I don't know. The World Happiness Report relies on one simple question, which is easy to criticise but at least it applies a clear and consistent method. The paper referred to does not. It uses a special US dataset for states and a much smaller global dataset for every other country, then treats the results as if they measure the same thing. This setup almost guarantees that US states look unusually good. The authors present this as evidence, but it mostly reflects differences in survey design rather than real differences in wellbeing. In that sense the methodological problems here are more serious than the ones they point to in the World Happiness Report.
> To put it bluntly, it is a sham
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...
> At a minimum, you would expect the happiest countries in the world to have some of the lowest incidences of adverse mental health outcomes. 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.
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 have lived in Finland for the past four years, having emigrated from the US like the other poster here, and the WHR is a common punching bag topic amongst locals here.
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!
This is a fairly common discrepancy between how people perceive the mean/median of a property is compared to the mean/median of how they themselves are.
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)
I have a relative who decided to move up to Baffin Island and get into long-distance arctic trekking. She'd probably fit right in.
As a Finn, I can confirm this.
Finns are amazing!
As a US person, I have lived in Finland for 3 years, and I can assure you that the Finns are the most content people you can imagine! They can go months without talking to anyone and still consider themselves "happy", but the correct word in English is "content".
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"
As Finn I would agree. Finland is fine. Not the greatest and not happiest. But overall it is fine still. In most areas cost of living is pretty reasonable, services are sufficient. Police for example does good enough job. Probably could earn more money somewhere else, but why bother...
It's extremely important if you're interested in social stability. Unhappy people have a tendency to turn authoritarian, burn down their own society, and attack anyone who looks different.
I dunno, "discontent" is a pretty politically charged word, going back to Shakespeare - "Now is the winter of our discontent" from Richard III is referring to an attempted political overthrow.
Unhappiness sounds much more pedestrian.
The only problem the author points out is that he doesn't like the Cantril Ladder question.
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".
> “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?”
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.
That seems to be working as intended? The unhappiness of both "dying of exposure on the sidewalk due to untreated mental illness" and the constant gnawing fear that this is a realistic outcome due to medical bankruptcy or whatever should pull down a country's happiness index.
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.
So why then is Bhutan so happy?
Bhutan is not ranked in the World Happiness Report, and at least one source (https://www.vox.com/policy/471950/gross-domestic-product-eco...) says that international comparative data contradicts the Bhutanese government's claim that their people are particularly happy.
Someone in a Scandinavian country is probably well informed of how terrible it is for the poorest and most vulnerable outside their country. The indexes are probably the same.
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.
I don't think that people in Scandinavia are well informed about how life can be for the poorest outside of their country.
> 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.
"Scandinavians don't know that poverty exists" is a pretty wild claim.
I've just had this topic with friends. How can finland and the nordics be further up than, say, spain? Have they ever been? Sure, materialistic safety is better up there. But the way of living, at least in my experience, is way higher. Look at suicide rates and alcoholism and such.
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)
Using suicide rates as a measure for population happiness is very peculiar, given that the people who commit suicide represent fractions of a percent, and would only ever sum up to a rounding error.
It's not that peculiar if you assume all countries follow the same type of happiness distribution that is simply shifted/stretched lower or higher.
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 a lot both of these metrics do say, but the fact that they are highly objective makes them extremely valuable.
There is also a religious element to suicide that cannot be overlooked.
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.
All the Spanish cities I've visited have looked "perfect", but there's a lot I don't see as a tourist, e.g. that Spain has one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe (10.5%).
Finland is now close to Spain when it comes to unemployment rate! Let's see how that affects Finland's ranking.
The perception of Spain is much more positive in the Anglophone world - it's viewed as a country where cost of living is low, you can nap in the middle of the day, the women/men are hot and easy, the wine is great and cheap, and you can party late at night.
In action 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.
> The perception of Spain is much more positive in the Anglophone world - it's viewed as a country where cost of living is low, you can nap in the middle of the day, the women/men are hot and easy, the wine is great and cheap, and you can party late at night.
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.
These measures are bullshit and often just come down to a prevalent societal ‘temperament’ that’s inculcated from birth. I live and have family in Sweden and the rest of my family is in Spain. The Swedes have immense pride in their country and pretty much only talk about the positives. When the winters are dark, cold, rain has been pouring for fourteen days straight and the last time you saw sun was 4 weeks ago, they say “there’s no bad weather just bad clothes”. One day I sat with my cousin and some other relatives in the olive grove of his country place in Spain - sun was shining and we’d been eating delicious locally produced food for hours and drinking wine from his vineyard while he yapped on about how everything in Spain is ‘shit’ (una mierda). And this is why places like Finland are reportedly the ‘happiest’ in the world.
Not for nothing, but I'm not sure that's a great metric. Venezuela for instance is 178, and it doesn't seem like an overly happy place to be these past few years.
Note that people who commit suicide don't answer surveys anymore.
A Finn here. And just as many other finns, I'm confused to why Finland ranks at the top. Yet, this seems like a case of someone looking to disprove a theory and thus finds the arguments. For example; Health metrics isn't a good measure, considering that Scandinavia has free health care, and this leads to more cases of mental health issues are recorded. Suicides aren't a great metric either, considering that Swedes and Finns have fairly high level of access to guns. I do agree that happiness is a term that is difficult to define, and that "happiness" is a bit misleading. "Content" is a better description.
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...
That fuzzy line that sits between happiness and contentment is worth some exploration. For some the two are one and the same but for others “happiness” represents something closer to a perpetual Disney-movie-good-ending sort of emotional state that I suspect is broadly speaking unrealistic. I wonder how much sadness has stemmed from chasing that unattainable ideal.
You have a good point. I was about to write something about that in my previous point, like "Finns have a ladder that is lowers than others", but it didn't sound right. You put it with better words.
Also regarding "comparison of suicide numbers", in many religious regions suicide is a problem for your soul and therefore a problem for your still-living relatives.
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.
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As a Swede, I've always been confused by these results. The self image of Swedes is that we're fairly miserable on average, and don't know how to enjoy life as much as some people in warmer climates.
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.
I think (as a fellow Swede) that there is a culturally sense of guilt involved in having a comparatively comfortable life and not being happy about it, compounded by a sense of guilt that a comfortable life is somehow undeserved.
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.
As an introvert living in Rio de Janeiro, I can tell you that a lot of being happier in a hot climate with a lot of people around is just a social mask.
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.
It's a good point about living in a hot climate often being associated with living a happy life. Although to what I've seen, there isn't much evidence for such a correlation.
The World Happiness Report extensively discusses positive and negative affect in Chapter 2 and the relatively high suicide/death of despair rates of the Nordic countries in Chapter 6. These seem to be totally ignored in TFA.
https://www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2025/caring-and-sharing...
https://www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2025/supporting-others-...
Related. Others?
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)
Unless it includes Sentinel islands, I'm not going to spend any reading minutes on those reports.
Normalizing for language and culture seem like the hardest parts of any global survey. How are the translations done of that one question and are there any cultural implications?
The author would do well to educate themselves on the difference between Scandinavia and the Nordics.
As Garrison Keillor said about the Nordics: "We Lutherans are an optimistic people—our glass is half empty and we're grateful for it."
No kidding. I lived in Finland for a few years and no way are they some of the happiest people.
Whom are you replying to? The only other comment I see about Finland agrees with the take that they are happiest.
I guess kudos for doing a deep dive into this, but was it necessary?
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. :)
The survey being used was created by a Princeton University psychology professor. It may or may not be useful but there's nothing obviously pseudo-scientific about it. I do not think the linked article writer is making that claim.
Should outlets like the NYT be reporting uncritically on pseudoscience? As long as they are I think this kind of work is extremely valuable.
How much of the article did you read? The main substance of it is not that the UN rankings are flawed, but how the rankings change based on the broader analysis by Blanchflower and Bryson. That result can't so easily be read off from our cynical preconceptions
Yes, it's necessary, and getting more so all the time: lately I've been seeing more and more commentary trying to tie happiness measurements to some political stance: "conservatives are happier than liberals", "women are happier after divorce", etc. And increasingly it's not coming just from random commenters, but from people with real power.
In such an environment it's vital to know if the methodology for measuring happiness is good or bunk.
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Happiness is a purely subjective thing. It's plainly obvious that any attempt at such comparisons will be doomed to be of limited utility. There are plenty of other ways you could try to go about getting something more useful, but none of them will be perfect.
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.
In case others are wondering what the one simple question is (called the Cantril Ladder):
“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'm not a psychology expert but from stuff I read I bet the reason they don't ask "How happy are you, on a scale of 0-10?" is they tried that and found the same person would give different answers from day to day and moment to moment based on what is going on this very minute.
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.
But it needs to be convoluted. The problem with the simpler version is the word happy needs to be translated both culturally and more literally.
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Came to say the same thing. The author criticizes the happiness report methodology than immediately cites a report full of methodological problems
One way to interpret this is not as the author's endorsement of the other report, but as a demonstration of how fragile these happiness rankings are to perturbations in methodology / definition.