage of natural resources.



With only Kuwait behind the UAE as the most unhappiest place in the Gulf, it warrants further review:

The new global environmental report compiled by the independent British think-tank the New Economics Foundation (NEF) analysed life expectancy and general life satisfaction and set them against each nation’s carbon footprint.

Saamah Abdullah, one of the authors of the Happy Planet Index, attributed the UAE’s poor performance to the consumption of natural resources, which is among the world’s heaviest.

Abdullah, who had been a Dubai resident for five years, pointed out that UAE had the third-highest per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the world but added that life expectancy was quite high at 78.3 years, based on 2005 data.




So what does happy mean - and what does happy stand for? Does the fact that your carbon footprint mean that place is unhappy? Yes, according to the authors:

"The HPI strips the view of the economy back to its absolute basics: what we put in (resources), and what comes out (human lives of different length and happiness). The resulting global index of the 143 nations for which new, improved data is available, reveals that the world as a whole has a long way to go. In terms of delivering long and meaningful lives within the Earth’s environmental limits – all nations could do better. No country achieves an overall ‘high’ score on the Index, and no country does well on all three indicators. "


So this does not seem an exercise in happiness, but more an exercise in making the world greener, or at least trying to. The mish mash of criteria is a little odd:

Life Expectancy - The UAE scores well at 78.3
Life Satisfaction - The UAE scores badly at 7.2
Ecological Footprint - The UAE scores badly at 9.5 as its total ecological footprint, based on data from the Global Footprint Network.

...and I wouldn't necessarily group them together to create their equation of happy planet index = happy life years/ecological footprint plus some alpha and beta application, but hey I'm not a statistcian. You can download all the data and the report if you are that way inclined.

All in all, what they are trying to do is make the world a better place, for you and for me and the entire human race. There's a song in there somewhere, I'm sure.

UAE ranked 123rd out of 143 nations in Happy Planet Index
The Happy Planet Index