Happiness and war in the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Sinikka Parviainen, William Pyle, Measuring Rally Effects Under Authoritarianism: Evidence from Russiaʼs War in Ukraine, Munich Society for the Promotion of Economic Research - CESifo GmbH, August 2026.

Abstract: Measuring politically sensitive attitudes in authoritarian settings is difficult because ex- pressions of political support may reflect repression and social pressure as much as genuine belief. We propose a complementary approach: using responses to questions that are not themselves politically sensitive to provide indirect evidence about politically sensitive attitudes. Using subjective well-being (SWB), we ask whether within-person changes in life satisfaction, after accounting for changes in material and personal circumstances, can provide evidence of incorporation into a wartime national project. Drawing on more than a decade of panel data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (2013–2024), we find that life satisfaction rises significantly following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Gains are initially larger among ethnic Russians and smaller in Moscow and St. Petersburg, consistently larger in military-industrial regions, and sharply lower among those nearest the front. This theoretically patterned heterogeneity is difficult to reconcile with generalized social-desirability bias and is consistent with differentiated wartime incorporation. By 2024, rising non-response and attenuating subgroup differences suggest that the informational value of SWB may deteriorate over time.

From the Introduction:

How can politically sensitive attitudes be measured when citizens believe they cannot safely reveal them? The problem is particularly acute in authoritarian regimes, where repression, self-censorship, and social pressure complicate the interpretation of survey responses. It becomes even more difficult during war, when expressions of support for the state may reflect social expectations of patriotic solidarity and strategic conformity as much as genuine belief. Under these conditions, conventional survey measures of support for political leaders or government policy provide an uncertain guide to underlying attitudes.

Existing efforts to address this problem have focused largely on improving the measure- ment of politically sensitive attitudes themselves. Indirect questioning techniques, including list and endorsement experiments, seek to make truthful responses less risky (Bullock, Imai, and Shapiro 2011; Blair and Imai 2012). These methods have substantially advanced the study of authoritarian public opinion, but they continue to measure politically sensitive attitudes through survey items whose purpose is to recover those attitudes. We take a different approach, asking whether responses to questions that are not themselves politically sensitive can sometimes provide indirect evidence about politically sensitive attitudes.

The intuition is that politically sensitive attitudes may manifest themselves in ways that extend beyond explicit political expression. They may shape how individuals experience and evaluate their lives, producing psychological outcomes that respondents have little reason to perceive as political. If these downstream consequences are less susceptible to strategic misrepresentation than direct expressions of political support, they may provide complementary evidence about those attitudes. We test this idea using subjective well-being (SWB).

Wartime rally effects provide a particularly demanding setting in which to evaluate this argument. Existing work typically identifies such effects through increases in support for political leaders or governments, despite longstanding concerns that these measures are espe- cially vulnerable to social desirability pressures in authoritarian settings (Hale 2022; Kizilova and Norris 2024). Because questions about life satisfaction do not ask respondents to evaluate political leaders or government policy directly, they may be less vulnerable to the strategic distortions that complicate the interpretation of conventional approval measures. At the same time, life satisfaction may respond to the same feelings of collective purpose and national sol- idarity that underlie genuine rally effects. We therefore ask whether SWB, after accounting for its material and personal determinants, can serve as an indirect indicator of incorporation into a wartime national project.

H/t Tyler Cowen .

What can we learn from Nordic happiness?

Nicholas Kristof, What We Should Learn From Nordic Happiness, NYTimes, July 4, 2026.

You want security, health care and the American dream? Look to Scandinavia.

“We actually live the American dream,” Jens Stoltenberg, a former prime minister of Norway who is now the finance minister, told me. “The American dream, it’s more reality in the Nordic countries than in America.” Image

Skeptics have argued that generous welfare benefits and the resulting high taxes have held back the Nordic economies. Perhaps a bit. “Farewell, Nordic model,” The Economist wrote in 2006. But Norway is now richer than the United States per capita, and Norwegian workers are more productive than American workers, with higher output per hour. Scandinavians live longer than Americans, and people are happier. The five Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden — all rank among the six happiest countries in the world in the World Happiness Report, based on Gallup polling.

Yet the Nordic countries are themselves facing significant challenges, including fiscal pressures, immigration, widening inequality and perhaps some breakdown in the social consensus. Some doubt whether the model can survive here, let alone be exported to countries that are larger, less homogeneous and more suspicious of taxation.

On the other hand, it’s not an alien model but, for Americans, a path we once blazed. Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, told me that the United States and Scandinavian nations pursued similar policies from the 1940s through the 1960s. That was the period when the United States rapidly expanded educational opportunities, had strong unions and, in the 1940s, experimented with universal child care. The post-World War II period is sometimes thought of as a golden age, for the economic pie both grew and was sliced more equally.

“The U.S. in the mid-20th century was sort of like Scandinavia today,” Katz said. But America changed course in the 1970s and eventually embraced the Reagan revolution.

One reason for the retreat, I’ve argued, was racialized political rhetoric that characterized some safety-net programs and investments in opportunity — used by Americans from all walks of life — as handouts primarily benefiting Black people, with a particular emphasis on caricatures of the “welfare queen.”

Three misunderstandings:

When Americans discuss the Nordic system, they sometimes suffer from three misunderstandings.

The first is that these are socialist countries. While they are often run by social democrats, they have market economies. Sweden did experiment in the 1970s and ’80s with quasi-socialist policies, but the upshot was an economic crisis. As Johan Norberg, a Swedish writer, put it: “We have been socialists and we’ve been successful — but never at the same time.”

The second misunderstanding is that because of their strong welfare systems, citizens of Nordic countries lie around while collecting benefits. Sure, some people do manipulate the system, but the labor force participation rate is higher in Nordic countries than in the United States.

The third is that in the case of Norway, its success is mostly a reflection of its oil wealth. Oil has given Norway a nice cushion, but the country has also managed the cushion unusually well — putting it in what is one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. Moreover, according to Geir Axelsen, the director-general of Statistics Norway, the increase in female labor force participation in Norway since the early 1970s appears to have added roughly as much to the country’s gross domestic product as oil has.

How it came about:

To understand how the Nordic socioeconomic system evolved, I dropped by the office of Kalle Moene, an economist at the University of Oslo. The system began in the 1930s, he said, when workers in thriving sectors of the economy agreed to hold down their wage demands to support sectors that were struggling.

That principle — sacrificing to help those not doing so well — still underpins the region’s business model. Norwegians who are better off are willing to give up some income to ensure that people in blue-collar jobs get by.

Moene argues that this wage compression promotes innovation and dynamism by boosting the profitability of growth industries and by lowering profits in lagging industries.

There's more at the link.

The Happiness Crash of 2020

Peltzman, Sam, The Happiness Crash of 2020 (March 13, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6465460

I document a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population. It occurred during 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic, and mainly persists through 2024. This happiness crash spread across nearly all typical demographics and geographies. The happiest groups pre-Covid (e.g., whites, high income, well-educated and politically/ideologically right-leaning) tend to show the largest happiness reductions. The glaring exception is marital status, which has consistently been an important marker for happiness. The already wide happiness premium for marriage has, if anything, become slightly wider. With both married and unmarried reporting large declines in happiness the country has become segregated: slightly over half-the married adults-remain happy on balance; the unmarried, nearly half, are now distinctly unhappy. I also show that across a number of aspects of personal and social capital post-Covid deterioration is the norm, including a collapse of belief in the fairness of others and of trust in the US Supreme Court.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

AI and Human Happiness

Tyler Cowen interviews Arthur Brooks:

Arthur Brooks reckons he’s on the fourth leg of a spiral-shaped career: French horn player, economist, president of the American Enterprise Institute, and now Harvard professor and evangelist for the science of happiness. His new book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, argues that happiness isn’t a feeling but a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning — the macronutrients of happiness, he calls them — and that most of us are gorging on the wrong ones. Tyler, naturally, wants to know: what’s the marginal value of a book on happiness, and what does spiral number five look like?

Along the way, Tyler and Arthur cover how scarcity makes savoring possible and why knowing you’ll die young sharpens the mind, what twin studies tell us about the genetics of well-being and why that’s not actually depressing, the four habits of the genuinely happy, the placebo theory of happiness books, curiosity as an evolved positive emotion, the optimal degree of self-deception, why Arthur chose Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy, what the research says about accepting death, how he became an economist via correspondence school, AI’s effect on think tanks, the future of classical music, whether Trumpism or Reaganism is the equilibrium state of American conservatism, whether his views on immigration have changed, what he and Oprah actually agree on, which president from his lifetime he most admires, Barcelona versus Madrid, what 60-year-olds are especially good at, why he’s reading Josef Pieper, how he’ll face death, and much more.

The AI and happiness segment from all that is below the asterisks. And I've added a coda about AI and asking the right question. Oh, and the sharp right-brain/left-brain stuff seems a bit old. 

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COWEN: How will artificial intelligence influence politics and the political spectrum? Easy question, right?

BROOKS: It’s a good question. I agree. One of the questions I get mostly, as you can imagine, because of my work, is how is it going to affect happiness? I’ve been thinking about it an awful lot. We discussed a minute ago the hemispheric lateralization theory of Iain McGilchrist, that the right side of the brain is the mystery and meaning and why questions of life, and the left hemisphere of the brain largely adjudicates the what and how to and engineering and technological questions of life. The problem is that in modern society, we’ve been kicking everybody into the left hemisphere of the brain and walling off the right hemisphere because people spend all day on their screens, and the hustle and grind-engineered Silicon Valley culture that we live in has actually eliminated a lot of the mystery and meaning from life and the incentive to actually ask those questions.

That’s a lot of what my new book is about, is how to get back to the right side of your brain, as a matter of fact. Now, AI is a magnificent extension of the left hemisphere of your brain. It’s a how-to and what engine, but it’s not a why engine. Any real why question that matters, you can’t put into ChatGPT and get something meaningful to you to say, “Why am I alive? For what would I be willing to give my life?” You put that into ChatGPT, it’ll start by buttering you up and telling you what a smart question it is, and then it’ll tell you how five different people have answered that question, and you’re left completely unsatisfied as a result of that.

The answer to the basic happiness question, which is an adjunct, which is next to the political questions, I think, is that if you use it for left brain things to free up your time and then go over to the right brain side of your life with your love and your faith and your relationships and beauty and suffering, then your life’s going to get better. It’s a very real possibility, Tyler, that this is what’s going to happen in economics and politics today.

If we went back 150 years or a little bit more, people would say, “Oh, the Industrial Revolution is going to permanently ruin society because it’s urbanizing and people don’t know each other and the traditional folkways are going away.” It had some rough transitions, to be sure, by bringing in market economics and division of labor and specialization, et cetera. The end of the day was a middle class and the weekend. That’s not the fruit of labor unions. That’s the fruit of the Industrial Revolution and the amazing largesse that it created through capitalism.

COWEN: That took a long time, right? This may be 70 years at the interim. What’s our interim going to look like? Will it be more nostalgia and more small-C conservatism?

BROOKS: Yes. I think it will be. I think this will be speeded up. I think within 20 years that we will have something like the post-industrial equivalent of the fruit that was wrought by the Industrial Revolution, that that’s what we’ll see from what’s going on today.

COWEN: Do you think the classical liberal view on AI should be that we don’t much regulate it or that we regulate it like a national security object, the way we might regulate atomic bombs?

BROOKS: I don’t know. I’m wrestling with that, and I don’t know the answer. Can you give me your opinion, please? Otherwise, I’m going to have to just go to your blog and look at it and form my own opinion on the basis of that.

COWEN: I think for now, we don’t know how to regulate it, and it’s changing more quickly than Congress can act intelligently. Maybe Congress cannot, at the moment, act intelligently at all. I’ll say hold off, but leave open the option because we might need to in some important ways.

* * * * *

COWEN: How long from now do you think it will be before an AI model with good prompting will write a better policy study than, say, the 70th percentile quality study from a good think tank?

BROOKS: That’s a good question. I think AI at not-too-distant future, will do a better job at executing policy analysis, but will do a very poor job at asking the right policy questions. I think that that’s going to be the comparative advantage, is the creativity and the human impulse, the curiosity that humans actually bring to it. The reason is because all large language models are being trained to what people have already done, ideas that people have already had.

What we’re incredibly good at using the right hemisphere, the why hemisphere of our brain, is asking new why questions, which actually leads us to the creativity that we’ll ask the best policy questions going forward. That’s what we’re going to have to specialize in—you, me, and everybody else in the space.

Bhutan’s concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH)

In July 2008 the Kingdom of Bhutan adopted  new constitution. This constitution made Gross National Happiness (GNH) the guiding philosophy and instituted an index for measuring GNH. I just had a discussion about this with ChatGPT, a discussion which included the use of digital technology for helping with the assessment. 

This obviously resonates with ideas I've been exploring with the book I am developing: Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution. Relevant tags: Arena_4, Homo_ludens, and  Kisangani2150.

* * * * *

Gross National Happiness

And then we have Bhutan, which has made Gross National Pleasure as it's measure of success.

Yes—Bhutan’s concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) is one of the most radical and illuminating gestures in the modern political world. And while the word is “happiness,” its philosophical grounding overlaps richly with what we’ve been discussing: pleasure not as luxury, but as meaningful, integrated well-being.

Bhutan

Let’s briefly place Bhutan in this framework:

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🇧🇹 Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness: A Civilizational Reframe

In 1972, Bhutan’s King Jigme Singye Wangchuck famously declared:

“Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.”

This wasn’t a slogan—it was the beginning of an alternative developmental philosophy grounded in Buddhist ethics, specifically the Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna traditions. GNH is not about fleeting enjoyment—it’s about cultivating the conditions for a flourishing life, individually and collectively.

GNH is built around four pillars:

1.     Sustainable and equitable socio-economic development

2.     Environmental conservation

3.     Preservation and promotion of culture

4.     Good governance

These are evaluated through nine domains, including:

·       Psychological well-being

·       Health

·       Time use

·       Community vitality

·       Ecological diversity

So while the term is happiness, its moral and spiritual structure evokes a Buddhist-Tantric understanding of harmony, presence, and balance—not endless pleasure, but the absence of inner conflict and outer disintegration.

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🪷 GNH as a Model for Pleasure-Rooted Ethics

In the context of your work, Bhutan offers a real-world example of policy grounded in consciousness. It suggests:

·       Pleasure, joy, and inner harmony can be public values, not just private pursuits.

·       Well-being is not reducible to income or productivity.

·       Cultural and spiritual life matter—ritual, rhythm, beauty, connectedness.

And this reframes pleasure not as hedonism, but as ecological coherence—where internal energy flow matches external structure.

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How Bhutan evaluates happiness

 

Tell me more about how Bhutan evaluates happiness.

Certainly. Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) is not just a slogan—it’s a structured, multi-dimensional framework for national policy and measurement, rooted in Buddhist principles and an ethos of holistic well-being. It challenges the economic model of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by asserting that development must serve the happiness and well-being of people, not just their material wealth.

Here’s how Bhutan actually evaluates happiness:

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🧭 The GNH Framework: Overview

Bhutan's GNH is organized around 4 pillars, expanded into 9 domains, and measured by over 130 indicators. It is both philosophical and quantitative, designed to assess whether development aligns with inner and outer well-being.

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🌳 Four Pillars of GNH

1.     Sustainable and equitable socio-economic development

2.     Environmental conservation

3.     Preservation and promotion of culture

4.     Good governance

These pillars guide national policy, education, infrastructure, and law. They're not just values—they’re implementation targets.

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🌸 Nine Domains of Happiness

Each domain reflects one dimension of holistic well-being, based on Buddhist principles but articulated in secular terms:

Domain	Description
1. Psychological well-being	Measures emotions, spirituality, life satisfaction, and meaning in life.
2. Health	Physical health, nutrition, and mental wellness.
3. Education	Formal education, skills, and knowledge.
4. Time use	Balance between work, leisure, sleep—emphasizing time poverty.
5. Cultural diversity and resilience	Celebration and continuity of Bhutanese traditions, languages, and rituals.
6. Good governance	Perceptions of government effectiveness, participation, and transparency.
7. Community vitality	Trust, belonging, safety, and relationships within communities.
8. Ecological diversity and resilience	Environmental stewardship, access to nature, sustainability.
9. Living standards	Material well-being, income, housing, and security—but not overemphasized.

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📊 How It’s Measured

The Centre for Bhutan Studies and GNH Research conducts detailed GNH surveys across the country every few years.

·       The surveys use Likert scales (e.g., from “very satisfied” to “very dissatisfied”) to assess subjective well-being.

·       Objective data is also used (e.g., health records, income, education level).

·       Each person is scored on their achievements across the nine domains.

Importantly:

·       A person doesn’t have to “score high” in every domain to be considered happy.

·       Bhutan uses a sufficiency approach: the focus is on whether people meet basic thresholds in a majority of domains.

This allows for individual and cultural variation in what happiness means.

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🔄 Use in Policy

Unlike most countries, Bhutan uses GNH indicators to guide public policy:

·       A GNH policy screening tool is applied to proposed laws and projects.

·       If a highway, factory, or education reform doesn’t support GNH values, it may be revised or rejected.

·       Examples: emphasis on organic farming, slow tourism, protection of sacred sites, and environmental laws embedded in the constitution.

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🧘 Underlying Philosophy

Though GNH appears secular in structure, it is deeply shaped by Buddhist ethics, especially:

·       The goal of reducing suffering and promoting compassion.

·       The belief that external conditions must support internal development.

·       An emphasis on interdependence, impermanence, and non-material contentment.

In other words, happiness isn’t a product—it’s a condition of harmony.

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📍 Summary: Bhutan’s Happiness Evaluation Model

·       Goes beyond GDP to ask: Are people flourishing in body, mind, culture, and community?

·       Recognizes that subjective well-being matters—but it must be grounded in ethical and ecological context.

·       Offers a model of development with conscience, where pleasure, meaning, and belonging are not sidelined, but centered.

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Would you like to see how this model might apply (or be adapted) to other cultural contexts—such as Western nations or digital environments?

I’m interested in digital environments.

That’s a timely and visionary direction—rethinking pleasure and well-being in digital environments using a framework like Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness is exactly the kind of reframing our cultural moment needs. As more of life migrates into digital space, the question becomes:

Can the digital realm be designed not just for engagement, but for flourishing?

Let’s build on Bhutan’s model and begin mapping how its domains and philosophy might guide digital design, platforms, and cultures that prioritize well-being over addiction, connection over consumption, and flow over friction.

Why Bhutan is Building the Anti-Dubai [a city built for mindfulness]

Cultivate joy. It's good for your health.

Catherine Pearson, 3 Ways to Cultivate Joy, NYTimes, May 9, 2025. Person opens by talking about co-hosting the “first-ever Well Festival in Brooklyn, which brought together some of the biggest names in health for a day of conversations.” Sounds like the Grey Lady is getting with the Homo Ludens program.

Here are three of my favorite joy-boosting tips that the panelists shared.

1. Reach out to your people.

Want to live a longer, happier life? Tend to your relationships, said Dr. Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who oversees the longest-running study of human happiness. That study has found that strong relationships are one of the biggest factors in people’s well-being as they age. [...]

2. Embrace joyful movement.

Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University, was in a remedial physical education class as a kid. So it’s surprising, she explained, that she has built a career around joyful movement. [...]

3. Live every day like it’s your first.

Suleika Jaouad, the memoirist and author of a new best seller, “The Book of Alchemy,” was diagnosed with leukemia in her 20s. Last summer, she had a recurrence, and the advice a lot of people offered was to live each day like it was her last. But every time she heard that sentence, she felt an “intense sense of panic,” Jaouad said.

There’s more at the link.

Two kinds of happiness, “affective” and “effective” [First World Happiness Report]

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].

Where are people happiest and how do we know? For that matter, what's happiness? [#HumanProgress]

Byron Johnson, Tyler J. VanderWeele and Brendan Case, The Happiest Country in the World Isn’t What You Think, NYTimes, April 30, 2025.

The three of us conceive of happiness — or flourishing — more broadly: as a state of affairs in which all aspects of your life are relatively good, including the social environments in which you live. If we were to examine not just life evaluation but also relationships with family members and friends, community and political participation, health, prevailing emotions, a sense of life’s purpose, feelings of financial security and so on, we could better understand what it means to live a good life and how governments and international institutions can help make people happier.

On Wednesday, we are publishing a substantial body of research — dozens of academic papers, including a high-level overview of the results in the journal Nature Mental Health — based on the first year of data from our Global Flourishing Study, a five-year project that poses more than 100 questions to more than 200,000 people across 22 countries on six continents. Combining answers to questions regarding several domains of well-being — health, happiness, meaning, character, social relationships and material prosperity — we calculated a composite flourishing score for each country.

Our findings present a different picture of global well-being. As expected, Sweden, for example, had high scores for life evaluation, behind only Israel, another typical standout in the World Happiness Report. When we widened the aperture, however, the picture changed: Sweden had only the 13th-highest composite flourishing score, essentially tied with the United States, and considerably lower than Indonesia, the Philippines and even Nigeria, whose 2023 gross domestic product per capita was just under 2 percent of America’s.

Across the whole sample of 22 countries, the overall national composite flourishing actually decreased slightly as G.D.P. per capita rose. The only high-income countries that ranked in the top half of composite flourishing were Israel and Poland. Most of the developed countries in the study reported less meaning, fewer and less satisfying relationships and communities, and fewer positive emotions than did their poorer counterparts. Most of the countries that reported high overall composite flourishing may not have been rich in economic terms, but they tended to be rich in friendships, marriages and community involvement — especially involvement in religious communities.

And, frankly, that's the kind of world I want to live in. If you want to talk about human progress, moving toward that kind of world – "rich in friendships, marriages and community involvement" – THAT's progress. We need two things from AI: 1) economic prosperity for all, and 2) flourishing all around. How are we going to pull that off? I suppose that's what my book, Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising, is going to be about.

Back to the article:

Japan, where only 3 percent of the participants reported attending religious services at least weekly, had the lowest reported composite flourishing as well as the lowest scores in many individual facets of flourishing, such as a sense of life’s meaning and social relationships. Indonesia, by contrast, where 75 percent of the participants reported attending religious services at least weekly, had the highest scores both for composite flourishing and for many individual facets of flourishing.

Indonesia is often contrasted unfavorably with Japan in discussions of international development, cited as an example of the so-called middle-income trap, in which economic growth stalls before reaching high-income levels. This is true, so far as it goes, but our study suggests that the focus on economic growth tells only part of the story.

To be clear: Being poor is not desirable, and we should strive to improve material conditions. But our research, though in its early stages, should prompt people to wonder whether prioritizing economic growth and material prosperity above all else has imposed costs on developed nations — and whether doing so is likely to impose these costs on the developing economies that follow the path of Europe and its colonial offshoots.

Here's the abstract for their flourishing study:

Tyler J. VanderWeele, Byron R. Johnson, and Piotr T. Bialowolski et al., The Global Flourishing Study: Study Profile and Initial Results on Flourishing, Nature Mental Health, April 30, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-025-00423-5.

Abstract: The Global Flourishing Study is a longitudinal panel study of over 200,000 participants in 22 geographically and culturally diverse countries, spanning all six populated continents, with nationally representative sampling and intended annual survey data collection for 5 years to assess numerous aspects of flourishing and its possible determinants. The study is intended to expand our knowledge of the distribution and determinants of flourishing around the world. Relations between a composite flourishing index and numerous demographic characteristics are reported. Participants were also surveyed about their childhood experiences, which were analyzed to determine their associations with subsequent adult flourishing. Analyses are presented both across and within countries, and discussion is given as to how the demographic and childhood relationships vary by country and which patterns appear to be universal versus culturally specific. Brief comment is also given on the results of a whole series of papers in the Global Flourishing Study Special Collection, employing similar analyses, but with more-specific aspects of well-being. The Global Flourishing Study expands our knowledge of the distribution and determinants of well-being and provides foundational knowledge for the promotion of societal flourishing.

What do people enjoy?

Fascinating graph showing how much people report enjoying different activities. Much of it backs up common sense but here's what jumped out to me:

1. 'Computer games' are among the most enjoyable, probably deserve more respect. Clearly beat 'watching TV'.

2. 'Play with child'… pic.twitter.com/CCQVpKpGhw

— Rob Wiblin (@robertwiblin) July 1, 2024

A long-term study of human development, 85 years of the same population [Happiness]

There's a ton of references at the YouTube site.

The overall finding is that healthy relationships with others is the single most important determinate of happiness. What does that imply about living in a world of "intelligent" machines? I hear and read people wondering, What will we do when machines are smarter than any of us? Setting aside the fact that I don't (really/quite) know what that means, perhaps that worry is misplaced. Perhaps we should be thinking about guiding the development and deployment of AI in directions that allow us to develop more fruitful relationships with others.

Back in my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins I took a half-dozen or so courses from Richard Macksey. He always had one of more guest lecturers in his classes. One of these guests was an Episcopal priest named Ralph Harper. I forget just what he brought Harper in to talk about, but it may have been mysticism, which is certainly one of the things I thought a great deal about in those days (still do). I remember Macksey recommending a book that Harper had written. I forget the title, but it might have been Human love: Existential and mystical. In fact, I'm sure that's the book, which I got (and is now in storage somewhere in suburban New Jersey). In there Harper said something to the effect that the answer to the question, What is the meaning of life? is not some kind or proposition or statement. It is something we can do. What can we do?

Love? Cultivate our relationships? If so, isn't that orthogonal to this strange and wonderful technology we're now developing?

Claudia Goldin on tenure, happiness, and other matters

Claudian Goldin is an economics historian who just won a Nobel. Tyler Cowen had a conversation with her back in 2021. I’ve picked out a few bits that particularly interested me, but there’s much more to the conversation.

Tenure

Following a long and interesting general discussion of the pay gap between men and women they focused on the position of female academics in economics. And that led to some remarks on tenure.

COWEN: How is the gender ratio for tenured economics professors evolving?

GOLDIN: CSWEP, that is, the American Economic Association Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, puts together those data, and they are creeping upward, as one would think they would. Now, in some very interesting work, we can see that they are — I said the words “creeping up.” They’re not bounding up.

The reason that they’re not bounding up at first we thought was a pipeline issue, but now it’s pretty clear that it’s less the pipeline issue. While it was there and still is there, there’s also an issue with the fact that women — more than men — will leave academia and use their economic skills extremely well but outside the tenure track.

COWEN: Should we either abolish tenure or fundamentally change it so as not to penalize women, but also for other reasons? It seems grossly unfair.

GOLDIN: Yes, I certainly wouldn’t do it because it’s a penalty for one group or another. It is an issue that arose. It solved potentially an issue from some time ago. I don’t know if the fundamentals are the same that would support it. It is clearly a difficult problem in the sense that individuals have higher productivity when they’re young and then lower productivity. I think that having long-term contracts is useful for individuals in fields where they’re so good.

If we think about sports, clearly those people just clean up at the beginning, and then they become used-car salesmen or whatever they become. So the question is, do we have a completely changed academic environment in which the superstars clean up at some point and then they go into something else? I don’t think that that would work either.

I think that a very important thing to think about is that we produce a large number of products. We produce knowledge, and that’s really the hardest thing to figure out how to do, but we produce the dissemination of knowledge and teaching. And people who are older probably do that better, and that is not generally what tenure is given for.

Happiness

That led immediately to these remarks on happiness:

COWEN: I’m sure you know the [Betsey] Stevenson and [Justin] Wolfers paper, 2009. Why haven’t American women gained more in happiness?

GOLDIN: [laughs] See, I’m not a great fan of that. I remember Betsey was interviewed on Mother’s Day one year. She was a new mother. The person interviewing her said, “Your work shows that mothers are less happy than they had been before they became mothers.” The person said, “That was a great question for Mother’s Day.” Betsey was stuck, and she said, “Well, yes, but they would never give up their baby.” I think that for me, as an economist, that says it all. There’s some problem.

COWEN: So, you think it’s not true that American women are less happy than they had been? I’m not sure what your stance is.

GOLDIN: My stance is that I’m not happy with the happiness measures.

COWEN: Do you think there’s something else they’re not picking up?

GOLDIN: Yes.

COWEN: That’s an ordinal-choice thing rather than stress in the moment?

GOLDIN: Yes.

COWEN: And that if people are choosing something out of a greater set of opportunities, they probably are happier?

GOLDIN: That’s right. It’s very hard to do that in general. Sometimes we rile up a group and get them to remember the things that they’re less happy about, and sometimes we show them where their lives are safe and secure and wonderful and plentiful, and then they get happier.

I remember when Dick Easterlin first began the happiness literature. I remember very, very well — it was a very long time ago — having dinner with him in Madison, Wisconsin, and talking about it. I was enthralled with trying to understand this happiness literature.

That was across countries, and it seemed interesting, from my Chicago theory point of view, that people recenter their happiness. You can be in a place in which, if you were plunked down there from somewhere else, you’d be miserable, and yet, you’re there, and you recalibrate yourself, just like people recalibrate themselves when they have a bad health event. It takes a while. I’m not certain what to do with the happiness literature.

This business of recalibration made me think of Miriam Yevick, who set out to be a research mathematician but ended up teaching remedial math to adults. She seemed quite happy with that. In my recent 3 Quarks Daily essay about Yevick I remarked that that seemed like Goethe’s Faust, “who sought the secrets of the universe in his youth [...] but ended up reclaiming land from the sea in old age.”

There’s much more in the interview.

Contentment and the happiness of Finns

Penelope Colston, The Finnish Secret to Happiness? Knowing When You Have Enough. NYTimes, April 1, 2023.

Ms. Hansen was one of more than a dozen Finns we spoke to — including a Zimbabwean immigrant, a folk metal violinist, a former Olympian and a retired dairy farmer — about what, supposedly, makes Finland so happy. Our subjects ranged in age from 13 to 88 and represented a variety of genders, sexual orientations, ethnic backgrounds and professions. They came from Kokkola as well as the capital, Helsinki; Turku, a city on the southwestern coast; and three villages in southern, eastern and western Finland.

While people praised Finland’s strong social safety net and spoke glowingly of the psychological benefits of nature and the personal joys of sports or music, they also talked about guilt, anxiety and loneliness. Rather than “happy,” they were more likely to characterize Finns as “quite gloomy,” “a little moody” or not given to unnecessary smiling.

Many also shared concerns about threats to their way of life, including possible gains by a far-right party in the country’s elections, the war in Ukraine and a tense relationship with Russia, which could worsen now that Finland is set to join NATO.

It turns out even the happiest people in the world aren’t that happy. But they are something more like content.

Finns derive satisfaction from leading sustainable lives and perceive financial success as being able to identify and meet basic needs, Arto O. Salonen, a professor at the University of Eastern Finland who has researched well-being in Finnish society, explained. “In other words,” he wrote in an email, “when you know what is enough, you are happy.”

But...

Frank Martela, a psychology researcher at Aalto University, agreed with Ms. Paasimaki’s assessment. “The fact that Finland has been ‘the happiest country on earth’ for six years in a row could start building pressure on people,” he wrote in an email. “If we Finns are all so happy, why am I not happy?”

He continued, “In that sense, dropping to be the second-happiest country could be good for the long-term happiness of Finland.”

The Finnish way of life is summed up in “sisu,” a trait said to be part of the national character. The word roughly translates to “grim determination in the face of hardships,” such as the country’s long winters: Even in adversity, a Finn is expected to persevere, without complaining.

And...

Since immigrating from Zimbabwe in 1992, Julia Wilson-Hangasmaa, 59, has come to appreciate the freedom Finland affords people to pursue their dreams without worrying about meeting basic needs. A retired teacher, she now runs her own recruitment and consulting agency in Vaaksy, a village northeast of Helsinki. [...]

When she returns to her home country, she is struck by the “good energy” that comes not from the satisfaction of sisu but from exuberant joy.

“What I miss the most, I realize when I enter Zimbabwe, are the smiles,” she said, among “those people who don’t have much, compared to Western standards, but who are rich in spirit.”

Music:

Music is a source of well-being for many Finns, many of whom sing in choirs, learn instruments or attend regular concerts, especially during the country’s long, dark winters. But Ms. Puutio worries that these opportunities may not be available to future generations: Finland will hold parliamentary elections on April 2, and the far-right Finns Party, which won the second-highest number of seats in 2019, has promised to cut funding for the arts if it secures a majority coalition this year.

“Music, which I am passionate about, it creates a mind-set where you can face your inner feelings and fears,” Ms. Puutio, who now manages an orchestra, said. “It touches parts of our soul we could otherwise not reach. And that will have a long-term effect on people’s lives, if these experiences are taken away from us.”

There is more at the link, more stories.

See also, Why is Sweden so successful in music? Scenes, it nurtures scenes.

Sadness is on the rise across the globe

The Rising Tide of Global Sadness https://t.co/7gLr5rX8gR

— Bill Benzon, BAM! Bootstrapping Artificial Minds (@bbenzon) October 28, 2022

From the article:

The researchers Charlotte Brand, Alberto Acerbi and Alex Mesoudi analyzed more than 150,000 pop songs released between 1965 and 2015. Over that time, the appearance of the word “love” in top-100 hits roughly halved. Meanwhile, the number of times such songs contained negative emotion words, like “hate” rose sharply.

Pop music isn’t the only thing that has gotten a lot harsher. David Rozado, Ruth Hughes and Jamin Halberstadt analyzed 23 million headlines published between 2000 and 2019 by 47 different news outlets popular in the United States. The headlines, too, grew significantly more negative, with a greater proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness. Headlines in left-leaning media got a lot more negative, but headlines in right-leaning publications got even more negative than that.

The negativity in the culture reflects the negativity in real life. The General Social Survey asks people to rate their happiness levels. Between 1990 and 2018 the share of Americans who put themselves in the lowest happiness category increased by more than 50 percent. And that was before the pandemic.

The really bad news is abroad. Each year Gallup surveys roughly 150,000 people in over 140 countries about their emotional lives. Experiences of negative emotions — related to stress, sadness, anger, worry and physical pain — hit a record high last year.

The last two paragraphs:

If misery levels keep rising, what can we expect in the future? Well, rising levels of populism for one. And second, greater civil unrest across the board. Clifton noted that according to the Global Peace Index, civic discontent — riots, strikes, anti-government demonstrations — increased by 244 percent from 2011 to 2019.

We live in a world of widening emotional inequality. The top 20 percent of the world is experiencing highest level of happiness and well-being since Gallup began measuring these things. The bottom 20 percent is experiencing the worst. It’s a fundamentally unjust and unstable situation. The emotional health of the world is shattering.

Martin Luther on music: "Music drives away the devil and makes people happy"

Forward to Georg Rhau's Symphoniae, a collection of chorale motets published in 1538, as follows:

I, Doctor Martin Luther, wish all lovers of the unshackled art of music grace and peace from God the Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ! I truly desire that all Christians would love and regard as worthy the lovely gift of music, which is a precious, worthy, and costly treasure given to mankind by God. The riches of music are so excellent and so precious that words fail me whenever I attempt to discuss and describe them.... In summa, next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world. It controls our thoughts, minds, hearts, and spirits... Our dear fathers and prophets did not desire without reason that music be always used in the churches. Hence, we have so many songs and psalms. This precious gift has been given to man alone that he might thereby remind himself that God has created man for the express purpose of praising and extolling God. However, when man's natural musical ability is whetted and polished to the extent that it becomes an art, then do we note with great surprise the great and perfect wisdom of God in music, which is, after all, His product and His gift; we marvel when we hear music in which one voice sings a simple melody, while three, four, or five other voices play and trip lustily around the voice that sings its simple melody and adorn this simple melody wonderfully with artistic musical effects, thus reminding us of a heavenly dance, where all meet in a spirit of friendliness, caress and embrace. A person who gives this some thought and yet does not regard music as a marvelous creation of God, must be a clodhopper indeed and does not deserve to be called a human being; he should be permitted to hear nothing but the braying of asses and the grunting of hogs.

and

.... if one sings diligently with skill and application, then music can make man good and at peace with himself and his fellows by providing him a view of beauty. Music drives away the devil and makes people happy; it induces one to forget all wrath, unchastity, arrogance, and other vices, quia pacis tempore regnat musica (for music reigns in times of peace).

Peak happiness lies mostly in collective activity. [We need a Declaration of Interdependence.]

Adam Grant, There’s a Specific Kind of Joy We’ve Been Missing, NYTimes, July 10, 2021.

Most people view emotions as existing primarily or even exclusively in their heads. Happiness is considered a state of mind; melancholy is a potential warning sign of mental illness. But the reality is that emotions are inherently social: They’re woven through our interactions.

Research has found that people laugh five times as often when they’re with others as when they’re alone. Even exchanging pleasantries with a stranger on a train is enough to spark joy. That’s not to say you can’t find delight in watching a show on Netflix. The problem is that bingeing is an individual pastime. Peak happiness lies mostly in collective activity.

We find our greatest bliss in moments of collective effervescence. It’s a concept coined in the early 20th century by the pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim to describe the sense of energy and harmony people feel when they come together in a group around a shared purpose. Collective effervescence is the synchrony you feel when you slide into rhythm with strangers on a dance floor, colleagues in a brainstorming session, cousins at a religious service or teammates on a soccer field. And during this pandemic, it’s been largely absent from our lives.

Peak happiness lies mostly in collective activity. 

Collective effervescence happens when joie de vivre spreads through a group. Before Covid, research showed that more than three-quarters of people found collective effervescence at least once a week and almost a third experienced it at least once a day. They felt it when they sang in choruses and ran in races, and in quieter moments of connection at coffee shops and in yoga classes.

But as lockdowns and social distancing became the norm, there were fewer and fewer of these moments. I started watching standup comedy specials, hoping to get a taste of collective effervescence while laughing along with the people in the room. It was fine, but it wasn’t the same.

Instead, many of us found ourselves drawn into a dark cloud. [...]

Emotional contagion can in part explain so-called Zoom fatigue, a phenomenon that has mostly been attributed to sitting still, staring at oversize virtual heads, feeling self-conscious at seeing your own reflection and juggling the cognitive load of reading glitchy facial expressions. The science of contagion suggests that the negative emotions we feel from video-call overuse could be partially driven by hours of communicating with people who are also sad, stressed, lonely or tired. (How to survive a Zoombie apocalypse: Avoid eye contact at all costs.) [...]

The Declaration of Independence promised Americans unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If we want that pursuit to bring us bliss, it may be time to create a Declaration of Interdependence. You can feel depressed and anxious alone, but it’s rare to laugh alone or love alone. Joy shared is joy sustained.

There's more at the link.

Finland is the happiest country in the world

Despite bone-chilling winters, Finland is the happiest country on Earth. Slimmer wage gaps and government mandates like long-term paid parental leave and free health care might be key; these perks relieve stressors, giving citizens fewer reasons to frown. https://t.co/axsBGFEVOz

— Wataru 天河 航 (@wataruen) March 6, 2021

If you want to be happy, it helps to be rich

Twenge, J. M., & Cooper, A. B. (2020). The expanding class divide in happiness in the United States, 1972–2016. Emotion. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000774

Abstract: Is there a growing class divide in happiness? Among U.S. adults ages 30 and over in the nationally representative General Social Survey (N = 44,198), the positive correlation between socioeconomic status (SES; including income, education, and occupational prestige) and happiness grew steadily stronger between the 1970s and 2010s. Associations between income and happiness were linear, with no tapering off at higher levels of income. Between 1972 and 2016, the happiness of high-SES White adults was fairly stable, whereas the happiness of low-SES White adults steadily declined. Among Black adults, the happiness of low-SES adults was fairly stable, whereas the happiness of high-SES adults increased. Thus, the happiness advantage favoring high-SES adults has expanded over the decades. Age–period–cohort analyses based on hierarchical linear modeling demonstrate that this effect is primarily caused by time period rather than by birth cohort or age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

H/t Tyler Cowen.