The Happy Planet Index The website TED.com offers free short presentations, called TED Talks, on a variety of interesting subjects. One of the talks is called "The Happy Planet Index," by Nic Marks.¹Marks comments that we regularly measure and report economic data on countries, such as Gross National Product, when we really ought to be measuring the well-being of the people in the countries. He calls this measureHappiness, with larger numbers indicating greater happiness, health, and well-being. In addition, he believes we ought to be measuring the ecological footprint, per capita, of the country, with larger numbers indicating greater use of resources (such as gas and electricity) and more damage to the planet. The figure below shows a scatterplot of these two quantitative variables. The data are given inHappyPlanetIndex.

9 C2 8 7 6 Happiness 5 - 2 4 6 10 Ecological footprint