Nicaragua? Yes, Nicaragua! 

On Tuesday, I told you about the results of a Gallup poll that listed Nicaragua as the “No. 1 country where people say they are ‘always’ or ‘almost always’ at peace.”

Nicaragua? Surprising? At first, yes. I was surprised. For the reasons I mentioned on Tuesday. But when I thought about the hundreds of Nicaraguan people I’ve lived with and worked with over the past 25+ years, I realized that I shouldn’t have been.

Nicaraguans are, by far, happier than Americans or Europeans or Middle Easterners or people in many of the Asian countries I know. The only people I’ve known that I’d say were happier than Nicaraguans were the Chadian people when I lived and worked there. And Chad, at that time, was one of the five poorest countries in the world.

You are no doubt familiar with the commonly quoted research on the correlation between wealth and happiness. It showed that once people have enough money to pay for their basic needs, the acquisition of more money does not directly affect their level of happiness. We usually understand “basic needs” to mean food and shelter, as well as plumbing, electricity, transportation, and so on. But that’s only true for wealthy countries. In poor countries, the basics truly are basic. A wooden shack and a well somewhere nearby is enough to make millions and millions of people happy with their lives.

And if this is true, why do we believe that (a) being poor is always and bad thing, and (b) helping poor people get richer is always a good thing?