What Is the Country Whose Citizens Are the Most Content?

A friend sent a report on a Gallup poll about the countries that have the happiest people. Well, that’s not precisely right. It wasn’t about happiness. It was about contentment.

Many such surveys are based on objective criteria like per capita income, life expectancy, health data, and more. I always ignored them, preferring to know the subjective responses – how people feel. That’s the way this one was designed. It employed questions like “Are you at peace with yourself (a) all of the time, (b) some of the time, (c) none of the time.”

Anyway… guess which country came out on top?

The USA? Canada? France? Switzerland? Sweden?

No!

Believe it or not, it was the country that hosts the Ford family’s second home: Nicaragua!

Is that crazy? Nicaragua is usually ranked as the poorest country in Latin America and one of the 50 poorest countries in the world. It is also a country that has survived a US-supported dictatorship, a communist revolution, a leftist dictatorship, a major earthquake, constant natural disasters, and more.

You can read about it here.

(On Friday, I’ll tell you why I think Nica came out on top.)