Wellbeing: Research Shows that a Lower Tax Rate Won’t Necessarily Make You Happy

The Gallup Organization has just published a new book: Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements by Tom Rath and Jim Harter.  The five essential elements are presented in a fast 100 pages.  The remaining 100 pages or so are devoted to the worldwide research Gallup undertook that provides the support for the first 100 pages. 

In brief, the five essential elements are: Career Wellbeing, Social Wellbeing, Financial Wellbeing, Physical Wellbeing, and Community Wellbeing.  If one wishes to have overall wellbeing, these five elements need to be optimized.  A chapter is devoted to each element giving helpful tips for increasing your wellbeing in that particular element.

These tips can be summarized as follows:

            Focus on your strengths.

            Do work that you love.

            Have a good friend at work.

            Spend several hours each day with people who make you feel good.

Good experiences and donating to others improve your wellbeing more than “retail therapy.”

            Automate bill paying and saving.

            EXERCISE!

            Eat right: lots of colorful fruits and veggies.

            Get enough sleep: at least 7-8 hours.

            Contribute to your community.

All this seems pretty straightforward, and we probably are aware of all these tips.  So where do you rate?  You can find out here, if you buy the book and get the code: http://www.wbfinder.com/home.aspx

If you don’t want to do that, the website does have some other useful info.

However, the book does rate cities, states, and countries on three criteria of Wellbeing: 1] percentage Thriving; 2] percentage Struggling; and 3] percentage Suffering.  The highest ranks will obviously be filled with those having the highest percentage of their population Thriving.

Based on Gallup’s research, the top 10 countries from 1 – 10 are Denmark (82% Thriving), Finland (75% Thriving), Ireland (72% Thriving), Norway (69% Thriving), Sweden (68% Thriving), Netherlands (68% Thriving), Canada ((68% Thriving), New Zealand (63% Thriving), Switzerland (62% Thriving), and Australia (62% Thriving).  The United States comes in at #19 with 50% Thriving. 

Now, what is quite interesting about the Top Ten Thriving Countries is that except for Ireland and Australia (Australia’s tax rates work out to be about the same as that of the US), all of them have higher tax rates; generally, significantly higher tax rates, than does the United States.  See the table below based on OECD 2005 data.

Another fascinating tidbit, is that all of the Top Ten Thriving Countries also have universal healthcare.

As Arsenio Hall used to say: “Things that make you go hmmmm….”

So, it looks like the Top Ten are using their higher tax rates to provide their citizens with the kind of infrastructure and benefits that improve Wellbeing.

It gives you something to think about before the elections.