Satisfaction with Life Index

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The Satisfaction with Life Index was created in 2007 by Adrian G. White, an analytic social psychologist at the University of Leicester, using data from a metastudy.^[1] It is an attempt to show life satisfaction in different nations.

In this calculation, subjective well-being correlates most strongly with health (.7), wealth (.6), and access to basic education (.6).^[2][3]

This is an example of directly measuring happiness—asking people how happy they are—as an alternative to traditional measures of policy success such as GDP or GNP. Some studies suggest that happiness can be measured effectively.^[4][5]

This Index, however, is not solely based on directly asking "how people feel", but also on its social and economic development.^{[citation needed]}

The Happy Planet Index was used along with data from UNESCO on access to schooling, from the WHO on life expectancy, and from the CIA on GDP per capita to perform a new analysis to come to a unique and novel set of results.^[6] Specifically, the extent of correlation between measures of poverty, health and education, and the variable of happiness.^{[citation needed]}