inkbluesky

Happiness is rising around the world: U-M study

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—People in most countries around the world are happier these days, according to newly released data from the World Values Survey based at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.

Data from representative national surveys conducted from 1981 to 2007 show the happiness index rose in an overwhelming majority of nations studied.

“It’s a surprising finding,” said U-M political scientist Ronald Inglehart, who directs the World Values Surveys and is the lead author of an article on the topic to be published in the July 2008 issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. “It’s widely believed that it’s almost impossible to raise an entire country’s happiness level.”

The 2007 wave of the surveys also provides a ranking of 97 nations containing 90 percent of the world’s population. The results indicate that Denmark is the happiest nation in the world and Zimbabwe the unhappiest. The United States ranks 16th on the list, immediately after New Zealand.

I think Denmark kicked out all the bitter chain smoking introverts that were writing the next great novel or inventing the next great video game. Or maybe they left on their own because everyone was getting on their nerves.

bits and pieces

‘Forclosure Phil’ Gramm: How John McCain’s Closest Economic Advisor Helped Engineer the Morgage Crisis

So here they were saying, “We were able to do this because of these unregulated swaps,” which some people at this community—Commodity Futures Trading Commission had wanted to regulate. And they were the lobbyists who went to—the financial industry lobbyists who went to Phil Gramm and said, “Listen, we’ve got to have these swaps unregulated.” They convinced Larry Summers, who was Treasury secretary. They convinced Alan Greenspan. And even though the bill was pronounced dead weeks before Phil Gramm did anything, he still managed to slip it through, get it passed by Congress when no one was looking, and no one even read it. You know, no one knew what was in this bill. And then the swap market took off, which helped lead to the subprime crisis.

And so, you’d think that a guy who did that and also gave us the Enron loophole would now be persona non grata in Washington and in the world of high finance. Well, if you thought that, you’d be wrong, because Phil Gramm went on to become a lobbyist and a high-paid executive at UBS, that same Swiss banking firm that lost tens of billions of dollars on the subprime crisis.

This is all perfectly understanable. McCain has said that he doesn’t think of economics as his area of expertise. Having a crony around like Gramm makes John feel less insecure.