You’ve raised a very interesting question!

However, I would ‘read’ the graph a little differently.

I explain myself.

You interpret the graph as a ‘T-shape’, with surprisingly and understandably happy countries (the left and right halves of the flat, ‘happy’ line of the ‘T’), and understandably unhappy countries (the upright, ‘unhappy’ line of the ‘T’).

Thereby, you put the ‘healthy’ and the ‘unhealthy’ happy countries on the same level of happiness, and of course, that makes the happiness of the latter surprising.

But in fact, I see the right half of the flat line of the ‘T’ rise a little.

That means that ‘very healthy’ countries are not just ‘happy’, but ‘very happy’, happier than the ‘surprisingly happy’ countries are. Which makes their happiness a little less surprising.

Secondly, you put the graph into terms of (either surprising or understandable) happiness alone.

In that way, you seem to stress the influence health has got on happiness, and to forget the influence happiness, or the absence of it, be it stress or boredom, has got on health.

So the ‘understandably unhappy’ countries could just as well be called ‘surprisingly healthy’.

So we can forget the whole surprising and understanding thing, and just call the ‘left’ group, the ‘happy’ group, the ‘down’ group, the ‘healthy’ group, and the ‘top right’ group, the, er…

Yes, what would make countries both (very) happy and (very) healthy?

The answer is simple, and is to be seen in this graph:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1006/10061704

It’s income equality.

Greets!

Steven

While I agree that any analysis could be spurious in such “scientific” conditions :( I’d like to bring another point of view for the “surprisingly unhappy”, and it deals with “western exposure” or “exposure to developed countries news”.

Besides being former Soviet Union members, the unhappy countries you marked are also countries with highest exposure to news the like “how cool it is to live in Europe/North America”. I’d like to ask if there are Northern Africa countries in this group (you just highlighted the european ones) such as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia or Mauritania.

In a trip to Morocco last year I could see by myself how satellite dishes played tricks on the real perception that people had about Spain or France, how easy was to live there, how a wealthiest live you could afford by just being there.

When I saw that Namibia is the most anomalously happy country on the graph, in terms of its distance from the best-fit lines, it made me wonder about the sampling of the “Satisfaction With Life Scale questionnaire”. Namibia is essentially two counties superimposed in one geographic area: a predominantly white, first-world, financially comfortable stratum, and a black, third-world, subsistence-level stratum. If the happiness questionnaire samples the first-world stratum more heavily than does the life-span data — perhaps because a larger fraction of the third-world population is way out in the bundu and therefore inaccessible — the result would be a “surprisingly happy” data point.

However, if that data point could be disaggregated into two — one for each stratum — we might see two points closer to the best-fit line, one high and to the right and the other low and to the left.

South Africa is another surprisingly happy country on your plot, and it too has a split personality, with an affluent Western first-world layer and a dirt-poor third-world layer. I’m less familiar with the other countries in that “surprisingly happy” cluster, but many/most are in sub-Saharan Africa, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many have a similar characteristic.

Just a thought.