A case study in elite misinformation.
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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.
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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.”
But perhaps the biggest problem with the World Happiness Report is that metrics of self-reported life satisfaction don’t seem to correlate particularly well with other kinds of things we clearly care about when we talk about happiness. 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. While Finland and Sweden consistently rank at the top of the happiness league table, for example, both countries have also persistently experienced some of the highest suicide rates in the European Union, ranking in the top five EU countries according to one recent statistic.
It turns out that my hunch is born out by the data. Scandinavia doesn’t just seem a lot less happy than headlines suggest each year; if you look at a variety of metrics that have at least as much connection to a layperson’s understanding of happiness as the single metric used by the World Happiness Report, countries like Finland don’t do especially well.
Two distinguished economists, Danny Blanchflower and Alex Bryson, set out in a recent paper to discover what would happen to the world happiness rankings if they looked at a broader range of indicators—and what they found is a totally different picture.
Instead of relying on a single metric of life satisfaction, Blanchflower and Bryson consider eight survey questions which have widely been asked in different countries around the world. The first four of these questions measure different dimensions of positive affect. They are based on asking whether respondents experienced enjoyment yesterday; whether they smiled or laughed a lot; and whether they felt well-rested. (Their measure of positive affect also incorporates answers to the Cantril Ladder.)
The next four questions used by Blanchflower and Bryson measure different dimensions of negative affect. They ask respondents such questions as whether or not they experienced sadness yesterday; whether they worried during a lot of the day; whether they experienced anger; and whether they were in physical pain.
What Blanchflower and Bryson found is striking. Responses to the Cantril Ladder barely seem to correlate with expressions of either positive or negative affect. Denmark, for example, came top of their ranking on the Cantril Ladder. But, like most other Scandinavian countries, Denmark did much worse on both metrics of positive affect such as how likely respondents had been to smile or laugh a lot the previous day (111th out of 164 countries) and on metrics of negative affect such as whether they had worried a lot (93rd out of 164.)1
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As a result, the overall ranking constructed by Blanchflower and Bryson looks totally different to the more famous version published by the UN. Finland, for example, falls to 51st place.2 Conversely, countries like Japan, Panama and Thailand, none of which do especially well on the official ranking by the UN, suddenly appear a lot happier; all of them are ranked above Finland and other supposed top performers.
Another surprise suggests that the story about happiness in the United States is not nearly as bleak as is usually suggested. For it turns out that happiness varies widely across America—and some parts of the country are seemingly the happiest in the world.
Once you break the United States into its component states, it becomes clear that parts of the country really are doing quite badly. Residents of West Virginia, for example, ranked 101st out of 215 countries and states, making them about as happy as those in much poorer places like Sri Lanka and Mauritania. But residents of other U.S. states are, according to the ranking constructed by Blanchflower and Bryson, among the happiest in the world. Seven of them—Hawaii, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas—are at the very top of the list, meaning that their residents are happier than those of the happiest country in the world (which turns out to be Taiwan, located in East Asia rather than Northern Europe). All in all, the residents of 34 U.S. states, plus those of the District of Columbia, have higher average levels of happiness than do the Fins.
In a culture obsessed with happiness and wellness, there will always be huge demand for content that sells readers on the one great hack for how to improve their lives. Want to live to a ripe old age? Eat like the residents of “blue zones” such as Sardinia or Okinawa. Want to be happy even though you’re not rich? Move to Bhutan, a country often portrayed as having figured out the key to happiness because the government announced in 2008 that it would henceforth be focusing on growing its “Gross Happiness Index.”
But that one great hack for how to improve your life nearly always turns out to be a sham. The residents of blue zones aren’t especially likely to live long because of their unique diets; more likely, blue zones are distinguished by poor record-keeping, leading to an abnormally high number of people defrauding the government by overstating their own age or continuing to collect pension checks for deceased relatives. Similarly, the government of Bhutan may talk a big game about prioritizing happiness over economic growth; but in reality, it doesn’t do particularly well in either the World Happiness Report or on Blanchflower and Bryson’s alternative metric—and the steady flow of people leaving Bhutan appear to believe that they could lead much happier lives elsewhere.
This suggests that, for all of the evident shortcomings of a purely economistic mindset, attempts to abandon tried-and-tested metrics like GDP for new-fangled indicators like happiness rankings may do more harm than good. After all, it remains extremely hard to measure happiness—and even if we could somehow come up with a reliable metric, we’d have precious little idea about what government policies could actually boost this outcome.
More broadly, supposedly serious news outlets still have a long way to go in subjecting publicity exercises like the World Happiness Report to appropriate journalistic scrutiny. It is easy to see why editors are tempted to assign some beat reporter without expertise in the social sciences to write up a fun little story about how much happier those enlightened Scandinavians are compared to benighted Americans. But if the media wants to live up to its self-appointed role as a gatekeeper of reliable information, it can’t continue to be complicit in the spread of such shoddy clickbait.
Over the last years, media outlets like the New York Times, universities like Oxford, and international institutions like the UN have devoted themselves to the fight against so-called “misinformation.” It is certainly true that our political discourse is awash with dangerous distortions and outright lies. But any institution which wishes to address that problem must start by looking into the mirror—and cease spreading “elite misinformation” like the World Happiness Report.
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Comments
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.
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?"
By staticman2 2025-12-1620:543 reply 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.
By levocardia 2025-12-1621:402 reply I have done survey methodology research and fully agree, almost assuredly when you see questions worded in a seemingly "convoluted" way like this, the reason is that there was exhaustive research that found this wording was the best balance of reliability and validity.
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.
By rolandog 2025-12-178:35 Agreed!
Although I'm no survey expert, the thing I'd like to bring to everyone's attention is how easy it is to not take into account people that have a degree of numeric or math illiteracy... which I guess they are the main target demographic that is included by these questions (and I can also guess that they make a worryingly large part of the demographic, because our systems are rarely inclusive).
In my experience, having met people from multiple countries during the time I've been living abroad, what I have noticed is that — in this world filled with inequality — it is a privilege to be able to have a good grasp in scientific subjects. And, for lots of different factors, people have setbacks or trauma that make it difficult to learn a subject that is either boring or painful to them.
So, yes the questions are a bit convoluted, but they help paint a mental image for probably the majority with a thing that they may be closely familiar with: stairs... Plus, it probably helps statisticians get a better signal to noise out of the questions, too.
By nxobject 2025-12-1717:04 I agree – I'm sure social psychologists and psychometricians have been thinking about this since forever, probably since even the dawn of modern psychometrics. Cross-cultural and cross-language validity would likely be particularly problematic with something more detailed, especially once you get entangled with things like how anger is expressed and conceptualized, the role of positive outer expressions of affect like smiling, etc.
By quitit 2025-12-1712:28 It's easy to overlook the importance in outlining a process for evaluating each rung in the ladder.
Adding this nuance to the question serves to invite deeper thought and avoid assigning a motivation-based rating (like when you give the Uber driver 5 stars when what you felt was actually just "satisfactory").
A more basic rating question can invite other kinds of influence, such as a motivation in how they'd like their life to be perceived rather than how they genuinely feel it to be.
In surveys with less nuance the data tends to correlate around the extremes.
By M95D 2025-12-189:07 It's the "best possible life for you" part of the question that makes all the difference.
By seizethecheese 2025-12-1620:472 reply 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.
By notahacker 2025-12-1621:48 Yep. There are some implicit cultural expectations around "best possible life" which vary from country to country, but it's not quite as much a "is the word in your local language we've rendered as happy closer in meaning to satisfied or ecstatic?" question, and it's also less about short term emotions on the day of the survey and much more about satisfaction with life opportunities, which is generally more relevant for international and longitudinal comparisons...
By nxor 2025-12-1620:51 [dead]
By Aperocky 2025-12-1621:58 Happy have so many definition that I like the question better, it is much less ambiguous than "happy".
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.
What an interesting question. It would seem intuitively that a population with a limited band of socioeconomic mobility must answer 10 and one with a wide band of mobility must answer 0. I wonder whether that is true.
By Doxin 2025-12-189:12 As far as I can tell happiness is relative in any case, I'm not sure that accounting for that in the question is a bad thing.
By M95D 2025-12-189:12 And yet, highest rating countries also have good socioeconomic mobility.
Socioeconomic mobility isn't the only thing that affects happiness. A good wife/husband contributes a lot to happiness, for example.
I have to say, I don’t understand what ”for you” means in ”best/worst possible life for you”. At first I read it roughly as ”given the fundamental unchanging circumstances of your life, such as where and when you were born, who your parents are, and your basic health” but maybe they mean something like ”in your subjective perspective on what is good/bad”?
By nhaehnle 2025-12-170:39 My thought as well, but the question is: does it matter for what the survey is trying to achieve?
Some people will interpret it one way, some a subtly different way, but is there a reason that people's interpretation changes over time in a way that is more rapid and more significant than the underlying question of how good their life is broadly? Probably not.
There may be cultural differences that make it tricky to do comparisons between cultures / countries, but it should give something useful when looking at the same culture / country over time.
By bossyTeacher 2025-12-1623:41 >"How happy are you, on a scale of 0-10?"
Your question is likely to be interpreted as you asking the person's current MOOD hence different answers on different times are likely. While you are thinking of a less changing wider concept.
The social context is important too, there is a social stigma around admitting that you are not happy which will play into this question too.
By connorshinn 2025-12-179:591 reply One possible flaw in this question - I really don't like heights, so the idea of being at the top of a ladder does NOT equate to being happy for me.
Now I know it's a metaphor and not a literal ladder, but it does make me wonder if that association skews the results at all..
By IAmBroom 2025-12-1721:46 Yes, I expect to hear a scale like this expressed as "where 10 is the best and 0 is the worst".
By sysguest 2025-12-250:15 "on which step of the ladder do you feel you personally stand at the present time?”
hmm maybe answering 10 means: I only expect my life to down-roll from now on?
By greygoo222 2025-12-1621:441 reply That's a necessary feature. The best translation of "happy" in different countries can have very different connotations.
That's why the ladder idea seems good: relatively mistranslation-proof.
For Finland, discussion seems to hinge on whether "happiness" is "close enough" to "contentedness".
By yencabulator 2025-12-175:402 reply I'm a Finn. I personally interpret that survey as Finland being the least unhappy place. There's a social safety net, health care is taken care of, you know your life won't get destroyed by the slightest misfortune, you get a good education for free, your surroundings are generally safe and well maintained, you feel safe & are fairly certain nothing bad will happen, there are people around you who share your values, life is good.
Things that for example the article author's favorite USA does not have. But of course a Murkin' can't accept that. I fully expect him to gripe that somehow the Corruption Perceptions Index is also somehow unfair to his favorite country too, and just cannot be right.
You had me at blaming "elites".
By euroderf 2025-12-178:54 Kind of a "Minimax" interpretation. Whereas in the USA, when you hit bottom it's so low that you probably ain't comin' up again.
By philipallstar 2025-12-1710:392 reply [flagged]
You should probably check where Finland is in a map before talking about hard to defend borders…
By yencabulator 2025-12-1717:181 reply And maybe check what Finland is doing with its military and what happened around World War II before saying that USA pays "most of our defense".
What's really rich is Americans deciding they no longer like their self-assigned World Police role, and managing to blame their supposed allies for that. Never underestimate the quality of Russian psyops, I guess.
By philipallstar 2025-12-2122:08 What Finland had during WW2 is not relevant to the value the US has provided all Western countries by making shipping lanes safe for the last 75 years.
> defence and medical advancement research
These are America's choices. And it's America's choice whether to wield these in world-leading competitiveness or as ossified self-serving bureaucracy.
Other countries make other choices about where to do world-leading R&D (that Americans can take advantage of as lower prices). Chinese solar, for example.
By philipallstar 2025-12-2122:07 > These are America's choices
Yes, and now they're starting to choose differently. Which is a shame, because shaming a country for acting in the worlds self-interest is a very strange thing to do.
By scotty79 2025-12-1622:15 If I feel hopeless, I might think that I live best possible life for me (and answer 10) despite feeling deeply unhappy about it.
By crimsoneer 2025-12-178:52 I'm assuming part of this is it's not always asked in English...?
By NedF 2025-12-1621:40 [dead]
By darth_avocado 2025-12-1622:41 I am yet to be convinced that 4000 data points are sufficient to extrapolate how happy 2.8B people are in the world. (India and China) Especially when it deals with a complex topic as happiness without taking any cultural differences into account.
People on HN tend to argue it’s sufficient data to be statistically significant, but I don’t see how.
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.
By nxobject 2025-12-1717:02 Apropos to that: I wish the author had said more about critically evaluating tweaks in methodology and definition.
(For example, he cites Blanchflower and Bryson because he prefers positive affect as a measurement of happiness – but doesn't note that Blanchflower and Bryson pool data for 2008-2017, so in terms of rankings they may be measuring something meaningful but different.)
By kansface 2025-12-1622:01 > 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 simplicity is nice, but for the (probable) fact that suicide attempts/rates and emigration don't correspond... so lets not call it happiness.
By Karrot_Kream 2025-12-1621:40 The substack references Nilsson et al [1] in regards to criticisms of the Cantril Ladder. It's a pretty easy to read paper so I highly suggest just reading it.
By testing22321 2025-12-1721:49 The US never gets a single city in the top 50 “world’s most livable cities” ranking.
Lousy public transport, bankrupting healthcare and education, mass shootings, traffic, pollution.
Nobody is fooled into thinking Americans are happy.
By Natsu 2025-12-1621:22 > In that sense the methodological problems here are more serious than the ones they point to in the World Happiness Report.
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.
By stickfigure 2025-12-1622:01 "Pick a random number between 1 and 10" is also a clear and consistent method, and also not particularly meaningful.
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.
By Sam6late 2025-12-175:26 I would like to rewrite it, replacing desires with hormones, since they are the drivers for desires, when young one could jump a wall, risking his/her life to see the one we desire, then in their fifties on a nude beach everybody looks and feels mundane. The defining experience of our age seems to be biochemical hunger. We're flooded with hormones that tell us to crave more, even when we already have more than we need. We're starved for balance while stimuli multiply around us. Our dopamine peaks and crashes without reason; our cortisol hums in the background like faulty wiring.
We live with a near-universal imbalance: the reign of thin hormones. These thin hormones promise satisfaction but never deliver. They spike and vanish, leaving behind only the impulse to chase the next hit. Philosophers once spoke of desires that change the self; today, our neurochemistry is being short-circuited before the self even enters the conversation.
A thick hormone is slower, steadier. It reshapes you in the process of living it—like the oxytocin that comes from trust, or the endorphins that build with persistence. But thin hormones—those dopamine flickers from notifications, likes, and swipes—do nothing but reproduce themselves. They deliver sensation without transformation, stimulation without growth.
Modern systems have perfected the art of hijacking our endocrine circuitry. Social media fires the neurons of connection without the chemistry of friendship. Porn delivers the hormonal spike of intimacy without the vulnerability that generates oxytocin. Productivity apps grant the dopamine signature of accomplishment with nothing actually achieved. We’ve built an economy not of meaning, but of molecules. And none of it seems to be making us more alive.
By VonGuard 2025-12-1721:14 Imagine that, the United States is attempting to pervert truth into utter and complete lies. It's almost as if this is the only brand the United States has left.
At this point in my life if I see something with United States looks good compared to the rest of the world I just immediately assume it is a lie. Because the United States is nothing but lies and greed anymore. We cannot even claim innovation as a central motivator anymore.
By hiAndrewQuinn 2025-12-1619:279 reply 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!
By perons 2025-12-1711:03 I'm brazillian, moved to Finland 2 years ago to work here, and can confirm the sentiment.
If you ask a Finn, most people are actually quite harsh to the Finnish government, economy, etc - specially as of recent, since Finland now has one of the worst unemployment rate in EU. But lifestyle here is quite sober, everyone has hobbies and are quite dedicated to them. I guess the Sauna and Avanto culture are the main happiness drivers here, and tbh after experiencing it, I wouldn't change for anything else.
By Lerc 2025-12-1620:41 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)
By marcus_holmes 2025-12-171:551 reply Friend of mine moved from Australia to Finland, and loved it there. I can't imagine dealing with all that cold after Aussie's wonderful heat, but he loved it.
Happiness is found in different places for different people, thankfully.
Even when it is extremely cold like -50 Celsius, one can still walk outside for hours with sufficiently warm clothes. But try the same when it is +50. And then spending weeks in air-conditioned apartments was strictly worse for me than in a heated home during the winter. Plus there is no insects when it is cold. So my preference is for colder climate.
By abdullahkhalids 2025-12-1721:551 reply The thing is, in cold places, it is possible for the temperature to remain consistently cold for several days on end, day and night. In hot places, even if day time temperatures approach 50 degrees, at night the temperature will almost certainly be below 35 degrees. So you can always go out at night and be fairly comfortable temperature wise.
By M95D 2025-12-189:17 How is that any better? Go out only at night vs. go out at any time?
By euroderf 2025-12-175:18 Yup, it's easier to dress for the cold than for the heat. Shorts & sandals only take you so far.
By marcus_holmes 2025-12-180:45 I've lived in both, and my face hurts in the cold. There's nothing quite like that amazing feeling of walking through warm air, feels like the atmosphere is hugging me :) I prefer the warm :)
By QuercusMax 2025-12-1620:41 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.
By burningChrome 2025-12-1621:361 reply Played hockey with several Finns. They always seemed grumpy about something. The Norwegians and Swedes I played soccer with always had a more cheerful disposition. They always made fun of the Northern Finns, saying, "You'd be grumpy AF too if you had to deal with Winter for 7 months every year!"
By vidarh 2025-12-179:50 I'm Norwegian, and the Norwegian stereotype of Finnish people used to be that they are dour and introvert. And we're by and large culturally a lot less outwardly cheerful to people we don't know than the Danes.
Sometimes Norwegian TV would show Finnish dramas while I was growing up in the '80s, and the standing joke was that the typical Finnish drama had two guys hiking through the forest, one of them saying something, and then half an hour more of hiking before the other would reply. I don't remember whether that was accurate (it's not as if I'd have kept watching), but I suspect not.
By euroderf 2025-12-175:19 Unrelated, but this reminds me of Americans' opinions of their congresscritters: Congresscritters as a whole are a terrible, corrupt bunch, but your own congresscritter is amazing!
By PLMUV9A4UP27D 2025-12-1620:12 As a Finn, I can confirm this.
By looperhacks 2025-12-178:03 A similar thing was recently reported for Germany as well. When asked how they believe the average German is doing, most people answered something along "worse than me".
By bflesch 2025-12-1620:11 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...
By euroderf 2025-12-175:25 You don't see many cops in Finland. You just don't.
Firstly because the social benefits system keeps a lot of people out of trouble ' call it bribery if you like, but it meets basic needs. Secondly because there's a lot of private "security" types around - for example in the supermarkets, keeping out drunks and dealing with shoplifters - letting the police focus on the real stuff.
It's extremely important if you're interested in social stability. Unhappy people have a tendency to turn authoritarian and lash about, hurting both their own society and anyone who looks different.
By QuercusMax 2025-12-1620:431 reply 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.
It's referring to a successful political overthrow.
The quote really needs the first two lines:
The verb in the sentence is "is made", not just "is". "Now" it is summer, not winter. They were discontent in the past. Now they are happy.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.
By QuercusMax 2025-12-1622:382 reply Leave it to Shakespeare to use a garden-path sentence to open one of his greatest plays....
By jfengel 2025-12-1718:54 One of my most important jobs as a Shakespeare actor is to find ways to enunciate some of his over-long sentences in a way that allows the audience to follow them just by listening.
In this case, it's not too hard. Shakespeare likes giving you oppositions, like "winter" and "summer". Put the stress there, and the audience will follow. And you don't need to breathe at the end of the line; it can flow directly into the next one.
By ninalanyon 2025-12-1721:09 It's only fifteen words! And very straightforward.
In democracies, you sometimes can see authoritarians being elected. Current situation in the USA is one example.
By johnp314 2025-12-1717:49 You have much better (concrete) examples in South and Centeral America, e.g. Venezuela & Nicaragua, but there are plenty of others.
By nephihaha 2025-12-1712:38 Not really. The US situation is engineered so only two parties ever get in, and are practically impossible to remove. Wait several years and the other lot will get in.
Even with Trump we see a lot of policies and directions that the Democrats have pursued previously.
Are they though? Alcoholism and Seasonal Affective Disorder are rife in Nordic countries.
By ninalanyon 2025-12-1721:151 reply Do you have a reference for that? The World Population Review [1] says that alcoholism rates are similar to or less than the US, Australia, Brazil. And definitely less than many other countries around the world.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/alcoholis...
By nephihaha 2025-12-189:50 These countries often have strict rules about alcohol which reflect this. In some parts you had to buy alcohol from a government store. Then there is usual tactic of taxing it to death. As a result illegal alcohol production is common out in the countryside.
