
The World's Happiest Countries - gaiusparx
http://www.forbes.com/2011/01/19/norway-denmark-finland-business-washington-world-happiest-countries.html
======
henrikschroder
Ah, lies, damn lies, and statistics.

It's nice and easy to compare the official numbers and compile lists and
rankings, but it's very easy to be clouded by your own preconceptions and
belive that the numbers tell the whole story. Not so.

For example, Sweden's weakest category was "Social Capital".

> The marriage rate is the 77th lowest, globally

I was fixing up my profile at LinkedIn today, and under my personal status I
could choose between "single" or "married". I got slightly annoyed, because I
am neither. I'm "cohabitating" or whatever the awkward English term for it is.
Over here, such an arrangement is very common, and even offers some legal
protection. There are many couples who live together, raise children, and
never marry. There's no difference between these and married couples, except
that the latter group shows up in global statistics and the former group show
up as singles, even though it's not an accurate view.

> while rates of religious attendance are seventh lowest among all countries,
> suggesting a limited access to familial and religious support networks.

The average Swede would consider this being seventh from the top, not seventh
from the bottom. There's also no lack of access to religious support, it's
that people don't _want_ it.

The numbers will tell you that a majority of Swedes are christians, because
the number you get is the number of members of various churches, but until
recently, membership in the state church was automatic, and a lot of people
get married in a church or baptize their children in a church, despite being
atheist or agnostic or apathetic to the whole thing.

So the official numbers say we are a christian nation where noone goes to
church regularly. The truth is that we are a secular nation that uses churches
for traditions.

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jhancock
<http://www.prosperity.com/> is the source of this study. Skip to this to see
the list without Forbes' layer of editorial and ads.

~~~
maukdaddy
Thanks for the direct list!

However, there's no way the US ranks #1 in health.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Actually, I think I figured out why the US ranks well in health. Rather than
measuring outputs, they also measure a weighted average of inputs, outputs,
and opinions. Opinions include features like "Satisfaction with Environmental
Beauty" (I'm sure the US is close to the top here).

<http://www.prosperity.com/health.aspx>

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smackay
I don't want to be morose but many of the countries listed also have
significant suicide rates. Finland, in particular, has the highest rate in
western Europe with Switzerland not far behind. I guess everything comes with
a price.

~~~
Lewisham
My intuition has always been that the rates are higher in otherwise "happy"
countries because the people at risk feel far more isolated from the rest of
the populace.

~~~
Alex3917
These countries also have much lower rates of self-destructive behaviors,
which is what most people with emotional problems in the U.S. do instead of
actually killing themselves outright. If you were to count deaths from self-
destructive behaviors together with suicides, the U.S. would dwarf every other
country.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I think "every other country" is wildly overstating the case.

Here is an article on alchohol and homicide in Russia:
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447353/>

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ashbrahma
I am surprised Bhutan is not on this list. In Bhutan, they measure growth by
GNH - Gross National Happiness and not by GDP:)

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tici_88
It is interesting how nearly all of the 10 countries in the top 10 are either
in North-Western Europe, or have historically been "sprung" from a country in
North-Western Europe (e.g. Canada, Australia, New Zealand who are in the
Commonwealth and still technically headed by Queen Elizabeth II).

If you look deeper, the top 10 countries that are in North-Western Europe
(Norway, Sweeden, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands) are all under the heavy
influence of the Gulf Stream which makes their climate particularly overcast,
rainy and dreary - probably the most miserable in the world.

So maybe it all comes down to the people of those countries learning ways to
"keep themselves happy" over the centuries - an evolutionary technique of
psychological survival, so to speak.

Just a thought.

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axod
The data lists US as ranked #1 for health???

Rubbish. Rather than taking real data such as life expectancy, they seem to be
asking population "Are you happy with health".

So basically, rather than measuring 'happiness', this is measuring how
deluded/subdued the population is.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The US has very good life expectancy once you slice the data appropriately.
Not #1 by any means, but better than most people thing.

A white American male will live 76 years, a white American female will live 81
years. That's less than a year short of life expectancies in Finland (76.1 and
82.4) or Austria (76.9 and 82.6), both of which are predominantly white).

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2008/06...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2008/06/11/AR2008061101570.html)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expec...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy)

Similarly, Japanese Americans live 84 years while Japanese only live 82 years.

[http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/browse.aspx?lvl=2...](http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/browse.aspx?lvl=2&lvlID=53)
[http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-
wdi&met=sp_dyn_le...](http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-
wdi&met=sp_dyn_le00_in&idim=country:JPN&dl=en&hl=en&q=japan+life+expectancy)

The only reason the US appears to fare poorly in life expectancy comparisons
is the composition effect. We have a lot of short lived Blacks, while most
other first world countries don't.

[edit: Thanks gjm for the correction on Simpson's Paradox. It's only the
composition effect (which is the driver of Simpson's Paradox, but is not
equivalent to it).]

~~~
gjm11
That's only Simpson's paradox if black people in the US are living longer than
black people in other first-world countries. If what's actually happening is
that the US has more black people _and_ they're not living as long as their
counterparts in (say) Finland or Austria, that's a different matter.

(Though the effect that drives Simpson's paradox could still be the largest
cause of the US's not-so-good performance in overall life expectancy.)

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davidw
IIRC, The Economist did one of these recently, or reported on it, but also had
the good sense to put in some climate data. In other words, I'd rather be here
in Italy than in someplace like Finland, even though you'd get no disagreement
that the latter 'works' better. The sunnier and warmer (within limits) it is,
the happier I am.

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pimeys
If Finland is one of the happiest, the people in other countries should be
very, very miserable... Most of the time the sun won't shine and people escape
it by drinking heavy loads of booze. It's cold and nothing ever happens. At
least when you are a twenty-something it professional :)

~~~
cturner
Norway came in first. It's cold. Booze in Norway is both hard to buy and
expensive.

~~~
smackay
That's why (at least in the far north) people make it themselves.

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hiroprot
Wowzer...Luxembourg is not even on the overall ranking list?

From what I recall, it has been consistently in the top 15 in other studies.

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gladimdim
Why do they split article into 5 pages. I do not read such sites. Is forbes
such poor that they increase ads view rate in such way?

~~~
keltex
For those of you who prefer not to play the ad maze game:

[http://www.forbes.com/2011/01/19/norway-denmark-finland-
busi...](http://www.forbes.com/2011/01/19/norway-denmark-finland-business-
washington-world-happiest-countries_print.html)

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iampims
Why does Forbes try so hard to make the article unreadable?

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pedanticfreak
I find it interesting they make up a bunch of metrics which they claim are
related to happiness rather than just asking people whether they are happy.

It's as if I said I was happy and someone responded "What? You only make
$50,000 per year, your country's GDP to pollution ratio is 4.25, and you had
2.13 medical procedures last year at a 26.7 percent premium over the global
average, you CAN'T be happy!"

Wouldn't it make more sense to figure out which people actually are happy then
figure out the statistical correlations? Although from what I've read there
aren't any meaningful correlations. Happiness is defined and continuously
redefined by experience.

~~~
notahacker
Without Forbes' editorial slant it's an index of _prosperity_ rather than
happiness.

Without any empirically verifiable data, you've basically got an index that's
hugely dependent upon subjective perceptions and influenced by cultural views
of how one _ought_ to feel.

Does anyone really believe that Europeans are less "well-rested" than the
Chinese who work 12 hour days to put cheap consumer goods on their tables? Is
greater American scepticism about "working hard gets you ahead" because
Chinese society is more meritocratic and entrepreneur-friendly, or because the
Chinese have a greater cultural imperative to work hard? Is it fierce
patriotism rather than a lack of violent political dissent in the past few
years that leaves Thais more confident in their judiciary, finances and free
choice than Westerners? And do the British really have little more reason to
be confident in their financial institutions than the Zimbabweans, or are we
just a nation of cynics?

~~~
pedanticfreak
Empirically verifiable data is good and all, but this so-called prosperity
index is just a perversion of statistics.

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borism
The Real World's Happiest Countries, not the utopian world of Forbes and
Heritage Foundation:

<http://www.happyplanetindex.org>

~~~
jhamburger
"The index combines environmental impact with human well-being to measure the
environmental efficiency with which, country by country, people live long and
happy lives."

That doesn't sound like it's measuring happiness to me.

~~~
borism
It is measuring the sustainability of happiness.

No point in being the happiest country in the world by throwing largest feast
party ever if next year half of your population dies from obesity
complications or something.

~~~
jhamburger
That list seems to mainly just punish the biggest consumers and reward
exporters. Meanwhile, if the USA (#114) decided to be responsible and stop
consuming so much, a lot of people in China (#10) Vietnam (#5) Brazil (#9) and
Saudi Arabia (#13) would become very unhappy very quickly.

~~~
borism
that's absolutely correct.

