Shiny, Happy, Imaginary Planet

I linked to a post by Scott Burgess earlier this week, which did a nice demolition job on the New Economics Foundation's "Happy Planet Index". But apparently, even Scott was taking the numbers too seriously:

Apparently NEF just made up Vanuatu's life satisfaction number by extrapolation from other countries. But, truly, this competely defeats the purpose of self-reported life satisfaction. There are undoubtedly unique aspects of Vanuatu's culture, economy, climate, character, etc., that would enter into their pattern of self-reports. So it's pretty funny that Vanuatu "wins" in a much-touted index in part due to numbers the authors made up.

Hat tip to Jane Galt for the URL.