Economic doom and gloom notwithstanding, how happy are people around the world? Pretty happy, it turns out, according to a new global survey by private think tank Ipsos (whose motto "nobody's unpredictable" suggests that they've never met our intrepid adventurer-by-day/blogger-by-night John C. Farrier):

DESPITE global economic gloom, the world is a happier place than it was before the financial crisis began. That is the counterintuitive conclusion of a poll of 19,000 adults in 24 countries by Ipsos, a research company. Some 77% of respondents now describe themselves as happy, up three points on 2007, the last year before the crisis. Fully 22% (up from 20%) describe themselves as very happy—a more important measure, says Ipsos’s John Wright, since whenever three-quarters of people agree on anything, “you need to pay attention to intensity in the results.”

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So, how about you? Are you happy?