EDITORIAL – Happiness an indicator

FEBRUARY is a good month to talk about the happiness or the lack of it, being traditionally the month for love and people in love.
About five years ago, in July 2011 to be exact, the United Nations General Assembly approved resolution inviting its close to 200 member countries to measure the happiness of their people and use this to help guide their policies.
On April 2, 2011, the resolution was followed by the first UN High Level Meeting on “Happiness and Well-being: Defining a New Economic Paradigm.” It was led by Prime Minister Jigme Thinley of Bhutan, the first country to have officially adopted gross national happiness instead of gross domestic product (GDP) as the main development indicator.
As it happened, the first World Happiness Report came out a day before the historic meeting. The second report which came out in 2013 was based on the Gallup Report which used available data from 2005 to 2012 from more than 150 countries.
The 2013 ranking based on the 2010-12 surveys indicated that Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Netherlands, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Austria, Iceland, and Australia are the top 10 happiest countries.
There was little change in the latest happiness report in 2015. What is unfortunate is that nowhere in the list of 85 countries was the Philippines included. That is the bad news. The good news is that the list is only partial, meaning that the Philippines could be somewhere in the remainder of the more than 150 countries included in the ranking.
Definitely, Filipinos have their way of measuring the level of their happiness. And occasionally we do hold surveys to gauge how people feel about their lives.
In Davao City, two institutions are doing that – the University Research Council (URC) of the Ateneo de Davao University and the Institute of Popular Opinion (IPO) of the University of Mindanao.
In its latest quarterly survey , the URC found that more than 95 percent of the Dabawenyos surveyed are happy, divided into 68.3 “moderately happy” and 27.3 percent “extremely happy.” Only 3.7 are “not totally happy” and .8 percent “not happy at all.”
Probing some more, the URC interviewers found that Dabawenyos’ reasons for being happy are relationship, 75.95 percent; health and wellness, 24.42 percent; financial stability, 11.11 percent and religion, 6.4 percent.
Those who are not happy, also were asked why and they gave the following reasons for their sadness: financial problem, 60.7 percent; health and wellness problem, 21.4 percent, and relationship problem 7.1 percent.
As can be gleaned from the findings, Dabawenyos are definitely normal, happy people. This is something we can be all happy about.
As we can see our country does not need to be ranked high in the level of happiness in the international scene. We can measure it ourselves.
We encourage our research institutions to continue gauging the level of happiness of our people as regularly as possible. This is a healthy exercise worthy of pursuing.