We might have a great sense of humor, but Egypt is trailing behind on the happiness index: Egypt came in 121 in the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s 2023 World Happiness Report’s (pdf) ranking of 137 countries. Egypt is joined by Lebanon (136) and Jordan (123) as the index’s lowest-ranking MENA countries. The index looks at life evaluations in 2020, 2021, and 2022, with these evaluations based on income, health, social support, freedom to make life choices, life expectancy, generosity, perception of corruption, and outlooks on the future.

Where are the happy people? The top five spots are occupied by Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Israel, and the Netherlands, in that order. Gulf countries, including the UAE (26), Saudi Arabia (30), and Bahrain (42), are the highest-ranked Arab countries in the index.

It takes a woman — or two: The Abu Simbel Temple — along with 20 other temples in Egypt — would have probably been underwater archeological sites if it weren’t for the efforts of Christine Desroches-Noblecourt and former US First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, according to National Geographic. With the onset of the building of the Aswan High Dam, Desroches-Noblecourt, then the acting chief curator of Egyptian Antiquities at the Louvre Museum, campaigned for salvaging these massive archeological treasures. Her pleas eventually reached UNESCO, former Egyptian Culture Minister Tharwat Okasha, and Kennedy. She pushed her famous husband to step in during a time when US-USSR relations were tense and anti-Nasser sentiment was at its height. Nevertheless, he successfully appealed to congress to earmark funds towards this mission, in turn, enabling the rest of the world to pitch in to support this venture. Desroches-Noblecourt’s efforts ultimately led her to raise more than USD 80 mn — equivalent to USD 813 mn today — for the daunting task of moving the fragile temple out of the cliff in which it was carved and reassembling it on higher ground.

Are algorithms robbing us of autonomy? Software algorithms and AI increasingly dictate the content we see, music we listen to, and tastes we acquire, giving this technology vast socio-political influence and power over our lives, psychologist and behavioral scientist Gerd Gigerenzer tells the Wall Street Journal. He argues that the impact of tech extends to the realm of our social and political behavior, cautioning us to “pay attention that we aren’t running into a situation where tech companies sell black-box algorithms that determine parts of our lives.”

Surveillance by governments and tech companies is a salient issue. “But people don’t read privacy policies anymore, so they don’t know,” Gigerenzer laments, adding that these policies are set up to be long and complex so that users can’t really read them. The policies grant tech companies access to personal data, which are used to generate the personalized ads that underpin their revenue streams. In this context, he says, the user becomes the product rather than the customer. Gigerenzer hopes for a future in which users take responsibility for decisions pertaining to their personal data and are enabled to pay for registration so that they can assume their rightful place as customers.

Tags: