High Pressure Economics
The latest research from the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick , appears to indicate that there is a clear correlation between a country's overall happiness and its average blood pressure. In work soon to be published, the authors describe the results of 15,000 interviews with people from across Europe who were asked all about their levels of satisfaction with life, their mental health, and whether they had had problems of hypertension. According to their data, the countries were ranked from happiest to saddest as follows: Sweden, Denmark, UK, Netherlands, Ireland, France, Luxembourg, Spain, Greece, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Finland, Germany and Portugal.
So confident were the researchers that perceived (not measured) hypertension was a good indicator of actual blood-pressure problems, that they predict blood-pressure readings will one day replace or augment GDP as a measure of the success of a country. Gross Domestic Hypertension or GDH - sounds pretty good.
However, there are a few problems to be resolved with the GDH.
Were this data to be applied to the well-known Intersalt data, the three most sucessful economies on earth would be the Yanomamo and Xingu natives of Brazil followed, at a distance, by the natives of Papua New Guinea.
No doubt, there are a few bugs to be worked out, but I wouldn't be surprised if we were to soon see a new Interhappiness study.
The other problem is that the Warwick data is inconsistent with data on Ischemic Heart Disease in Europe published by WHO and highlighted in "The burden of disease attributable to nutrition in Europe " by Pomerleau et al., Public Health Nutrition, 6(5), 453-61, 2003. This paper describes the critical importance of fruit and vegetable consumption (DASH diet) to overall well-being.
Until we can be confident that correlating a perception (of happiness) with a perception (of hypertension) makes sense, it would be prudent to take heed of the Pomerleau conclusions.
