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.
Forbes seems to be misrepresenting it, too. The ranking there (http://www.prosperity.com/rankings.aspx) doesn't claim it's a ranking of "happiness", but a weighted ranking of eight factors: economics, entrepreneurship/opportunity, governance, education, health, safety/security, personal freedom, and social capital.
I suppose you could define doing well at a weighted combination of those eight factors as the meaning of "happiness", but that seems like a stretch. I'd expect a happiness ranking to be measuring perceived happiness or life satisfaction, while this is attempting to measure something else.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).]
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.)
Looking at the raw data, this seems to mostly be down to the outlying high level of healthcare spend (which is for most nations strongly positively correlated with better outcomes).
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.
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 :)
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
Years ago I visited Vanuatu. A small pacific island.
The people there were incredibly laid-back and friendly. When traveling around the island by bus, the people in the fields would literally look up as we passed and wave. When I asked a tour guide why, he said it was because they were happy and wanted to wave to us because as tourists they knew we were contributing to their economy.
At the time, I thought they seemed to be the happiest people I'd ever met living on an island paradise.
Did a google search for 'happy vanuatu' and lo-and-behold:
"The 178-nation "Happy Planet Index" lists the south Pacific island of Vanuatu as the happiest nation on the planet, while the UK is ranked 108th." (2006)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/5169448.stm
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.