Joy to the World?

How happy are we?

A pair of researchers at the University of Vermont say they've worked out a system that measures the relative happiness of the world, day by day. Their announcement, unsurprisingly, was published in the Journal of Happiness.

According to these guys, Election Day, Nov. 4, 2008, was the happiest day in four years. On the day that Michael Jackson died, we were collectively miserable.

Here's how their system works.

You (and a hundred million other people) write — in a forum, a blog, or a social networking site — anything that starts with or includes the words "I feel," "I'm feeling" and so forth.

Your feelings are aggregated by a site called www.wefeelfine.org. Researchers mine the results, and assign scores to certain phrases on a scale of 1 to 9. For example, the phrase "I feel lazy" gets a score of 4.38, while "triumphant" gets 8.87 and "paradise" receives a score of 8.72. It's hard to know what would actually score a 9 — maybe "outrageously fabulous"?

Once the phrases are collected and scored, it's an easy step to crunch the numbers for a daily world average. By choosing particular blogs and forums, it's also possible to narrow the focus. For instance, blogs about spelunking are likely to attract mainly spelunkers; blogs about menopause are rarely visited by teen-aged boys.

Of course, measuring happiness isn't an exact science. Still, it's nice to know whether the world is trending toward joy or sadness … and hopeful to know that it may be possible to tweak the results.