From the first link:
Beyond the essential ideas of broad access to food, housing, quality education, health care and employment, quality of life also may include intangibles such as job security, political stability, individual freedom and environmental quality. Through all phases of life, these countries are seen as treating their citizens well.
Now I know why I failed to address your link. You linked to data that is a quantification of people's opinions as to their inner sense of how their government treats them as citizens. It is a measure of how people say they feel in relationship to how well they feel respected as human beings. It would seem that people prefer environments that promote a sense of well being, in short self affirming rather than self negating. It seems people with a greater sense of self worth are happier than those who are doubtful they are worth anything.
But all of this is an external measure as if it is the environment out there that determines our inner state. That is a belief I want to challenge. The real issue, then, in my opinion, is that people who are miserable rage against the machine whereas people who are happier have less ambition to change anything. They are more content. They are also less able to be triggered and less sensitive to every minor slight that comes their way. They are more rational and make more logical and less negative emotion driven decisions.
The greater the discontent the greater the likelihood that decisions are hate filled and self destructive. So we should maybe first improve our mental state before we make too many rash self destructive qualitative decisions because the more fucked up we are the less we have any idea as to what quality really is. The thing materialistic people believe is that everything happens at a material level and there is no such thing as unconscious motivation and that is a profoundly delusional condition to be in.
But it explains why I have trouble communicating with you. I am talking to you out of what to you is darkness. Essentially truth is of a different dimension that the flat world of meterialistic thinking.