Aren't all of these types of things (unhappiest day of the year, best day to be born on, age that we're happiest etc) clearly pseudo-scientific/scientistic babble - and brands can then just use them to sell the Scandi (or whatever) lifestyle. Nobody who believes this is going to be swayed by your anaylsis. :)
In such an environment it's vital to know if the methodology for measuring happiness is good or bunk.
My immediate problem with this is the lower bound of responses in a given country would be determined by your perception of the safety nets available to you. Someone in a Scandinavian country where there are virtually no unsheltered homeless people probably doesn't index their zero to "dying of exposure on the sidewalk due to untreated mental illness," while an American who sees that regularly would.
The person in the Scandinavian country, when asked this question, will think "hmm, well I am not in America, so I will add 3 steps to my answer" and, och se där, up they go to the top of the World Ranking.
> bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life >>>for you<<<.
..and when asked this, I believe they consider how bad it can get for them in their country.
Based on my experience living and talking with people in Scandinavia and eastern europe.
I've always figured that this is in fact a big reason why the Nordic countries do so well on the survey: the average is lifted not by shiny happy people holding hands, but by the strong safety net ensuring that you can't fall into a pit of despair.
That said, note that both things mentioned in here will raise average happiness:
> But it turns out that the residents of the same Scandinavian countries that the press dutifully celebrates for their supposed happiness are especially likely to take antidepressants or even to commit suicide.
When I start deep questions about financial safety, the future and so on, just by asking I can be labelled as a pessimist. And I'm far from that.
I'm a fairly resolved and confident introvert, but I know many timid people that feel ashamed that they don't feel "happy" in these large group of people, that are extremely agitated and yelling around to grab some piece of attention they need.
And what is being shown in social media, documentaries and etc is just one pov.
In a warm climate you see people walking around feeling comfortable.
In a cold climate, the people you see are freezing.
Saying you are unhappy is in a sense saying you need a better quality of life, or deserve more happiness, both of which are kind of taboo under the Law of Jante.
That report is correct, it just they advertise with the wrong word in the headline, I guess because it is more click-bate title than having it as "The most content country"
Unhappiness sounds much more pedestrian.
The quote really needs the first two lines:
Now is the winter of our discontent
made glorious summer by the sun of York.
York (Richard's brother, Edward, now King Edward IV) has overthrown King Henry VI. There's also an important pun: "York" also refers to their father, also named Richard, who was the Duke of York until his death at the hands of Henry's faction. So Edward is also the "son of York".
That said, Richard is being sarcastic. He's plotting the next political overthrow, which will also be successful. And who will in turn be overthrown again. That, at least, will put an end to it, if for no other reason than that literally everybody else is dead.
The odd thing however is that when I ask them whether they think the average Finn is happy, they say absolutely not, but when I ask them whether they themselves are happy, most of the time I get a "oh this place is actually pretty great for weirdos like me, I just mean like, normal people would hate it here". But that's the thing: No one normal chooses to live in Finland!
You see it in things like business confidence going in both directions at various times, pessimism when things are going well, optimism when things are going poorly.
It is very convenient in politics, because you can choose which figure to report to make it seem like you are saying the same thing but you can switch between them to make things look good (or bad l, depending on your attention)
The good news is that we don't need a perfect happiness report to think about the things various countries are either doing very well or very poorly and how our own lives might be changed if the place where we live did things differently. The World Happiness Reports gets attention year after year because it prompts that kind of thinking and there is value in that.
U.S. hits new low in World Happiness Report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45378896 - Sept 2025 (277 comments)
U.S. No Longer Ranks Among 20 Happiest Countries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39763595 - March 2024 (92 comments)
The Finnish Secret to Happiness? Knowing When You Have Enough - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35411641 - April 2023 (19 comments)
World Happiness Report 2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35230812 - March 2023 (2 comments)
World Happiness Report, 2019 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19615776 - April 2019 (60 comments)
Why Denmark dominates the World Happiness Report rankings year after year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16720551 - March 2018 (3 comments)
Happiness report: Norway is the happiest place on earth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13913145 - March 2017 (158 comments)
World Happiness Report 2015 [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10793969 - Dec 2015 (22 comments)
Denmark 'happiest' country in the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=234018 - July 2008 (1 comment)
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Bonus highlight: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5152494 (Feb 2013)
I'll spoil it: - Finland 38 - Norway 71 - Spain 137
(fun fact: USA is 31)
ranked by suicide. If you visit it, and the vibes and feelings you have don't match the statistics, the statistics are shit I'd say. And maybe cities and rural areas destroy this statistic. But what do I know (but the article agrees with me)
Also, I Spain your view of Spain is tainted. I think very few people would choose an average city in Spain over e.g. Copenhagen where 20% of the Danish population live.
In reality the average Spaniard isn't experience the majority of that, as those are perceptions that arose from the rose-tinted glasses of tourists. Most tourists don't know about the Eurozone crisis, the regional disparity, and the consolidation of Spain's economic growth engines to 1-2 cities.
Spain is a good developed country with a decent QoL as is reflected by it's HDI and developmental indicators (and the fact that it has outpaced historically richer and more developed Italy is a testament to that), but tourists almost always take a rose-tinted view whereas locals almost always take a negative view.
And I think this is the crux of the issue with how the "World Happiness Index" is used in American discourse - in the US almost no one vists Europe or other parts of the World for extended periods of time and most Americans lack familial or social ties in Europe. As such, idealized images of Europe ("a socialist paradise" or "white Christendom under siege") have taken hold in popular discourse and are used as proxies for the American culture war.
If you're a tourist, you get to experience only those parts. If you live there, you have to experience the other 99% of the life also and it's not so great.
I’d never want to live in perpetual summer. Seasons brings joy.
Then, the relative size of a bottom or top absolute threshold is highly meaningful. Even if it's a fraction of a percent, populations are huge and suicide rates are not rounding errors at all -- they're actually quite statistically significant.
And as macabre as it is, suicides are objective facts mostly unaffected by methodology, and unaffected by translation issues, cultural differences, etc.
This is why suicide rates are actually a powerful mental health statistic, just like height is a powerful physical health statistic, at the population level. There's obviously still a lot both of these metrics don't say, but the fact that they are highly objective makes them extremely valuable.
I wouldn't be surprised if cultural differences is actually the largest factor that explains a country's suicide rate. Not easy to prove of course, but I would be very careful drawing any conclusions from differences in suicide rates between countries with vastly different culture.
I think you can also expect large differences in how countries report their suicide rate.
“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?”
Personally feels a little more convoluted than just asking "How happy are you, on a scale of 0-10?"
I'd also bet that they found the above "convoluted" question was one that led to the same people giving more consistent answers from day to day and moment to moment.
Even if I'm wrong I hope you see this is a much thornier problem than just asking a question and assuming the answer tells us anything about the person taking the survey.
There is also a lot of value in a question that works well enough, that you ask consistently over long stretches of time (or long stretches of distance). Maybe it's not perfect, but the longitudinal data would be worthless if they updated the wording every single year.
My happiness changes depending on many external factor and varies by hour and days, but the answer to the former question aren't going to change quite as often, would have probably provided the same answer over the entire year.
It's a simple question, sure, but it's not clear that it's a very meaningful one, even if other approaches aren't necessarily any better. When I think of the word happiness, I don't exactly associate it with suicide or rarely smiling.
The simplicity is nice, but for the (probable) fact that suicide attempts/rates and emigration don't correspond... so lets not call it happiness.
The point I took from the article is that we should stop paying attention to this meaningless metric. I didn't read it as a request to replace it with another metric.
Also, I think it's easy to misunderstand the Finns from the surface of us. We don't exhibit happiness, and we don't express happiness in a way that is easily observed. Finland ranks at the top of trust in other people, and being one of the least corrupt countries in the world. Those two metrics are a hint into how we Finns relate to other people. Also, it's difficult to get to know Finns, and for this reason it's difficult for outsiders to understand the Finns and the mentality.
On the anecdotal side, earlier this year I solo-traveled the US for 4 weeks, and out of those I got into deeper conversations, I was struck by how sad people were. That made me more convinced that I live a very happy life, in a happy place.
Edit: Some references: Weapons per capita: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g... Corruption index: https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024 Trust in others: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-people-trust-e...
So there is a huge incentive for religious societies to let a family member's suicide appear like an accident. Suicide rates are an extension of mental health disease rates and extremely hard to compare without correcting for many factors.
I get it if you feel like that question falls short of representing your own personal concept of happiness, but that question is the standard in positive psychology research for measuring self reported subjective well being, and hardly enough to say the report is "beset with methodological problems".
https://www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2025/caring-and-sharing...
https://www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2025/supporting-others-...
Exactly. WHR is a wonderful tool to study how policy institutes and media work together to build a narrative over the years.
> “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?”
One issue identified in the article that in some countries that really isn't taken to mean happiness, it's taken to mean "wealth". My take is simple that someone locked in a cage for the rest of their life without a chance to escape can still confidently put a 10 down. The cage may very well be golden, so it doesn't say much about their absolute happiness or suffering so to speak. Another situation is a person who sees more achievable opportunity - "if I can do x, y, z, I'll be higher on the ladder". Then they'd report themselves low, because they see a path to reach higher. But in the report they'll just look like the saddest person ever.
I suspect there may be a pattern, every time I hear on the radio that it's "World $x Day" I'm afraid I start wondering who's actually behind that specific press release and/or what funding and incentives are really in play...
"Ecological fallacy! Ecological fallacy!," I screamed, flapping my arms pointlessly at my laptop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy#Individual_...
It varies wildly by culture, but we're all conditioned somewhat to falsely report our feelings. I don't expect an honest answer if I greet someone with "How are you doing?".
Who cares about “happiness report”. Just another way to feel smug about how your country is better than those other places. But it’s non-material so it’s unfalsifiable, or can be nudged towards the unfalsifiable.
Why are Norwegians “happy”? I don’t know based on whatever “report”. But we are “supposed to be” because we have it “[so] good”. See how that works?
Norwegians have also convinced themselves that they are under a tyranny of “conformity”. Give me a break. It’s all memes.
briandw•3h ago
IAmBroom•2h ago