The Gallup World Poll asks an amazing battery of questions about the subjectively-experienced lives of people across the globe, and hence offers an unparalleled opportunity to contrast the subjectively-experienced lives of those in rich and poor countries.

This chart is my personal favorite, showing the proportion of people in each country who report having smiled or laughed a lot the previous day. Higher levels of economic development are clearly associated with more smiles and laughter. But equally, there are a lot of exceptions to this rule, and plenty of puzzles.

Laotians are more likely to smile than anyone else, and the Irish appear to have earned their national reputation as jolly japesters. My own country, Australia, comes in as the 29th of the 131 countries in the Smile Stakes, while the U.S. is a disappointing 45th.

Click here for the full article.

Luckily the annual Australian Unity wellbeing index - the statistical smile tracker - was released this week, which helped shed some light on this consumerist conundrum.

The what-makes-us-happy report discovered that happiness starts to stall as household income passes $100,000.

According to the authors, once you crack six figures “money loses its ability to reliably raise wellbeing and does not increase in line with increasing income”.

Which makes perfect sense. It’s a fancy way of describing what I call the economics of enough.

Click here for the full article.

For an in-depth study of all things happy, check out this entry on “Pleasure” from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. While it isn’t exactly what most people would call light reading, the entry is a fascinating and comprehensive discussion of pleasure and happiness.  You will find a multitude of philosophies regarding what pleasure and happiness truly mean to the human experience we all share.

Pleasure, in the inclusive usages most important in moral psychology, ethical theory, and the studies of mind, includes all joy and gladness — all our feeling good, or happy…