this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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This ranking is bonkers. Turkey, India, and China are in the top 3. The bottom 3 are Norway, UK, and finally Japan. Mexicans work some of the longest hours in the world, but has a ranking similar to Sweden. Norway and Sweden are some of the happiest countries in the world, with some of the strongest safety nets and worker protections. Why do their “employee well being” scores not reflect this? I don’t trust this ranking at all.
Edit: misread Netherlands for Norway. Still, the Netherlands actually ranks even higher on happiness than Norway, so my point stands.
There's probably sampling bias going on because of who McKinsey has access to.
McKinsey's offices in Turkey, India, and China tend to be in big tech/finance hubs (Beijing, Shanghai, Istanbul, Bengaluru, Mumbai) and, because of the scale of these countries, McKinsey rarely has to leave those contexts. I can absolutely believe that overall quality of life and satisfaction is better in those cities than in the West in aggregate. Beijing alone has a larger population than Sweden and Norway combined.
Having skimmed the study summary, I suspect that even more than sampling bias is research design shenanigans. There are a lot of new measures being introduced. They’ve somehow finessed the numbers so that India ranks high on “employee well being” despite having high levels of burnout, worse healthcare outcomes, and lower happiness than many other countries. The study repreatedly says that this new measure of “holistic health” is independent of those other factors.
I suspect that this is less about genuine scientific concern for “well being” and more about guiding businesses with their hiring decisions.