{"id":1458,"date":"2009-11-03T22:07:00","date_gmt":"2009-11-03T22:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2009\/11\/live-long-and-be-atheist-2.html"},"modified":"2014-11-21T19:25:12","modified_gmt":"2014-11-21T18:25:12","slug":"live-long-and-be-atheist-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2009\/11\/live-long-and-be-atheist-2.html","title":{"rendered":"Live long and be atheist"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
\"Happy_life_years_v_atheists\"<\/a><\/div>\n

The splendid World Happiness Database<\/a> has released a new analysis<\/a> of their 2009 data. Basically what they\u2019ve done is to multiply happiness scores in each nation with the life expectancy. The idea is that what most people want is a life that\u2019s both long and happy.<\/p>\n

Costa Rica came out top, followed by the usual gaggle of Northern European Countries (and Canada).<\/p>\n

Now, there\u2019s an \u2018ecological\u2019 problem in this analysis, in that the people with long lives in a nation aren\u2019t necessarily the happiest. What\u2019s more, happiness might be very unevenly distributed in some countries.<\/p>\n

And being grumpy might have its plus side \u2013 in the news yesterday<\/a> was an Australian study which claimed that grumpy people are less prone to errors of judgement!<\/p>\n

\"Happy_life_years_v_atheists\"<\/a>Be that as it may, whenever these national statistics come out I always like to correlate them against religion, to see how they stack up. So here\u2019s the results for this one.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019ve done is plot the percentage of hard-core non-believers in each country against the \u2018happy-life-years\u2019.<\/p>\n

In the top graph, it\u2019s the percentage of people who say they are \u2018confirmed atheists\u2019. In the bottom graph, it\u2019s the people who say that religion is \u2018not at all important\u2019 to them.<\/p>\n

There is a weak, but statistically significant relationship \u2013 especially with the unimportance of religion. What\u2019s more, the correlation is about 50% stronger than with happiness alone.<\/p>\n

However, digging around in the data shows that the is mostly driven by life expectancy. Average happiness, by itself, is not related to the number of atheists, and only marginally related to the number of non-religious.<\/p>\n

Now the interesting thing is that happiness is strongly correlated with life expectancy (as you might expect). So you also would expect a correlation of happiness with atheism \u2013 simply because they both correlate with life expectancy.<\/p>\n

The fact that this does not happen suggests a negative interaction. What may be happening is that some countries with short life expectancy are particularly religious. That makes them happier than you would expect, and confounds the straightforward link between long life expectancy, happiness and atheism.<\/p>\n

To put it another way, turning to religion has the effect of increasing happiness. But good life expectancy is more important, and countries with good life expectancy are the happiest and least religious.
\n__________________________________________________________________________
\n\"Creative<\/a><\/span> This article by Tom Rees<\/b> was first published on Epiphenom<\/a>. It is licensed under Creative Commons<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The splendid World Happiness Database has released a new analysis of their 2009 data. Basically what they\u2019ve done is to multiply happiness scores in each nation with the life expectancy. The idea is that what most people want is a life that\u2019s both long and happy. Costa Rica came out top, followed by the usual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2091,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nLive long and be atheist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The splendid World Happiness Database has released a new analysis of their 2009 data. 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