Are people in rich countries happier, by and large, than people in not so rich countries? It appears in general that they are, but the margin may be slim. In Portugal, for example, only one in 10 people report being very happy, whereas in the much more prosperous Netherlands the proportion of very happy is 4 in 10. Yet there are curious reversals in this correlation between national wealth and well-being the lrish during the 1980s consistently reported greater life satisfaction than the wealthier West Germans.