A prosperity index is not a life evaluation
The order changes when we ask people to rate their lives.
Within the same 132-economy comparison group, Costa Rica places 35th on our equal-domain index and 12th on life evaluation. Portugal moves the other way: 21st on the index and 51st on life evaluation. Those are descriptive differences between two orderings, not evidence that either has discovered the true prosperity ranking.
We call their ordinal difference Lived Gap. Positive values mean life evaluation places a country nearer the top than our index does. Costa Rica’s gap is +23; Portugal’s is -30 places.
The cohort must match first
Our main index covers 170 complete cases. The survey overlap is smaller. Comparing a country’s rank out of 170 directly with its rank in the survey’s different coverage would mix two changes: the measurement and the comparison group. Here both orderings are restricted to the same 132 economies. The original domain scores are retained, and only their ranks are recomputed in that intersection.
The life-evaluation values are means of people’s Cantril-ladder ratings over 2021–2023, ending in the index’s 2023 endpoint. They do not measure emotional mood on a particular day. Our index instead combines five chosen indicator domains with equal weights. It is unsurprising that they differ; the extent and direction of the differences identify cases worth examining.
Interpret rank gaps modestly
Rank positions discard the size of score differences. A ten-place gap is not ten units of wellbeing. Survey sampling uncertainty and cross-cultural response patterns matter; the model data retain the published confidence intervals for the means. We do not infer a statistically significant rank discrepancy from the gap alone, or claim that the survey explains what our index misses.
For Pluraterra, the practical lesson is editorial: calling the existing five-domain index a happiness score would overstate what it measures.
How we calculated this
Use only the 132 economies with both an equal-domain index score and a captured WHR endpoint-2023 mean. Rerank the original composite scores without renormalizing the five input domains. Rank the survey means over the same set. Lived Gap = index rank − life-evaluation rank. Source survey means cover 2021–2023 and are captured in the WHR historical series; this is not a reproduction of an official report’s full ranking. No formal rank-gap inference or confidence interval is constructed.
These analyses were selected after exploring the available data. They are descriptive findings, not preregistered hypothesis tests. Future source revisions or a different comparison set can change the numbers.
Sources and reproduction
- Pluraterra · equal-domain index
- WHR · life-evaluation definition and pooled periods
- WHR · captured series source
All calculations and source hashes · Reproduce with Python · Pinned source release
Citation: Pluraterra. “A prosperity index is not a life evaluation.” 2 November 2026. Analysis v1, source release 2026-11-02-r3. This analysis is derived by Pluraterra; underlying source attribution and reuse conditions remain applicable.