All Hail North Korean "Happiness!"

In the endless search for meaning through today’s churning morass of sociopsychobabble gibberish, it’s gratifying to stumble across a case that illuminates some truth, especially when it turns up in a truly unlikely place.

So, a word of thanks to North Korea’s Ministry of Truth (or whatever they call it) and the state’s Chosun Central Television for showing us the way.

By now you’ve probably heard the earthshaking news reported on Shanghaiist:  It seems a new survey reveals that the number 1 happiest country on Earth is… Red China!  Followed closely by number 2, Communist North Korea.

Coincidentally enough, the news comes from North Korea’s Chosun TV and the findings are apparently those of North Korean researchers.  Apparently being a murderous, repressive, often-starving pariah state counts as a plus in some quarters.

Go figure.

While the methodologies of the survey and its criteria aren’t divulged in any of the available reports, communism and hostility to Western civilization seem to be big contributing factors to the North Koreans’ definition of happiness.  Consider that Cuba comes in at number 3 on the list.  Iran is 4^th and Venezuela rounds out the top 5.

The U.S. is apparently not such a happy place.  The “American Empire” ranked at the very bottom of the happiness list.

Predictably, out across the web and the media world, the chuckles abound.

A few news agencies are playing this one more or less straight, drily using such qualifiers as “politically expedient” to describe the purported findings. 

But more of the response seems to lean towards snarky commentary. Yes, it does sound like farce, perhaps a story from The Onion.

Alex Moore on the blog Death and Taxes gives the NorKs their props: 

“You’ve gotta hand it to the North Koreans, though—they have mastered the oldest trick in the lying-and-cheating book: you’ve gotta make it look believable. Notice they didn’t go for the number-one happiest position. That would look suspicious. Instead China takes that designation.”

NPR’s blog The Two Way gamely offers the headline “Consider the Source” and author Mark Memmott notes with a wink that “Famine and repression apparently didn't hurt North Korea's standing in the eyes of the ‘researchers.’”

Consider the source indeed.

Nyuk nyuk. 

Silly North Koreans.  Thinking we’d take their “happiness index survey” seriously when it’s obviously such self-serving claptrap.  Who in the world would ever expect that kind of thing to be taken seriously?

Who, indeed?

Not so fast comrades.

All well-deserved kidding aside… is this really any different from any number of distorted and self serving studies, polls, measures, surveys, indices, so often tossed out by leftist advocacy “researchers” and think tanks to make America look bad and its economically dysfunctional contemporaries, both developed and undeveloped, look good? 

How often do we see phantom “experts” emerge to ascribe a society’s “happiness” or “unhappiness” to some fuzzy non-quantifiable criteria utterly in conflict with that society’s actual performance in the world marketplace as measured by real, quantifiable, standards such as GDP, national security, employment levels or job creation? 

Don’t consider such reality based metrics as Gross Domestic Product when you can trade in your yardstick for a Slinky and instead use the warm and fuzzy HDI, the “Human Development Index!” 

Farther afield, recall the regular ritual of the United States being pilloried by yet another set of statistics criticizing …yes criticizing… its success in locking up criminals!

In proper context, the North Korean happiness “survey” seems merely a reductio ad absurdum version of a practice common among agenda-driven advocacy “researchers” the world over.

How many surveys can you recall that tell us what a paradise people inhabit in Europe’s socialist utopias like France, Norway and Sweden?  Through decades on the doorstep of the Warsaw Pact from which they were protected (courtesy of American soldiers and taxpayers) they’ve luxuriated in a world where crushing taxes and sometimes mind blowing deficits limit job growth and opportunity …but every non-achiever can therefore enjoy free health care, and abundant self-esteem, secure in the knowledge that nobody has a chance of earning significantly more than he does because the government will confiscate the money. 

The unraveling financial crises across the continent may demonstrate the folly of these systems but… hey, they’ve been happy!

Interestingly enough, the North Koreans happiness initiative was foreshadowed (or maybe even inspired) by an intriguingly similar proposal put forth by the Paris based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Rather than concentrate on such chilly numbers as a country’s GDP, which quantifiably measures success, the OECD suggests we consider an ethereal “Better Life Index,” one which considers factors like “leisure,” “health,” “life satisfaction,” “work-life balance.”

Better life index?  How super plus good!  George Orwell would be proud.

Even then-presidential candidate John Kerry once took a shot at precisely this kind of meaningless manipulation when, during his unsuccessful White House bid, he proposed his own reimagining of the “Misery Index.”  Even back then, it was obvious to anyone paying attention that the U.S. economy in 2004 was terrific.  Inflation was low and the jobless rate was around 5.7%.  (Wow, those were the days!)  So rather than use the true, classic, “Misery Index” employed since the 1960s, a simple combination of the unemployment and inflation rates, Kerry’s campaign devised a version that ignored the historically accepted inflation number and cherry picked the worst tidbits like rising health care, gasoline and education costs while, at the same time, disregarding the nice unemployment rate in favor of more obscure jobs numbers that omitted those sectors seeing the best job growth.           

This isn’t apples and oranges.  It’s apples and mushrooms.  Be careful not to get whacked by those moving goalposts. 

Not that pro-growth, pro-opportunity organizations don’t regularly produce their own treatises on the merits of the world’s socioeconomic systems.  The World Bank issues it’s “Doing Business Report” annually.  But here the analyses use real world statistics, lots of them, on real world factors that measurably impact opportunity and, as a result, jobs and prosperity.  Taxes. ease of licensing or hiring, enforcement of contracts, clarity of property rights, no muddy dwelling on self-esteem here. 

But all that is just too hard edged if you’re living in the Age of Aquarius.

I don’t recall anyone speaking up when the OECD was suggesting that its own definition of “happiness” supplant objective criteria such as per capita GDP in considering the merits or moral value of a nation’s economic or social systems.  All the North Korean “happiness index” does is take the idea to its most logical, illogical, extreme.  When divorced from real quantifiable measures, the success of a nation can be… well… whatever the definer wants to say it is.  

Oh sure, the North Koreans were stupid and ham handed about their little foray into statistical propagandizing.  But the mere fact that they don’t do their ridiculous posing as well as their fellow travelers in the developed world do it does not make the essence of what they’re attempting any different. 

The story of North Korea being the second happiest country in the world will surely fade quickly, particularly given its stark conflict with the facts.  But it should be more than just a source of comedic entertainment. 

It should also be instructive.  Less outrageous, more skillful, examples of agenda-driven game playing with ostensibly objective “research” abound in today’s public discourse.  All too often, they are simply accepted as fact when, in reality, they are highly partisan opinion.

Yes, yes, yes.  Consider the source.

Let us take this lesson to heart and thank the North Koreans for being so clumsy and obvious with their lies.

They may have helped us spot some truth... or more artfully packaged untruth... elsewhere.