Although New Year’s Day is not a holiday much celebrated in Israel, where it is an ordinary workday, it does produce the usual journalistic taking stock of the year that has passed. To judge from the morose moods of the Hebrew newspapers, 2007 hasn’t been a good year for Israelis.

This may seem surprising to anyone who has been following the statistics out of Israel. The economy is doing well. Economic growth rates are among the most vigorous in the developed world. Unemployment is at its lowest level in years and still dropping. Private consumption is up. Inflation remains low. The shekel is a stronger currency than it ever has been before. Israel’s international credit ratings are at their highest ever.

The security situation is the best it’s been in years, too. The number of Israelis killed or injured in terror attacks has declined to a post-Oslo low. The border with Lebanon has been absolutely quiet for the first time in decades. Israeli military pressure on the Gaza Strip has reduced rocket and mortar attacks from there, too. The country is safer than at any time in recent memory.

Yet Israelis, one is told, are disgruntled and think their country is going downhill. They are troubled by what they perceive to be growing corruption, worsening crime, increased domestic violence, widening gaps between rich and poor, greater numbers of the population beneath the poverty line, a failing educational system, deteriorating health care, more traffic jams on the roads, a decline in public morale, a government unresponsive to public demands for change and reform. Approval of the country’s prime minister continues to be in the low-to-middle teens.

Can things really be so good and yet so bad? Perhaps they can. Positive and negative trends can certainly co-exist in a society at the same time, and Israeli life in 2007 may have improved in some ways and deteriorated in others.

Still, why should the perception of its having gotten worse so outweigh that of its having gotten better? This may be more a question of national character than of national trends.

Recently I saw the results of an international study done two years ago. Its results were plotted on a “happiness/income” graph — that is, along a curve whose two coordinates were the per capita incomes of the populations of 33 different countries and the percentage of people in each that considered itself to be happy. The results were not quite what one might have expected.

True, two of the three countries scoring highest on the happiness scale, with well over 90% of their citizens contented, were Switzerland and the United States, also highest on the income scale. Yet the third, Mexico, has a low per capita income, and right behind it, outpacing Spain and Germany, were Chile and Colombia — the latter a country infested by a vicious and never-ending civil war, brutal drug syndicates, a thoroughly corrupt political system, and the highest murder rate in the world. And not far below Colombia, at the same happiness level as Belgium but at the very bottom of the income scale, was Nigeria, by most accounts — though obviously not that of the Nigerians themselves — a disaster of a nation.

At the other end of the scale, the two unhappiest countries, with scores in the 30s, were Russia and Ukraine, which placed worse than Zimbabwe, which two years ago no less than today was probably the most miserable places on the face of the earth. And smack in the middle, trailing the supposedly stolid English and dour Portuguese, as well as the Vietnamese and Venezuelans, were the Italians — a people widely considered by envious tourists to be the happiest in the world. Barely a percentage point behind them came the Israelis.

Are Colombia and Nigeria really better places to live in than Italy or Israel? One may be permitted one’s doubts. What is clearly missing from the happiness/income graph is a third coordinate. Call it the grumble scale.

Some people like to complain; others think of it as bad form. Although the English are not known for their insouciance, they are famous for their stiff upper lip; the Italians are not. Break bad news to an Englishman and he will quietly mumble, “Oh, well.” Break it to an Italian and he will exclaim “mama mia!” and loudly curse the world for its injustice. No one who knows the two countries could possibly think that Italians are less happy than English. It’s just that the average Italian has not the slightest inhibition about telling you when he is not happy, while the average Englishman does.

Israelis are much more like Italians in this respect. They are proficient gripers and see nothing wrong with it. If anything, they have difficulty conceding that things might be going well. “Yes,” they will say when you break the good news to them, “but what you don’t realize is that. …” — and they will then explain to you why the good news is not so good. Jews are, after all, a people of worriers. They always have been and are not about to stop just because they have a state of their own. This makes it something of a well-kept secret that Israel is a country that can be an extremely enjoyable place to live in.

Happiness is an elusive notion in individuals, let alone in entire peoples. It may indeed not have a great deal to do with how wealthy people are, but it also may not have much to do with how happy they say they are. And if wanting an even better life than the reasonably good one it now has makes a country unhappy, national unhappiness might not always be such a bad thing. 2007, in any case, was a pretty good year for Israel.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.