From Yasha Mounk's substack, March 20, 2025 (World Happiness Day):
A case study in elite misinformation.
Today is World Happiness Day. So, like every year on March 20th, you are likely to see a lot of headlines reporting on the publication of the annual World Happiness Report. “Finland is again ranked the happiest country in the world [while] the US falls to its lowest-ever position,” a headline in the Associated Press ran this morning. Forbes even got philosophical, promising “5 Life Lessons From Finland, Once Again the World’s Happiest Country.”
Published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University, the basic message of the report has remained the same since its launch in 2012. The happiest countries in the world are in Scandinavia; this year, Finland is followed by Denmark, Iceland and Sweden. America, despite being one of the richest large countries in the world, persistently underperforms: this year, the United States only comes in 24th out of the 147 countries covered in the report, placing it behind much poorer countries like Lithuania and Costa Rica.
I have to admit that I have been skeptical about this ranking ever since I first came across it. Because I have family in both Sweden and Denmark, I have spent a good amount of time in Scandinavia. And while Scandinavian countries have a lot of great things going for them, they never struck me as pictures of joy. For much of the year, they are cold and dark. Their cultures are extremely reserved and socially disjointed. When you walk around the—admittedly beautiful—centers of Copenhagen or Stockholm, you rarely see anybody smile. Could these really be the happiest places in the whole wide world?
So, to honor World Happiness Day, I finally decided to follow my hunch, and look into the research on this topic more deeply. What I found was worse than I’d imagined. To put it politely, the World Happiness Report is beset with methodological problems. To put it bluntly, it is a sham.
News reports about the World Happiness Report usually give the impression that it is based on a major research effort. Noting that the report is “compiled annually by a consortium of groups including the United Nations and Gallup,” for example, an article about last year’s iteration in the New York Times warned darkly that “the United States fell out of the Top 20” without a hint of skepticism about the reliability of such a finding.
In light of such confident pronouncements, and the absence of any critical voices in most of these news stories, you might be forgiven for thinking that the report carefully assesses how happy each country in the world is according to a sophisticated methodology, one that likely involves both subjective and objective criteria. But upon closer examination, it turns out that the World Happiness Report is not based on any major research effort; far from measuring how happy people are with some sophisticated mix of indicators, it simply compiles answers to a single question asked to comparatively small samples of people in each country:
“Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. Suppose we say that the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. If the top step is 10 and the bottom step is 0, on which step of the ladder do you feel you personally stand at the present time?”
The obvious problem with this question, commonly known as the Cantril Ladder, is that it doesn’t really ask about happiness at all. We know from many surveys that people tend to give very different answers to questions about what makes them satisfied with their life and to questions about whether they are feeling good in the moment. Having children, for example, tends to raise parents’ assessment of how meaningful their life is; but notably it does not make them report higher levels of happiness at any particular moment, including when they are spending time with their kids. At most, a ranking based purely on the Cantril Ladder could therefore give us something called a World Self-Reported Life Satisfaction Report—and it’s easy to see why such an honest title wouldn’t entice many journalists to write about it.
The less obvious problem with the Cantril Ladder is that it does not even do a good job of measuring respondents’ satisfaction with their own lives. When one set of researchers asked over a thousand survey respondents in the United Kingdom what they took the question to be getting at, the most commonly mentioned responses included “wealth,” “rich” and “successful.” As August Nilsson and his colleagues painstakingly demonstrate, some of the specific language in the question—such as the metaphor of the ladder and its emphasis on the “top” as well as the “bottom step”—primes respondents to think about social hierarchies. Their conclusion is sobering: “The Cantril Ladder is arguably the most prominent measure of well-being, but the results suggest caution in its interpretation—the Cantril Ladder’s structure appears to influence participants to attend to a more power- and wealth-oriented view of well-being.”....
....MUCH MORE
Previously:
May 2021 - "The Grim Secret of Nordic Happiness"
I thought everyone knew this. At minimum as regards the Finns.
As to the Nordics, what with the Janteloven I sometimes think there is a bit of play-acting in the ostentatious humility....
As noted in the outro from 2019's "FinnTech: What To Do With Near-Indestructible Black Plastic":
I remember asking a Finnish woman why it sounded like people were laughing when they spoke Finnish, were they happy?
"Oh no" she said and then she stopped talking.
Someone, I can't recall who, mentioned that on public transportation
Finns sit and stare at their shoes. It is considered very forward to
stare at someone else's shoes.
I don't know as much about Finland as I do about Norway but here are some of our posts:
Thousands Of Migrants Flee Finland Hoping For A Better Life In Iraq
"Embracing päntsdrunk, the Finnish way of drinking alone in your underwear"
The Finns used to dance the Tango
but maybe not so much anymore. The only Finnish band I could name is an
old-school Finnmetal band, Children Of Bodom described as:
"Melodic death metal meets virtuoso guitars: Children Of Bodom took the spirit of eighties
heavy metal and thrash, and married it to a contemporary death metal framework"
or, as Encyclopaedia Mettalum thumbnails it:
Genre: Melodic Death/Power Metal
Lyrical themes: Death, Hate, Lake Bodom, Anger, Antagonism
Current label: Nuclear Blast
And then there was the time "Norway Invades Finland":
That's really all I've got. They fought the Soviets to a standstill in WWII. The famine that started in 1866 was the last natural
great starving in Europe but nowhere near as bad as what Stalin and the
communists did in the Holodomor, 150,000 vs 3.5 to 4 million.
And the people sound like they're laughing when they talk, but they aren't.
Somehow related:
These Captcha Things Are Getting More Difficult
Select all squares with Finnish snipers:
Is that Marshal Mannerheim in the tree on the right?
On the other hand, August 2022's - "The Dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Culture That Is Finland" has a video of the Russian Red Army Choir doing a nice cover of "Happy Together" in Helsinki's Senate Square along with Finland's Leningrad Cowboys.
July 2023 - Questions Der Spiegel Is Asking: "What Happens If Russia Attacks Finland's Åland Islands?"
I know, I know this one: a dance-off!
