With the release of the 2025 World Happiness Report, the focus has been on the top countries in the rankings. They don’t mention trends except for highlighting “In general, the western industrial countries are now less happy than they were between 2005 and 2010.” But we care about world happiness. So, we think it’s worth […]
Looking for the latest rankings? See our blog post about the 2026 World Happiness Report. Our friends at the World Happiness Report have just published their 2025 rankings, based on self-reported happiness. We also wrote a chapter for the report! Read on to learn more. Once again, the Nordic countries claim the top spots, with Finland retaining […]
As the only organisation looking to apply wellbeing science to improve happiness globally, we’ve been analysing the recent announcement of USAID funding withdrawal to understand what it means for donors who trust us to guide their giving towards having maximum impact. Understanding the Impact of Closing USAID The United States has historically been the world’s […]
Academic papers Human wellbeing and machine learning Standard regression models explain surprisingly little of the variation in wellbeing, limiting our ability to predict it. In response, Oparina et. al assess the potential of machine learning to help us better understand wellbeing by analysing wellbeing data on over a million respondents from Germany, the UK, and […]
Four of our publications have been awarded prizes this year. In this post, we provide a summary of each publication and why the judges rated them so highly. Deworming and decay: replicating GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness analysis Joel McGuire, Samuel Dupret, and Michael Plant | Read the post What’s the post about? We replicated GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness analysis of […]
Summary Our charity recommendation for 2022 is StrongMinds, a non-profit that provides group psychotherapy for women in Uganda and Zambia who are struggling with depression. We compared StrongMinds to three interventions that have been recommended by GiveWell as being amongst the most cost-effective in the world: cash transfers, deworming pills, and anti-malarial bednets. We find […]