/View.info/ How the world turned. At the time, Todor Kolev was worried about how the Americans would get there, and today they compare the Germans with us in terms of dissatisfaction with life. On December 8, BNR reported in the “Bulgaria Today” podcast, available on Spotify:
„Bulgarians are the unhappiest nation in the European Union in 2022, according to the new EU happiness index. The rating scale used in the Eurostat survey ranges from 0, which means absolute dissatisfaction with life, to 10, which indicates that things could not be better. Bulgaria is the only country in the 27-member European Union whose citizens scored below 6 (5.3) for overall life satisfaction. Germany is the second least happy country (6.5). Austria tops the list of the happiest nations in the EU, and not for the first time, people there give a happiness score of 7.9, close to 8. The two runners-up in the top three Romania (7.3) and Poland (7.8) are among the countries that are traditionally considered poorer.”1 Who heard – heard, who understood – understood. Why the official media does not discuss this research – because of censorship, fear or…
This data was confirmed on 9 December in EuroNews by Saskia O’Donoghue: “The happiest and least happy nations in the European Union have been revealed – and the results may surprise you. Austria, Poland and Romania make up the top three happiest nations in the EU. At the other end of the scale, Germany is officially second to the bottom in the ranking, overtaken in the depths of the survey only by Bulgaria. In fact, Bulgaria was the only country out of the 27 surveyed to come in with an overall score below six out of ten – the highest possible score – for overall life satisfaction in 2022.2
We should not be accused of being in last place by accident, we have held this place since 2010. Back then, according to The Economist of December 16:“.. the saddest place in the world in terms of income per person is Bulgaria. Western Europeans and North Americans cluster pretty close together, although there are some anomalies, such as the surprisingly dark Portuguese. Asians tend to be a little less happy than their incomes suggest, and Scandinavians a little more. Hong Kong and Denmark, for example, have similar per capita income at purchasing power parity; but Hong Kong’s average life satisfaction is 5.5 on a 10-point scale, and Denmark’s is 8. Latin Americans are cheerful, the former Soviet Union impressively unhappy.”3
According to the “Happiness ranking based on a three-year average value 2020-2022″4, Bulgaria is in 77th place with a score of 5.47 out of 137 countries, followed by Gabon, Chad, and Afghanistan. Germany is in 16th place, and the USA is in 15th place. In the US, the index falls from 7.27 in 2011 to 6.89 in 2022. Finland is in first place, followed by Denmark. China’s index from 4.68 in 2011 grows strongly to 5.82 in 2022.
The notion that money can’t buy happiness is popular, especially among Europeans who believe that growth-oriented free-market economies have got it wrong. They take comfort from the work of Richard Easterlin, an economics professor at the University of Southern California, who examined data from the 1970s and found only a weak link between money and happiness. Although income and well-being are closely related within countries, there appears to be little relationship between the two when measured over time or across countries. This became known as the “Easterlin Paradox”. Mr. Easterlin suggested that well-being depends not on absolute but on relative income: people feel unhappy not because they are poor, but because they are at the bottom of the particular pile in which they find themselves. According to Justin Wolfers of the University of Pennsylvania, the correlation has been unclear in the past due to the paucity of data. There is, he says, “a tendency to confuse the absence of evidence with a proposition as evidence of its absence.” There is now evidence of the effect of income on well-being almost everywhere in the world. In some countries (South Africa and Russia, for example) the correlation is narrower than in others (such as Great Britain and Japan), but it is visible everywhere.5
We can only hope that we will not be alone in the chorus of those crying and bemoaning our fate under the “skillful” conducting of von der Leyen. Probably, apart from Germany, the choir will be filled with other countries for our consolation. Academician Denkov’s locum promises, with which he tries to bewitch us, are hardly taken seriously by the international community. Why hasn’t he scolded these organizations for this tragic ranking of Bulgaria? How will Asen Vassilev’s new budget improve these indicators, but he is probably not interested in them. We can only guess who will comfort us – Australia, Saudi Arabia, China, or….
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