Taiwan ranked 31st in this year’s World Happiness Report released yesterday, coming second in East Asia behind Singapore.
The annual report, launched in 2012 to support the UN’s sustainable development goals, is based on data from US market research company Gallup, analyzed by a global team now led by the University of Oxford.
People in 143 countries and territories are asked to evaluate their life on a scale from zero to 10, with 10 representing their best possible life. Results from the past three years are averaged to create a ranking.
Photo: Ritchie B. Tongo, EPA-EFE
Taiwan this year ranked 31st globally with a score of 6.503, falling from 27th in last year’s report.
However, it retained its status as the second-happiest place in East Asia, just behind Singapore at No. 30 with a score of 6.523.
This year’s report also looked at happiness by age, finding that Taiwanese younger than 30 were the 25th-happiest in the world and the highest in East Asia.
Taiwanese aged 60 and older came in at No. 34 globally, behind Singapore at No. 26 and China at No. 30.
The findings suggest that overall, young people are happiest in Taiwan, while older people are the least happy.
Outside of Asia, the index found rising unhappiness among younger people, causing the US and some large western European countries to fall down the ranking, while Nordic nations remained on top.
Finland remained in the top spot with an average score of 7.741, followed closely by Denmark, Iceland and Sweden, while Afghanistan and Lebanon held the bottom two spots with scores of 1.721 and 2.707 respectively.
In broad terms, the rankings are loosely correlated with countries’ prosperity, but other factors, such as life expectancy, social bonds, personal freedom and corruption appear to influence individuals’ assessments as well.
The US dropped out of the top 20 for the first time, slipping to 23rd from 15th last year, due to a sharp decline in the sense of wellbeing of Americans younger than 30.
While a global ranking of the happiness of those aged 60 and older would place the US 10th, under 30s’ life evaluations alone put the US in 62nd place.
The findings are at odds with much previous research into wellbeing, which found happiness highest in childhood and early teens, before falling to its lowest in middle age, then rising around retirement.
While the phenomenon is starkest in the US, the age gap in wellbeing is also wide in Canada and Japan, and to a decreasing extent in France, Germany and Britain, which all lost ground in this year’s rankings.
By contrast, many of the countries with the biggest improvements in wellbeing are former communist countries in central and eastern Europe.
Unlike in richer countries, young people there report significantly better quality of life than older people, often on a par or better than in western Europe.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching