Monday, September 13, 2010

Charity May Depend More on Happiness than Wealth

From Need Magazine
Aaaaaand we're back to our weekday schedule. Hopefully you enjoyed our weekend features. If not, we can always improve them! This blog is still a newborn, so post a comment if you have suggestions to help it past its toddler phase, and eventually its awkward teenage years. Only YOU can help this blog grow into a happy, well-adjusted adult!

Now for the news: Clayton Jones of The Christian Science Monitor reports that a country's average level of charity depends more on its happiness than on its wealth. This information comes from a Gallup survey called "The World Giving Index 2010". The survey asked the following questions in 153 countries:

Which of the following three charitable acts have you undertaken in the past month:
1. Donated money to an organization?
2. Volunteered time to an organization?
3. Helped a stranger, or someone you didn’t know who needed help?
Gallup then compared the answers to indexes of wealth and happiness. Assuming people answered honestly (usually when huge numbers of people are surveyed, honest people outweigh the fibbers), a surprising number of economically poor countries are generous. Sierra Leone, for instance, ranks as the ninth most generous country in the world, even though it is the third lowest country on the Human Development Index.

So if you follow positive psychology tips to become happier, you may become more generous, and becoming more generous may make you happier, and so on! It's win-win!

1 comment:

  1. Oh the teenage years, how very awkward indeed haha

    Interesting statistics!! I love teh fact that it seems to be such a "vicious circle" too.

    ReplyDelete