THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

A new index aims to assess just how happy South Africans are and what implications that might have for the struggling economy

So what can the level of happiness in SA tell us about its lurching economy? That’s something that Professor Talita Greyling, from the University of Joburg’s school of economics, wants to find out.

In recent weeks, Greyling and New Zealand academic Stephanié Rossouw have been running a study to assess what happens to people’s levels of happiness over an election period. And they’re doing this by applying “sentiment analysis” to between 45,000 and 85,000 tweets published every day by SA’S 8.3-million active Twitter users.

“Twitter is real-time. It can tell you what the level of happiness is an hour ago. And when people tweet, they express their emotions and their feelings, so it’s a really good measure,” says Greyling.

That may be tough for some people to believe. For one thing, only 54% of the country has access to the internet. Second, SA has a notoriously brutal social media environment. Microsoft’s “civility index”, released in January, ranked SA as the second-worst of 22 countries, with 61% of respondents reporting some sort of emotional or psychological pain due to online interactions.

But Greyling says: “Actually, on every day I’ve tracked it since April 29, the positive sentiment has outweighed the negative.” And she points out that the sample size — 15% of the population — is enormous.

It’s an interesting idea, tracking whether an election that promises (yet again) the prospect of renewal can inject happiness into the nation. And Greyling plans to apply her index to see whether increased happiness

We believe people are more likely to invest and participate in markets the higher your happiness score