Countless metrics have been proposed over time to track wellbeing of some type. The recent WISE initiative [1] tries to put some structure around this (using current welfare, future welfare and inclusiveness as key dimensions).
Despite this lack of sharpness and unassailable objectivity, the signal sent by all these metrics is generally real: the focus on aggregate economic performance (the infamous GDP) and organizing society entirely around the maximization of monetarily defined wealth is too simplistic, no longer fit-for-purpose (if it ever was) and potentially a complete cul-de-sac.
The list of "happy" countries is more or less the set where various intangible cultural aspects partially mitigate the growing inadequacy of the mainstream socioeconomic apparatus. But it is not a blueprint that can be easily adopted or improved upon by other countries and cultures.
Yet there are no visible paths to workable alternatives (or complements) to the existing system. The simplicity of mapping everything onto a single monetary dimension has been such a successful monopoly and created incredibly strongly entrenched interests. It has left effectively no room for evolving any other broad-based economic infrastructure or tools that might expand what we optimize for to things that evidently matter.
People are frustrated and compile this or that index or meta-index but the expression "put money where your mouth is" neatly expresses the current impasse. Happy happiness day! [2]
Whatever metrics anyone comes up with today, cannot be scaled back historically.
If e.g. you put some metric around "do you have a car", and try to use that metric towards "happiness", this implicitly puts all the people in 19th century in the "unhappy by not having a car" category.
The only thing that can be used over time is the self-reported level of happiness. I.e. "on a scale of 1 to 5, how happy do you feel today?". And this is exactly what this study does.
The real issue is that GDP (a concept which is too complicated to be understood by general populace), or any other "economic performance" criterion, have little to no relation to the self-perceived happiness of the population. Objectively poor people can be happy, and objectively rich people can be unhappy.
This is a democratic worry: unhappy people are pliable people and are more likely to vote for demagogues, demagogues who are more a wrecking ball than a manager of state.
Hopefully we get good and hard the democracy that we have long been promised; and good and hard because you only get an outcome that people whose lives have been utterly and entirely unlike your own are the ones making the rules for how you and yours will be to the end of your days. Sounds like a lot of fun right? It sure is interesting how people's opinions change when they realize what kind of people are the ones getting to make the rules for everybody from here on out.
The concern is not that people want change or that they vote for change per se but that the change comes in the form of a person or persons who destroy the freedom to vote for change. This is more likely to happen during times of discontent.
Falling happiness ought to be a concern for any political system that seeks to enhance the society.
You say that as a bad thing, others see it as a good thing. Like with everything, we eventually revert to a happy and "flowing" medium. People being unhappy means their needs and worries were not being catered.
Alternative explanation would be quite different: once people have their needs and worries taken care of, they immediately think of new needs. These new needs are (naturally) not being catered (yet), so people feel unhappy. Once these are catered, new ones are created.
If my neighbours have a car but I don't, I'm unhappy. If I get a car, I'm unhappy since my neighbours have an SUV. Once I get an SUV, I'm unhappy since they have one with climate control, power windows, roof window, and navigation. Rinse, repeat.
This explanation talks more about what we humans are as a species, and less about government etc.
Your word choice of "catered" in reference to meeting the needs of people is interesting. Do you feel that suffering is part of being a citizen?
Needs are not something to be "catered" to, but met with reasonable effort, and the US, so far as I can tell, is failing on that front, and has been for decades, regardless of red or blue leadership.
Nobody is asking for handouts, just the ability to afford a home and groceries with an appropriate wage. Sorry to be pedantic, and I certainly agree with your sentiment, but we need to watch our language in this discussion since I firmly believe that is part of why the subject matter is so divisive.
Finnish public discussion is often very critical of Finland. People keep comparing Finland to other countries and complaining how some specific thing is worse than in country X. That's probably a key reason Finland ranks so high here.
Happiness, when measured at population level, doesn't mean intense emotions. It doesn't mean that everyone is visibly happy. It means that people are generally content with their lives, because nothing is particularly wrong for most people.
If you look at the country rankings, all the usual suspects rank high: the Nordic countries, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. Whenever you rank countries by some measure of success or quality of life, you expect to see those countries near the top. All of them are wealthy and not too large, and they all have a culture where the people in charge generally try to make things right. It doesn't always look like that from the inside, but when you compare them to the rest of the world, it's pretty clear why they are so successful. Especially if you try to measure success by the quality of life experienced by the middle 80% of the population.
> A far right government with an xenophobic, anti-EU, "we need a strong leader" party being the second strongest
Other things on the list I can understand but not this one. The government is not "far right" and not "xenophobic" (although one of the party in the government might be labeled as such, persus). Compared to US for example I think the current government is much more on the left than either republicans or democrats. The leading party in finland (part of the government) is actively pushing for more work-based migration.
Where did you get the "we need a strong leader" rethoric that you mention? I have never seen that from Persus (the party you are refering to)
Because none of the items you mentioned affect happiness or the perceived life of the people in Finland. The vast majority won't and don't know people who commit suicide, murder or die from drugs. People may grumble about bus strikes but are mostly are happy with and trust public services, transport, police, press and government. And feel safe they won't be destitute even if lose their job.
BTW Finland doesn't have a far right government - there's a right wing party (which has shelved its anti-eu policies) as part of the government coalition. The proportional representation perhaps makes people feel less disenfranchised and 'happier'.
How does Israel and Kuwait rank so high ? Did they surveyed the arab israelis and Palestinians? What about those slave workers in Kuwait ? In both case that's more than half the total population that lives in horrible conditions.
All these studies are self-reported happiness (basically, many people answering the question "How happy do you feel today?"). Israel ranks high because large parts of the population — the religious ones, with not a lot of income but many children and a strong sense of fulfillment — are regularly and steadily self-reporting high levels of happiness.
(This relates to both Jewish and Muslim citizens of Israel.)
Your (or mine, or anyone's) view of their conditions don't have much influence on their everyday feelings.
> Makes this whole Ranking suspicious
There's nothing too suspicious about asking many people in different countries are they feeling happy on this particular day. If anything, what's looking suspicious is the premise that high levels of GDP (for whatever that means) would result in more happiness of the people.
- Israelis have a well-known reality-distortion field as regards their well being.
- The Palestinian population, de facto subjects of the Israeli state, are most probably not included.
Bhutan is the self-proclaimed “Happiest Country in the World”, going so far as to “measure” Gross Domestic Happiness and claim it’s more important to their government than GDP.
But its not all about economic pressure, right? Poor countries with high sense of community and looking out for one another, are often happy. As for the UK, I heard the stats suggest older people are happy while younger people and teenagers in particular are not. My personal belief, as a Brit, is while social media probably doesn't help, a big reason for unhappy teenagers is that secondary schools have been effectively privatised. They're run by "Academy chains" - essentially big business , which pushes teenagers very hard to have high attendance rate , come to school when ill, push them to do well on exams. Not actually learn useful things, but learn how to game the system to get the high scores. Its very corporate, and ultimately about maintaining the image of the corporation not the well-being of teenagers. One can dispute this, and say other stuff is upsetting teenagers e:g news about wars and climate breakdown, but "twas ever thus" e:g my Mum was preparing for O-level exams (yesterday's GCSEs) during Cuban Missile crisis. People point at economic issues but that's very inconsistent - there are some teenagers in poverty, some rich, some in the middle, we're a divided society that's for sure.
That's the "Life Evaluation" list, there are other criteria as well if you look at the full report...
Large differences between age groups as well, as the report states:
> Norway, Sweden, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Spain are countries where the old are now significantly happier than the young, while Portugal and
Greece show the reverse pattern.
Driven especially by having the second most happiest youth. For one, Israel is an advanced country with mostly sunny weather. But the edge in my opinion is military/service culture produces a sense of self-actualization in the youth that is lacking in much of the West. Religion also makes people happy, and Israel is a pretty religious country.
This has been researched, the ultra-religious population (with the traditional clothing, very large amount of children, not much of an income) are regularly reporting high levels of happiness.
They did actually drop a pretty significant 0.9 points in the latest poll, but since the list is using three year averages that only caused a 0.3 drop for 2023.
As a Brit who lived in the US a few years so maybe has a detached perspective.. I saw Americans being happy in a land of opportunity with high personal freedom, opportunity to reinvent yourself, the great outdoors etc, and certainly I enjoyed that too. OTOH, individualism has its dark side. When people believe its all about self-determination and the state shouldn't be helping people, some people fall massively through the cracks e:g someone on low income while they try to look after a disabled family member. Americans are often generous at helping each other, in fact ironically I found those that supported economically right-wing "everyone should pull themselves up by their bootstraps" ideology, could often be simultaneously generous to others that they perceived to be in need. I think a source of unhappiness in the USA might be loneliness. To be honest, reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little house on the prairie" series, while that sounds idyllic in a way, it also sounds lonely and hard work to me. So, some sources of lower happiness in the USA in terms of lack of community, might be deep-rooted? (some off the top of my head thoughts which others may dispute :). )
But has it actually got worse? ;) I mean, yes in recent times, according to the methodology used by these academics, specifically relative to other countries. But that's pretty specific. As others said, maybe other countries have improved relatively? What's the take-away form all this? To me, loneliness is the biggest issue. We can all deal with a lot of cr*p in our lives if we've got supportive friends, and we can all be much happier by helping others who need it . Its very satisfying.
There are several front-page stories about youth happiness on the guardian today.
This struck me:
"""
It was the hush that worried the US’s top doctor as he toured the country’s university campuses last year.
Dr Vivek Murthy went to places including Duke, University of Texas and Arizona State, but so many youngsters were plugged into earphones and gazing into laptops and phones that it was incredibly quiet in the communal areas. Where was the loud chatter Murthy remembered from his college days?
I'm not saying that I disagree, but this strikes me as a "Things are different from my youth and are therefore bad" style comment (on behalf of the article author, not the commentator).
Well, there's two parts to that. Things are different, which I think is fair, and people are talking to each other less, which I guess is subjective but feels bad to me. I'm glad I went to college before smartphones existed, and Facebook really was just a place to put dumb photos from parties and poke each other.
Until November of this year, at which time Trump's forthcoming inauguration will retroactively be deemed the cause of why the US dipped in the happiness ranking earlier in the year
Readit News
Despite this lack of sharpness and unassailable objectivity, the signal sent by all these metrics is generally real: the focus on aggregate economic performance (the infamous GDP) and organizing society entirely around the maximization of monetarily defined wealth is too simplistic, no longer fit-for-purpose (if it ever was) and potentially a complete cul-de-sac.
The list of "happy" countries is more or less the set where various intangible cultural aspects partially mitigate the growing inadequacy of the mainstream socioeconomic apparatus. But it is not a blueprint that can be easily adopted or improved upon by other countries and cultures.
Yet there are no visible paths to workable alternatives (or complements) to the existing system. The simplicity of mapping everything onto a single monetary dimension has been such a successful monopoly and created incredibly strongly entrenched interests. It has left effectively no room for evolving any other broad-based economic infrastructure or tools that might expand what we optimize for to things that evidently matter.
People are frustrated and compile this or that index or meta-index but the expression "put money where your mouth is" neatly expresses the current impasse. Happy happiness day! [2]
[1] https://www.beyond-gdp.world/wise-database/wise-metrics
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Day_of_Happiness
If e.g. you put some metric around "do you have a car", and try to use that metric towards "happiness", this implicitly puts all the people in 19th century in the "unhappy by not having a car" category.
The only thing that can be used over time is the self-reported level of happiness. I.e. "on a scale of 1 to 5, how happy do you feel today?". And this is exactly what this study does.
The real issue is that GDP (a concept which is too complicated to be understood by general populace), or any other "economic performance" criterion, have little to no relation to the self-perceived happiness of the population. Objectively poor people can be happy, and objectively rich people can be unhappy.
That's a stilted and verbose euphemism for "voting against the status quo."
Isn't that expected when people are allowed to vote and when the status quo fails them?
> This is a democratic worry
No, not being allowed to vote for change shows that democracy is absent.
Falling happiness ought to be a concern for any political system that seeks to enhance the society.
If my neighbours have a car but I don't, I'm unhappy. If I get a car, I'm unhappy since my neighbours have an SUV. Once I get an SUV, I'm unhappy since they have one with climate control, power windows, roof window, and navigation. Rinse, repeat.
This explanation talks more about what we humans are as a species, and less about government etc.
Needs are not something to be "catered" to, but met with reasonable effort, and the US, so far as I can tell, is failing on that front, and has been for decades, regardless of red or blue leadership.
Nobody is asking for handouts, just the ability to afford a home and groceries with an appropriate wage. Sorry to be pedantic, and I certainly agree with your sentiment, but we need to watch our language in this discussion since I firmly believe that is part of why the subject matter is so divisive.
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/worlds-happiest-countries-202...
1. Finland
2. Denmark
3. Iceland
4. Sweden
5. Israel
6. Netherlands
7. Norway
8. Luxembourg
9. Switzerland
10. Australia
11. New Zealand
12. Costa Rica
13. Kuwait
14. Austria
15. Canada
16. Belgium
17. Ireland
18. Czechia
19. Lithuania
20. United Kingdom
* One of the highest suicide rates in Europe
* One of the highest homocide rates in Europe
* High rate of drug related mortality
* Poorly performing economy since the financial crisis 2008 / Nokia mobile phones fell in 2011
* Rapidly growing public and private debt
* A far right government with an xenophobic, anti-EU, "we need a strong leader" party being the second strongest
* Increasing strikes (well that might be too new to be covered by the research)
How does that lead to rank 1?
Simple answer from the mouth of a Finnish teenager: "All that are not happy have committed suicide."
Edit: I don't question that Finland ranks higher than the US. But the number 1 is very questionable.
Happiness, when measured at population level, doesn't mean intense emotions. It doesn't mean that everyone is visibly happy. It means that people are generally content with their lives, because nothing is particularly wrong for most people.
If you look at the country rankings, all the usual suspects rank high: the Nordic countries, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. Whenever you rank countries by some measure of success or quality of life, you expect to see those countries near the top. All of them are wealthy and not too large, and they all have a culture where the people in charge generally try to make things right. It doesn't always look like that from the inside, but when you compare them to the rest of the world, it's pretty clear why they are so successful. Especially if you try to measure success by the quality of life experienced by the middle 80% of the population.
Other things on the list I can understand but not this one. The government is not "far right" and not "xenophobic" (although one of the party in the government might be labeled as such, persus). Compared to US for example I think the current government is much more on the left than either republicans or democrats. The leading party in finland (part of the government) is actively pushing for more work-based migration.
Where did you get the "we need a strong leader" rethoric that you mention? I have never seen that from Persus (the party you are refering to)
Because none of the items you mentioned affect happiness or the perceived life of the people in Finland. The vast majority won't and don't know people who commit suicide, murder or die from drugs. People may grumble about bus strikes but are mostly are happy with and trust public services, transport, police, press and government. And feel safe they won't be destitute even if lose their job.
BTW Finland doesn't have a far right government - there's a right wing party (which has shelved its anti-eu policies) as part of the government coalition. The proportional representation perhaps makes people feel less disenfranchised and 'happier'.
Makes this whole Ranking suspicious
(This relates to both Jewish and Muslim citizens of Israel.)
Your (or mine, or anyone's) view of their conditions don't have much influence on their everyday feelings.
> Makes this whole Ranking suspicious
There's nothing too suspicious about asking many people in different countries are they feeling happy on this particular day. If anything, what's looking suspicious is the premise that high levels of GDP (for whatever that means) would result in more happiness of the people.
Disclaimer: I'm an Israeli expat.
Why is Bhutan not on this list? Too small?
https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2024/happiness-of-the-young...
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/latest-updates/uk-i...
Large differences between age groups as well, as the report states:
> Norway, Sweden, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Spain are countries where the old are now significantly happier than the young, while Portugal and Greece show the reverse pattern.
They did actually drop a pretty significant 0.9 points in the latest poll, but since the list is using three year averages that only caused a 0.3 drop for 2023.
There are several front-page stories about youth happiness on the guardian today.
This struck me:
"""
It was the hush that worried the US’s top doctor as he toured the country’s university campuses last year.
Dr Vivek Murthy went to places including Duke, University of Texas and Arizona State, but so many youngsters were plugged into earphones and gazing into laptops and phones that it was incredibly quiet in the communal areas. Where was the loud chatter Murthy remembered from his college days?
"""
from https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/mar/20/vivek-murthy-u...
Deleted Comment
Next he'll go into a library and find that people are silently staring into books
Dead Comment