Blanchflower and Oswald compute the mean level of happiness within the various
countries represented in the 2002 round of the International Social Survey Programme
(ISSP) and claim that compared to her score on the Human Development Index, Australia
is unusually unhappy.1 They never actually show a cross-country comparison of the
happiness and development indices, and so in Figure 1 we simply take the average
happiness scores from Table 1 of their paper, chart them against the Human Development
Index, and run a simple bivariate regression.