Global polls typically show that people in industrialized countries where incomes are relatively high report greater levels of satisfaction with life than those in low-income countries.
But now the first large-scale survey to look at happiness in small, non-industrialized communities living close to nature paints quite a different picture.
Looking at happiness in non-industrialized settings
Everyone has 24 hours per day. Across the global population of 8 billion people this adds up to approximately 190 billion human hours per day. How those hours are spent determines the impacts we have on our surroundings as well as how we experience life. To find out how people around the world use their time, a research team led by McGill University has gathered and analyzed information about both economic and non-economic activities in order to estimate, for the first time, what a day in the life of the world looks like.
Surprising as it sounds, all life forms in the ocean, from small krill to large tuna, seem to obey a simple mathematical law that links an organism’s abundance to its body size. For example, although small krill are individually only about one millionth of the weight of a large tuna, they also tend to be a million times more numerous throughout the oceans. The idea, known as the Sheldon size spectrum theory, was first advanced in the 1970s, but has never been tested for a wide range of marine species and on a global scale until now.
Short growing seasons limited the possible size of hunter-gatherer societies by forcing people to rely on meat, according to a recent study by a team of international researchers, including McGill University professor Eric Galbraith.
Economic growth is often prescribed as a sure way of increasing the well-being of people in low-income countries, but a study led by McGill and the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) suggests that there may be good reason to question this assumption. The researchers set out to find out how people rate their subjective well-being in societies where money plays a minimal role, and which are not usually included in global happiness surveys.
Thanks to the pandemic, we know just how quickly food can disappear from supermarket shelves. But it is hard to gauge the vulnerability of our food production system as a whole to abrupt changes, such as those that could be caused by extreme events such as a nuclear war or massive volcanic eruptions.
The diversity of life is staggering. From microscopic algae to elephants, life has devised countless ways to thrive in every environment on the planet. But while biologists have tended to focus on the many varied forms that species have evolved, the age of ‘big data’ offers an unprecedented view of some surprisingly common features shared by all creatures, great and small.
To improve people’s well-being as much as possible in coming decades, policy makers should look beyond narrow economic calculations and prioritize non-material factors when making big decisions.
