Molly Young, My Miserable Week in the ‘Happiest Country on Earth,’ NYTimes Magazine, May 2, 2025. The article opens:
“Coming to Helsinki in February is an objectively weird choice,” said a man named Mikko Tirronen. “During this time, we don’t have …” he paused. “… colors.”
I was sitting in a coffee shop with Tirronen, a web developer and writer, after flying to Helsinki to think about happiness. For eight years running, Finland has been rated the happiest country in the world by a peculiar United Nations-backed project called the World Happiness Report, started in 2012. Soon after Finland shot to the top of the list, its government set up a “happiness tourism” initiative, which now offers itineraries highlighting the cultural elements that ostensibly contribute to its status: foraging, fresh air, trees, lakes, sustainably produced meals and, perhaps above all else, saunas.
After a bit of this and that:
There are obvious problems with measuring happiness. Despite thousands of years of inquiry, nobody (from Confucius to Aristotle to Jeremy Bentham to Richard Easterlin to Oprah Winfrey) can agree on what happiness is: Is it a quantum of pleasure? The absence of pain? A perception of purpose, hope, community? How does it relate to health or wealth or income? Is happiness a mood? A neurotransmitter?
Yep! Here's what we can do:
Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. 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. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?
That's called the Cantril Ladder, after its inventor, Dr. Hadley Cantril.
Every year, representatives from Gallup contact approximately 1,000 people per country, either by phone or face to face, and ask them to identify their location on the ladder. The authors of the World Happiness Report then take those answers and combine them with the answers from the previous two years, for a sample size of around 3,000 people.
Nordic countries consistently dominate the top of the list. Finland has its well-publicized eight-year streak of happiness supremacy. Denmark, Iceland, Sweden and Norway are reliably in the Top 10. The most miserable countries tend, not surprisingly, to be those stricken with poverty, conflict, corruption and human rights violations: Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Yemen, Haiti. Between these two poles, you can see the shifting fates of nations. Poland and Portugal, for example, have each ascended nearly one full ladder rung since the survey began. The United States peaked at No. 11 in the year 2012 and has tumbled since then.
In mid-March, the 2025 World Happiness Report was released. It was the longest one to date, a 260-page PDF bursting with data. The United States had dropped one spot since the previous year, to 24th place. Finland sustained its winning streak.
Now things get interesting:
Would you have guessed, for example, that Italy (No. 40) is apparently less happy than El Salvador (No. 37)? Or that Saudi Arabia (No. 32) is happier than France (No. 33)? Or that Israel is in the Top 10? Or that Bhutan, the country whose own Gross National Happiness Index gave rise to the report, has been absent from the list since 2019, when it limped in at No. 95?
And then there are the raw figures. Each country is ranked according to a score derived from the Cantril Ladder responses. Finland’s current score is 7.736, while the United States measures 6.724, about a ladder rung lower. If you look at it another way, Americans are 87 percent as happy as Finns. That’s not bad. What seems to bother American readers about the report is that it’s a game we’re not winning — indeed, it’s a game we’re losing to our closest neighbors, Mexico (No. 10) and Canada (No. 18). Year after year the PDFs track our downward trajectory, past Lithuania and Slovenia and the United Arab Emirates.
Alas, "MAHA" has already been dragooned into service by Robert Kennedy in Trump administration, where it means Make America Healthy Again. But, really, what are the chance the 4 7& Co. will Make American Happy Again? Zilch.
After telling us all about those Finnish saunas we get this:
The first World Happiness Report, summarizing the state of its research, drew a distinction between two concepts: “affective happiness” and “evaluative happiness.” Affective happiness captures emotions, immediate responses to events, whether we are experiencing joy or sadness at one moment or another. Evaluative happiness is a more contemplative or systemic matter, mapping a person’s overall appraisal of life and whether they are satisfied with theirs. Affective happiness is the realm of laughter, fun, picnics, parties, sex. Evaluative happiness is tied to good health, sufficient income, social cohesion, safety.
A crude synonym for evaluative happiness — and so much of this research flounders on the crudeness of synonyms! — would be “contentment.” That is what the Cantril Ladder measures, and it should surprise no one that the Nordic countries, with their long life expectancies, highly redistributive tax regimens, functional governance, low corruption and shared norms land at the top of the charts. The type of happiness that tourists go to Finland to find isn’t even the sort of happiness the country is accused of possessing.
A second area of confusion is that the two concepts of happiness, affective and evaluative, can operate independent of each other. A woman in the midst of extruding a baby might suffer from labor pains (low affective happiness) but feel profoundly satisfied or purposeful (high evaluative happiness). The “happiest country in the world” label seems to imprint on the American mind as a never-ending carousel of delights, but in Finland’s February chill, the reality is more modest.
There's more at the link. You might want to compare with this post: Where are people happiest and how do we know? For that matter, what's happiness? [#HumanProgress].
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