The Cantril Ladder Across 143 Countries (Helliwell et al., 2024)

The Question

Can one self-anchored ladder question, asked the same way every year, produce a stable picture of how the world is doing?

What They Found

• The Cantril Ladder averaged 5.5 globally across 143 countries, with Finland on top at 7.7 and Afghanistan at the bottom near 1.8
• Six explanatory variables (GDP per person, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and absence of corruption) accounted for more than three quarters of the gap between the happiest and least happy countries
• Country rankings shifted little year to year, suggesting the ladder tracks structural conditions of life rather than passing mood, which is the core promise of a life-evaluation measure
• Younger adults in many Western countries scored noticeably lower than older generations for the first time in two decades, reversing a long-held assumption that happiness rises smoothly with age
• National averages held up against external benchmarks: countries with higher ladder scores also reported longer life expectancy, stronger social trust, and better self-rated health

How They Tested It

• Pooled Gallup World Poll data from 2021 to 2023, using nationally representative samples in 143 countries
• Every respondent answered the same single ladder question, with 0 anchored to the worst possible life they could imagine and 10 to the best
• Averaged the ladder score within each country, then ranked countries and modeled the rankings against six economic and social variables
• Cross-checked the ladder against companion measures of positive and negative emotion to confirm it was capturing life evaluation, not affect

Caveats

• Country averages smooth over huge within-country variation; a national score of 7 still hides large numbers of people in the Suffering band
• The ladder is self-anchored, so a 7 in Finland and a 7 in Lagos describe the same relationship to one's own ideal, not the same objective standard of living
• A single item has no internal consistency check, so the report relies on large national samples to cancel individual noise; the measure is far less reliable for any one person than multi-item scales like the SWLS or WHO-5

How Reborn Helps

Reborn lets you take the same single ladder question that powers the World Happiness Report and see your score against the global average of 5.5.