WHAT MAKES A HAPPY COUNTRY? LOOK TO FINLAND

When governments around the world introduced coronavirus restrictions requiring people to stand 2 meters apart, jokes in Finland started circulating:

“Why can’t we stick to the usual 4 meters?”

Finns embrace depictions of themselves as melancholic and reserved. But for four consecutive years, Finland has been named the happiest country in the world by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which publishes an annual report evaluating the happiness of people around the world.

“Four times in a row is too much,” said Jukka Lindstrom, a writer and standup comedian. The weather is “like the worst day in London, every day,” he said. “There’s definitely something in our history that makes us have this kind of low self-esteem as a nation, always feeling like an underdog.”

The World Happiness Report uses data from interviews of more than 350,000 people in 95 countries, conducted by the polling company Gallup. The rankings are not based on factors such as income or life expectancy, but on how people rate their own happiness on a 10-point scale.

“We believe that these subjective, or self-perceived, evaluations are a more reliable way to tell how good life is,” said Shun Wang, professor of the KDI School of Public Policy and Management in South Korea and one of the authors of the report.

Questions included, “Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?,” “Did you learn or do something interesting yesterday?” and “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?”

The authors came up with six categories to explain most of the difference in happiness between countries: gross domestic product per capita, social support, life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity and perception of corruption levels. Wang said some results were surprising:

Parts of Eastern Europe ranked relatively low on the list, despite having relatively good income levels, while in South America happiness levels tended to be high, despite lower income levels.

In Finland, a relatively egalitarian society, people tend not to be fixated on “keeping up with the Joneses.”

“People often do pretty well in social comparison,” said Antti Kauppinen, a philosophy professor at the University of Helsinki. “This starts from education; everybody has access to good education. Income and wealth differences are relatively small.”

All of the countries that ranked in the top 10 — including the four other Nordic countries — have different political philosophies than in the United States, which is No. 14 on the list, behind Ireland and ahead of Canada. Lower levels of happiness in the U.S. could be driven by social conflict, drug addiction, lack of access to health care and income inequality, Wang said.