CHART OF THE DAY: Is today a good day?

Is today a good day? A bad day? Or just a typical, run-of-the-mill kind of day? 

Maybe it is still too early to tell.

But the answer someone is likely to give to the 'Is today a good day?' question could be highly dependent in which country you live. Take a look at today's CHART OF THE DAY, courtesy of the fine people over at Pew and taken from their Spring 2014 Global Attitudes survey, and of course some FREE commentary from me after the chart.

It may seem odd or counter-intuitive, but many of those in the poorer countries surveyed were more likely than those in richer nations to say that the day, and this is just a randomly selected day, was a good one.

When looking at this question by national income, there is a slightly negative correlation between respondents reporting that the day is a good one and their country's per capita GDP. The USA being the major outlier on this measure. The USA has the highest GDP per capita among the countries surveyed by Pew and these American respondents were more likely to rate a day as particularly good than people in other rich nations. But across the board in almost all the surveyed countries, the most common response to this question is that the day was just “typical.”

Kind of interesting, even if it is hard to know what, if anything to make of it. On the one hand it is noteworthy that with the exception of the USA, the relative wealth (as expressed in per capita GDP), doesn't seem to predict general happiness, (or at least contentedness). But the fact that across the world most people's are just 'meh', seems more interesting.

Think about your typical day. Today even. 

Good, bad, or 'meh'. 

How about yesterday? The day before?

When was your last really, really good day?

I hope it is today.

Happy Wednesday.

Comments

[Mark]

There was some interesting discussion on this on Facebook. Are there particular aspects within the various cultures that explain their position? What is it about Americans? ("Delusional" was one offered explanation.) It would be interesting to see how data from the "World Values Survey" fits into this. For example, can you find a stronger fit between GDP/person and "Good day" within a particular WVS Culture?
What the world values, in one chart

[Steve]

My unresearched take would be that Americans just have been conditioned that we have it really good here - and for the most part we do. We don't really, in large measure anyway, look at other countries and wish things here were more like they are somewhere else. But it is hard to say for sure.