Happiest Countries In The World

[David G]

Finland - where people pay their taxes, and cooperation is valued some, is once again rated #1.

U.S. didn't make the top 10. SOOOOO much potential wasted.

What makes Finland so happy? According to the experts from Aalto University in Finland, there are several key factors. “Finland seems to excel here because of the Finnish welfare system’s ability to help its citizens feel taken care of,” says Aalto University lecturer Frank Martela. “Things like relatively generous unemployment benefits and nearly free healthcare help mitigate sources of unhappiness, ensuring that there are fewer people in Finland who are highly unsatisfied with their lives.’’

Finland’s urban planning also makes people feel healthy and safe. “A person’s environment plays a big role in their happiness which makes the topic of health promotion in cities very important,” says Aalto University professor Marketta Kyttä. “It’s closely related to social sustainability and whether you feel connected to your community.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurabe...h=1431d0979c22

This as opposed to the US current trend toward making the wealthy and powerful ever more so...

1. Pay higher, and more progressive taxes. It really pays off.

2. Pay attention to architecture and urban planning. It also pays off. See my comments elsewhere on the Pattern Language approach.

[David G]

Or... it might be the vodka?

[Johan R]

Or... it might be the vodka?

Given Heimlagas absurd proclamations, i am inclined to agree.

[JayInOz]

Hey johan you're looking well since you got injured and then recovered and then died and then came back

[Stiletto]

When I see Israel in that list I don't think many people of Arab ethnicity were surveyed.

[Beowolf]

We spent 8 days in #3 and were very happy while we were there. So much so that TLC and I have discussed a stay of several months at some point in the future.

C11482FE-50C7-484B-92D0-F71D4674FC0D.jpg

[David G]

Here's another perspective... suggesting that the study left out an important factor: expectations.

He says that low expectations are easily met, and Finns historically tend to have low expectations. Having lived in a largely Finnish town in Oregon, I can see that.

Do you know the term 'Sisu'? Hard term to define, but some say it is THE defining national trait. It means 'guts' and bravery and determination, and the ability to persevere and succeed far beyond what one would expect. Usually with dignity. Boats (including one of mine) get named Sisu for a reason.

And Sisu could easily be understood as a national reaction to the sort of gloomy low-expectations minset the author mentions.

So there's that...

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/...-VvvCvB11XMgoY

[Keith Wilson]

Here's another perspective... suggesting that the study left out an important factor: expectations. He says that low expectations are easily met, and Finns historically tend to have low expectations. Having lived in a largely Finnish town in Oregon, I can see that. Do you know the term 'Sisu'? Hard term to define, but some say it is THE defining national trait.

Yes indeed; lots of Finns in northern Minnesota. I would translate 'sisu' more as 'stoicism', but it has elements of all of that.

[heimlaga]

I would say that there are several factors:

1. A rather egalitarian society. Where everybody is seen as a human being and neither superhuman because of wealth nor subhuman because of poverty. What is interresting is that within Finland similar research shows that we Finland Swedes are generally happier and healthier and live several years longer than the Finns. We are known within the country for being even more egalitarian and more enterprizing than the Finns and for having even stronger social ties with friends and family and villagers.
2. A good bit of collectivism. Which manifests itself in single payer health care and decent public schools for all and a general mindset of "we will do it together".
3. Strong social ties with friends and family and neighbours and villagers.
4. Affordable homes and land in many parts of the country. Outside the three largest cities most young people can afford to get a home of their own in one way or another. Much of the land is owned by ordinary people.
5. A strong cultural identity. Different identities among Finns and Swedes and Sami though all of them strong. We know where we belong.
6. Realism. Few of us are dreamers and that hysterical forced optimism so common in for instance America is not our way of doing things. Moderate success is what most of us aim for and often acheive.

[John B]

We're only a few months into 2023, how do they know how happy we're going to be for the next 3/4.
Winter is coming.

[WszystekPoTrochu]

and that hysterical forced optimism so common in for instance America is not our way of doing things. Moderate success is what most of us aim for and often achieve.

THIS is so valuable. A few years back, psychologists around here popularised the term "the tyranny of optimism".
Kids are force fed the "you can do everything, you can be anyone, you can all be exceptional in whatever way you imagine.
Except the tiny detail: a statistical citizen is by very definition mediocre. No, surely no young impressionable mind should hear that!

You push whole generations into frustration and then wonder why happiness index goes down, even disregarding the whole horrors of social media and all other goodness that modern life wrought upon the innocent. At the same time, the economy gets slowly crippled by a shortage of blue collars, plus those who do get to wear blue collar often will do it reluctantly at best.

[john welsford]

We're only a few months into 2023, how do they know how happy we're going to be for the next 3/4.
Winter is coming.

Winter is coming? Yes sir, thats a good time to go sailing. Here in NZ anyway.

John Welsford

[David G]

THIS is so valuable. A few years back, psychologists around here popularised the term "the tyranny of optimism".
Kids are force fed the "you can do everything, you can be anyone, you can all be exceptional in whatever way you imagine.
Except the tiny detail: a statistical citizen is by very definition mediocre. No, surely no young impressionable mind should hear that!

You push whole generations into frustration and then wonder why happiness index goes down, even disregarding the whole horrors of social media and all other goodness that modern life wrought upon the innocent. At the same time, the economy gets slowly crippled by a shortage of blue collars, plus those who do get to wear blue collar often will do it reluctantly at best.

Yes. Just mindlessly repeating to every child, "You can be anything you want" is perverse.

And... there's value to the American Dream - that anyone , if they can parley enough smarts, creativity, hard work and perseverance, can create some sort of success or improvement in their lives... regardless of where on the socioeconomic spectrum one was born.

[john welsford]

THIS is so valuable. A few years back, psychologists around here popularised the term "the tyranny of optimism".
Kids are force fed the "you can do everything, you can be anyone, you can all be exceptional in whatever way you imagine.
Except the tiny detail: a statistical citizen is by very definition mediocre. No, surely no young impressionable mind should hear that!

You push whole generations into frustration and then wonder why happiness index goes down, even disregarding the whole horrors of social media and all other goodness that modern life wrought upon the innocent. At the same time, the economy gets slowly crippled by a shortage of blue collars, plus those who do get to wear blue collar often will do it reluctantly at best.

I don't recall at any time being interested in much more than "enough" when it came to a career, and I always seemed to be able to get "enough" together to be reasonably comfortable while doing things that interested me, and without too much stress. Thats a much happier thing than I've seen in many of the high flyers.

John Welsford

[JayInOz]

I always said that I never wanted to be rich, I just wanted to be able to pay the bills without anxiety. Being a farm worker wasn't the best choice in that regard When Christmas and car rego are the two things you dread most each year, you're struggling And after spending some time in America and observing the way ordinary working class people like me actually lived, while constantly being told that it was the greatest bestest freeest country on earth, I just wanted to kiss the ground when I arrived home in Australia where I belong. I'm sure the Americans I talked with believed what they were telling me-even though I doubt any of them could have found Australia on a map JayInOz

[David G]

Private opulence, public squalor: How the U.S. helps the rich and hurts the poor


https://www.npr.org/sections/health-...xM7wM2uoGOsfOM

More on why the U.S. didn't make the top 10, and is likely to slip further unless we reverse this trend.

[skuthorp]

I was going to post a thread about what I call the Brazillia disease. Where property is so expensive that the workforce needed to keep the place running cannot afford to live anywhere nearby, and indeed are discouraged from doing so by those wealthy property owners concerned about their property values. But here will do as well.

But then humans are like that.

[MushCreek]

I think that a strong cultural identity helps many small countries to be successful and happy. In the US, we have so many different cultures, with different expectations, work ethics, sense of entitlement, etc. I like the idea of sensible expectations, too. I was the black sheep of our family, not completing college, and going into a blue collar trade instead of pursuing a 'noble' profession. I'm very happy with what I have; in fact, it seems like an embarrassment of riches to me.

[Durnik]

U.S. didn't make the top 10. SOOOOO much potential wasted.

silly. capitalism doesn't want happy slaves.. it wants obedient, unquestioning, productive slaves. how else to explain the complete lack of vacation time in the u.s. for workers. otoh, capitalism sees finland et al as wasting _their_ potential.

[David G]

I was going to post a thread about what I call the Brazillia disease. Where property is so expensive that the workforce needed to keep the place running cannot afford to live anywhere nearby, and indeed are discouraged from doing so by those wealthy property owners concerned about their property values. But here will do as well.

But then humans are like that.

Here we have places like Aspen, CO. But every gentrified city has that same issue to some degree. Our family is not so poor that we're being forced into the far suburbs, but I do feel it. Because low-rent warehouse space for a low-margin industry like boatbuilding/woodworking has gotten mighty scarce. Some has been converted to trendy lofts. Some has switched to retail. Some to higher-margin industries, and a lot has been hugely bid up by a frenzy of commercial ganja growers looking to cash in on legal weed.

[David G]

silly. capitalism doesn't want happy slaves.. it wants obedient, unquestioning, productive slaves. how else to explain the complete lack of vacation time in the u.s. for workers. otoh, capitalism sees finland et al as wasting _their_ potential.

Sorta, kinda, a little bit. But WAY too oversimplified. There IS a segment of society that wants just that. But most don't. And even among corporations, there's a spectrum.

[LeeG]

Here's another perspective... suggesting that the study left out an important factor: expectations.

He says that low expectations are easily met, and Finns historically tend to have low expectations. Having lived in a largely Finnish town in Oregon, I can see that.

Do you know the term 'Sisu'? Hard term to define, but some say it is THE defining national trait. It means 'guts' and bravery and determination, and the ability to persevere and succeed far beyond what one would expect. Usually with dignity. Boats (including one of mine) get named Sisu for a reason.

And Sisu could easily be understood as a national reaction to the sort of gloomy low-expectations minset the author mentions.

So there's that...

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/...-VvvCvB11XMgoY

I did not know that. It’s also a kayak.

https://cdkayak.com/Kayaks.aspx?id=54

[LeeG]

“hysterical forced optimism”

musicals, what can I say

[David G]

I did not know that. It’s also a kayak.

https://cdkayak.com/Kayaks.aspx?id=54

It gets used a lot. Locally, there's even a gang of female painters named 'Sisu Painting'. I've heard they do good work, and are up for a challenge.

[WX]

[Too Little Time]

Kids are force fed the "you can do everything, you can be anyone, you can all be exceptional in whatever way you imagine.
Except the tiny detail: a statistical citizen is by very definition mediocre. No, surely no young impressionable mind should hear that!

Out of the 8 billion people in the world, I would regard most people in the US or the EU (or the UK) as being more than mediocre. It is difficult to see that since we are mostly more than mediocre.

I think that many people find out their true position a bit too late. Many do the minimum to get through school and later realize that was not enough to be what they wanted.


I am certainly not what I wanted to be, but I did have the opportunity to see many who were so much more than I was.

[JayInOz]

It gets used a lot. Locally, there's even a gang of female painters named 'Sisu Painting'. I've heard they do good work, and are up for a challenge.

Sisu is also a current movie - The promo- https://youtu.be/Dl8OIFXrD6o

[heimlaga]

I think the American unhappiness comes from he fact that there are gigantic gaps between ideology and percieved reality and reality.

They say that anyone has the same opportunities to become what they want through hard work and entrerprizingness. In reality the class divides are gigantic in your country. Rich and poor don't even live as neighbours in the same village and chat at the mailbox and help each others back and forth the way we do while not even thinking about who is milloneer and who is destitute. Many jobs in America are too badly paid to really keep the worker afloat so working your way up is difficult. The poor can often not afford health care when they get ill and even a basic education costs more money than working class people can afford.
How many congressmen in the last 50 years have started their lives born to homeless destitute parents? How many presidents in the last 50 years have come from a working class background? How many of the famous self made businessmen were really self made that is born to parents who couldn't contribute a penny neither to their education nor anything else?
Seen through binoculars from Swedish speaking Österbotten in Finland everything in America looks like an extreme class society. Though the Americans always proclaim that it isn't.
Being expected to succeed under condition where success is statistically speaking pretty much impossible leads to self loathing and so on........

The obsession with keeping up with the joneses doesn't improve things either. It channels too much time and resources into non productive activities only to keep up the facade. The woman I share bed and table with has grown up in a small town in Sweden where they kept up facades the same way as Americans seem to do. For fear of becoming outcast. For fear of dropping ot of eastablished society. They got surprisingly little productive work done in that town and mental illess and unhappiness was more normal than the opposite.

Just some thoughts. I may be wrong.

[David G]

[QUOTE]=heimlaga;6824031]I think the American unhappiness comes from he fact that there are gigantic gaps between ideology and percieved reality and reality.

They say that anyone has the same opportunities to become what they want through hard work and entrerprizingness. In reality the class divides are gigantic in your country. Rich and poor don't even live as neighbours in the same village and chat at the mailbox and help each others back and forth the way we do while not even thinking about who is milloneer and who is destitute. Many jobs in America are too badly paid to really keep the worker afloat so working your way up is difficult. The poor can often not afford health care when they get ill and even a basic education costs more money than working class people can afford.
How many congressmen in the last 50 years have started their lives born to homeless destitute parents? How many presidents in the last 50 years have come from a working class background? How many of the famous self made businessmen were really self made that is born to parents who couldn't contribute a penny neither to their education nor anything else?
Seen through binoculars from Swedish speaking Österbotten in Finland everything in America looks like an extreme class society. Though the Americans always proclaim that it isn't.
Being expected to succeed under condition where success is statistically speaking pretty much impossible leads to self loathing and so on........

The obsession with keeping up with the joneses doesn't improve things either. It channels too much time and resources into non productive activities only to keep up the facade. The woman I share bed and table with has grown up in a small town in Sweden where they kept up facades the same way as Americans seem to do. For fear of becoming outcast. For fear of dropping ot of eastablished society. They got surprisingly little productive work done in that town and mental illess and unhappiness was more normal than the opposite.[QUOTE]

************************************

You are right. We promote 'The American Dream'. The notion that one can - given sufficient hard work, brains, creativity, perseverance, etc. - make the socio-economic class of one's birth... irrelevant.

And, currently, we are doing a pizzpoor job of actualizing that ideal. Other times, we've done better. A few times, worse. And yes, I do suspect expectations play a role.

Economists even have a metric for measuring the degree to which such transitions are likely... the 'Gini Coefficioent --

The Gini coefficient measures the inequality among values of a frequency distribution, such as levels of income. A Gini coefficient of 0 reflects perfect equality, where all income or wealth values are the same, while a Gini coefficient of 1 (or 100%) reflects maximal inequality among values. For example, if everyone has the same income, the Gini coefficient will be 0. In contrast, a Gini coefficient of 1 indicates that within a group of people, a single individual has all the income or consumption, while all others have none.^[4][5]


The Gini coefficient was proposed by Corrado Gini as a measure of inequality of income or wealth.^[6] For OECD countries, in the late 20th century, considering the effect of taxes and transfer payments, the income Gini coefficient ranged between 0.24 and 0.49, with Slovenia being the lowest and Mexico the highest.^[7] African countries had the highest pre-tax Gini coefficients in 2008–2009, with South Africa having the world's highest, estimated to be 0.63 to 0.7,^[8][9] although this figure drops to 0.52 after social assistance is taken into account, and drops again to 0.47 after taxation.^[10] The global income Gini coefficient in 2005 has been estimated to be between 0.61 and 0.68 by various sources.^[11][12]


See the following for a chart of U.S. performance. It rose sharply in the 70's and has bounced around 0.4 ever since. And on a gentle upslope since 2016. Not as bad as some, but not close to living up to our much-vaunted ideal --

https://pip.worldbank.org/poverty-calculator?src=USA

[MushCreek]

I've always found it interesting that when I was a kid growing up, we had all sorts of people just on our street. My father was a salesman. We also had a lawyer, a dentist, a doctor, a sheet metal worker, a teacher, and a school janitor, all on the same street. The only noticeable difference I remember was that the lawyer had a nicer car. Things have changed a lot since then.

[Ted Hoppe]

The happiest countries have strong cultural and significant majority mono ethic base. They like new ideas but carefully weave them into their "superior" culture. If it undoubtedly weakens their own cultural and ethic understanding - it is rejected by most of the enthusiastic majority strata of the society based on a cultural identity. they believe assimilation into their culture is superior rather than allowing significantly change it. The greater the influences of different cultures - the less happy they are. by the metrics established by happiness - they can be seen as liberal on one hand and conservative, anti immigrant on the other. Once new immigrants and new cultures begin to appear and grow in their cultural cities, towns and villages causing change the less happy they are. Very few from happy areas like new arrivals who build on once open land, local farms and beautiful scenery. Only the ones doing the sell out; selling build find it enriching. The trade off and loss of identity of those from the region builds resentment. Which in turn becomes unhappiness. the great lie is the huge melting pot leads to overall happiness. It generally does not for those already living there. It is people who are selling the remaining resources to a burdened population promote. When change means less for most - it makes folks less happy.

I am reminded of how many great places there are to live. Many of you live in them. When folks come and build on your little piece of heaven, increasing density, rudeness, traffic and crime - your little piece of heaven is less happy. Add to that reductions in buying power and if your children can afford to make their homes like they grew up - you are going to get very resentful.

[Paul Pless]

the happiest countries in the world are wealthy

[Ted Hoppe]

the happiest countries in the world are wealthy

helps to have a strong national resource or be in a economic crossroad as well as have a higher intelligent, educated population. Once the disparities between rich and poor are obvious - less happy they are.

[Dan McCosh]

The US is a happy country. It's the people who are grumpy.

[ERGR]

Six countries of the top eight in the happiness ranking have the Swedish CV90 combat vehicle. OK, you can obviously be happy without it, but why take the risk?
/Erik