Author: Frank Jacobs / Source: Big Think
- Haiti and other countries with low butter supply report low life satisfaction.
- The reverse is true for countries like Germany, which score high in both categories.
- As the graph below shows, a curious pattern emerges across the globe. But is it causation or correlation?
“Give me a good sharp knife and a good sharp cheese, and I’m a happy man”. Perhaps not a quote you’d expect from the creative mind behind Game of Thrones, but maybe George R.R. Martin is onto something.
Life’s better with butter
Image: Our World in Data
According to this infographic, there is a clear, statistical link between self-reported levels of life satisfaction in countries worldwide (vertical axis) and the per-capita supply of dairy products – in this case, butter (horizontal axis).
Of course, butter is not cheese: for one thing, it contains only trace elements of casein, a chemical compound associated with dairy, but much more prevalent in cheese, which causes a feeling of euphoria.
Yet as the map shows, an abundance of butter does make people happy. Or could it be a case of correlation instead of causation? In that case, something else influences both life satisfaction and the availability of butter to go up and down together. Perhaps… the availability of cheese?
No butter, no joy
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