The world is becoming a happier place: study

[katty]

more: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080709203655.lgzq5fmw&show_article=1

excerpt:
The world is becoming a happier place, a study published in this month's Perspectives of Psychological Science shows.

...In the United States, Switzerland and Norway, happiness was stagnant, but all three countries were still in the top 20 of 97 nations, representing 90 percent of the world's population, that were ranked in order for happiness.

Denmark ranked at the top of that list and Zimbabwe at the bottom.

"Happiness and life satisfaction rise steeply as one moves from subsistence-level poverty to a modest level of economic security and then levels off," the study says.

"Among the richest societies, further increases in income are only weakly linked with higher levels of subjective well-being," it says.

How happy a country is, is also strongly related to how democratic it is, said Inglehart.

"The results clearly show that the happiest societies are those that allow people the freedom to choose how to live their lives," Inglehart said, citing the tolerant social norms and democratic political systems in Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada -- all of which rank among the 10 happiest countries in the world.