The World Happiness Report claims to offer a sound comparative picture of countries in terms of their happiness, but evidence from Tanzania indicates that the Report:

• Claims to serve as an alternate to economic indicators of a country’s well-being, but its chief measure, Cantril ladder, significantly correlates with wealth, favoring wealthy countries and disfavoring poor countries.

• Overaggregates and homogenizes local reality, missing profound differences between demographic groups within regions and countries.

• Asks respondents to report their happiness on a scaled measure (Cantril ladder) that is culturally alien to most non-Western respondents and misunderstood by many respondents with a primary school education.

• Elevates a Western interest in happiness to a global concern and then rank orders countries without sufficiently acknowledging the cross-cultural limitations of this notion of well-being in non-Western contexts .

• The World Happiness Report is useful for detecting broad trendlines in a population’s experience but its usefulness for guiding policy is overshadowed by its limitations.