Happy future is possible
Russian popular science journal "Schrödinger cat" published an interview with Ronald Inglehart, Scientific Supervisor of LCSR. During the interview «SC» correspondent discovered that professor, unlike himself, is convinced that our long-suffering planet has the potential to become a planet of happy people.
Russian popular science journal "Schrödinger cat" published an interview with Ronald Inglehart, Scientific Supervisor of LCSR. During the interview «SC» correspondent discovered that professor, unlike himself, is convinced that our long-suffering planet has the potential to become a planet of happy people.
The interview started with a discussion of methods how to calculate the index of happiness for the residents of different countries. Ronald emphasized that sociology have tools which make it possible to evaluate such subjective phenomena as happiness. After that, professor turned to cross-country comparative studies and explained that happiness of the whole population does not only depend on economic performance of the country. Namely, the scientist sees the happiness in freedom of choice and in democratic political regimes, which makes such freedom possible for everybody. Ronald backed his ideas by facts: the democratic regimes tend to demonstrate a consistently high level of happiness of the population. For example, Denmark is a permanent leader of ratings of happiness since 1973. But, unfortunately, there is no single recipe of how to achieve universal harmony through democracy: the differences in culture, historical experience and traditions form distinct paths of the countries` developments. The example of Russia is vivid as its unique history and experience of superpower show how democratic political regime may differ much from generally accepted standards.
Read the whole article via the link below (the article is in Russian):