World Cup version of the Happiness Index

Now that England have made their rationally-predicted (but irrationally-disappointing) exit from the World Cup, who else are we to support? As economists, we need a rational basis on which to make that choice, from a rapidly declining set of options. Help is at hand, in the form of a new index supplied by an economist at Yale University. In a paper published last week in the New York Times, Dean Karlan suggests that we should root for the outcome that will produce the largest aggregate increase in happiness.

The index combines a country’s passion for soccer (sic - he is an American professor and so has to be forgiven) multiplied by its average level of poverty multiplied by its population. Poverty is an important factor for Karlan, who says that "happiness and wealth are correlated, and all else being equal, a utilitarian would prefer to help the person who is worst off." He also justifies the point because the wealthy have more outlets for dealing with sports disappointments — such as going out to a nice meal — and can bounce back faster. Population helps to justify the utilitarian concept - the bigger the population, the more people who stand to benefit from their country's team doing well. Which means that Uruguay, with a population of only 3.3million, are less likely to do well in this particular index - so even if they hadn't been beaten at the weekend, supporting Uruguay would not have been a rational decision.

As Karlan admits, it’s perhaps a bit crude, simply to multiply these factors by each other. Measuring the average level of poverty and the population is simple enough, but how do you estimate and compare the relative passion for one sport? What does a country do in order to watch it's team play? Ghana shut down factories and imported electricity from neighboring Ivory Coast to make sure that the power grid would support all households watching the match - showing a level of dedication that would be way beyond the US and the European nations. However, using an assumption that the internet is universally available, Karlan has used Google Trends and looked at the number of searches for 'soccer' compared with the other most popular sports in each country - I imagine that he did translate this to look at searches for 'football' in most countries other than the US.

The combination of factors results in top spot for Nigeria, as it finishes fourth in the passion ranking, and is one of the poorest countries in the tournament. Separating it from the rest of the African countries in the World Cup is its huge population — 174 million people. "Simply put, the Nigerians have a lot of very passionate, low-income people who are ready to celebrate Nigerian success." However, they have just been defeated by wealthy France, who have a score of only 2.8 and so must have caused deep disappointment in Nigeria. Now we should switch allegiance again to Karlan's runner-up Brazil, who play Columbia in the quarter finals on Friday. Meanwhile, the US scores only 0.1 - proving that it would be very irrational (for a non-American) to support a country that calls football 'soccer'.