Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Unhappy Planet

Some academic tree huggers have put together an interesting scale that was done showing a "Happy Planet Index". This was calculated by looking at the combination of how satisfied people are, the life expectancy and how well managed the ecological aspect of the country is.

Hardly surprising is the fact that Zimbabwe comes last in the list of 178 countries with a Happy Index of 16.6. Other "happy countries" like Fiji, the Philipines, Argentina come in with a Happy Index of over 50. The "happiest country" was a little island nation called Vanuatu. Perhaps it is time to ask for a transfer...

The link for this scale is here: http://www.happyplanetindex.org/list.htm

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Guess what - my score was all of 3.2 - which, as they pointed out, was well below the 'bottom-placed' Zim on 16...!!!! I did the test as honestly as I could. Maybe the fact that we had no power from 11am to 8.15pm, and everyone I spoke to today was p.....d off with this place had something to do with it?

Geoff said...

Thats a really bad score Dad! Makes me worried! (not that I did much better, scoring 9.7) We going to have to make a plan to get that score up aren't we!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the link Geoff. A friend of mine had sent me a link to something about it on the Sky News website, but I didn't have time to sift through everything and find out what was taken into account. It surprises me not that Zim is the bottom of the list; despite some of the "happier" countries being less developed, I think it's a case of what you don't know you can't miss! Just the mere thought of having to go back there in a few months' time depresses me - if it was just for a holiay I'd be looking forward to it, but it's not sadly.
See ya, Mandie