It’s all smiles until I lose

On Wednesday, pollster Gallup unveiled its third Positive Experience Index (PEI) — meant to measure general happiness on a country-by-country basis. By happenstance, the Swiss business school IMD released its annual World Competitiveness Yearbook (WCY) the following day, providing an ad hoc opportunity for a comparison across two fundamentally different rankings: happiness and competitiveness. The PEI’s headline finding was that a majority of adults worldwide are experiencing positive emotions despite the fact that conflicts and unrest dominate much of the news. And while the results from 138 countries show, according to Gallup, that higher incomes contribute to people’s positive emotions, the researchers said that this correlation weakens above certain income levels, such as $75,000 per year in the United States. One would thus expect the PEI to roughly line up with the WCY, which is dominated by rich nations. Related article: IMD’s competitiveness index ranks the nations And this happened in certain cases: