The Free Press
Today is the International Day of Happiness. So like every year on March 20, you are likely to see a lot of headlines about the publication of the annual World Happiness Report. “Finland is again ranked the happiest country in the world [while] the US falls to its lowest-ever position,” ran a headline from the Associated Press this morning. Forbes even got philosophical, promising “5 Life Lessons From Finland, Once Again the ‘World’s Happiest Country.’ ”
Published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University, the basic message of the report has remained the same since its launch in 2012. The happiest countries in the world are in Scandinavia; this year, Finland is followed by Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden. America, despite being one of the richest large countries in the world, persistently underperforms: this year, the United States only comes in 24th out of the 147 countries covered in the report, placing it behind much poorer countries like Lithuania and Costa Rica.
I have to admit that I have been skeptical about this ranking ever since I first came across it. Because I have family in both Sweden and Denmark, I have spent a good amount of time in Scandinavia. And while Scandinavian countries have a lot of great things going for them, they never struck me as pictures of joy. For much of the year, they are cold and dark. Their cultures are extremely reserved and socially disjointed. When you walk around the—admittedly beautiful—centers of Copenhagen or Stockholm, you rarely see anybody smile. Could these really be the happiest places in the whole wide world?
So to honor the release of this year’s report, I finally decided to follow my hunch, and looked into the research on this topic more deeply. What I found was worse than I’d imagined. To put it politely, the World Happiness Report is beset with methodological problems. To put it bluntly, it is a sham.
News reports about the World Happiness Report usually give the impression that it is based on a major research effort. Noting that the report is “compiled annually by a consortium of groups including the United Nations and Gallup,” for example, an article about last year’s iteration in The New York Times warned darkly that “the United States fell out of the Top 20” without a hint of skepticism about the reliability of such a finding.
In light of such confident pronouncements, and in the absence of any critical voices in most of these news stories, you might be forgiven for thinking that the report carefully assesses how happy each country in the world is according to a sophisticated methodology, one that likely involves both subjective and objective criteria. But upon closer examination, it turns out that the World Happiness Report is not based on any major research effort; far from measuring how happy people are with some sophisticated mix of indicators, it simply compiles answers to a single question asked to comparatively small samples of people in each country:
“Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero 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 feel you personally stand at this time?”
The obvious problem with this question, commonly known as the Cantril Ladder, is that it doesn’t really ask about happiness at all. We know from many surveys that people tend to give very different answers to questions about what makes them satisfied with their life and to questions about whether they are feeling good in the moment. Having children, for example, tends to raise parents’ assessment of how meaningful their life is; but notably it does not make them report higher levels of happiness at any particular moment, including when they are spending time with their kids. At most, a ranking based purely on the Cantril Ladder could therefore give us something called a World Self-Reported Life Satisfaction Report—and it’s easy to see why such an honest title wouldn’t entice many journalists to write about it.
The less obvious problem with the Cantril Ladder is that it does not even do a good job of measuring respondents’ satisfaction with their own lives. When one set of researchers asked over a thousand survey respondents in the United Kingdom what they took the question to be getting at, the most commonly mentioned responses included “wealth,” “rich,” and “successful.” As August Nilsson and his colleagues painstakingly demonstrated, some of the specific language in the question—such as the metaphor of the ladder and its emphasis on the “top” as well as the “bottom step”—primes respondents to think about social hierarchies. Their conclusion is sobering: “The Cantril Ladder is arguably the most prominent measure of well-being, but the results suggest caution in its interpretation—the Cantril Ladder’s structure appears to influence participants to attend to a more power- and wealth-oriented view of well-being.”
But perhaps the biggest problem with the World Happiness Report is that metrics of self-reported life satisfaction don’t seem to correlate particularly well with other kinds of things we clearly care about when we talk about happiness. At a minimum, you would expect the happiest countries in the world to have some of the lowest incidences of adverse mental health outcomes. But it turns out that the residents of the same Scandinavian countries that the press dutifully celebrates for their supposed happiness are especially likely to take antidepressants.
It turns out that my hunch is born out by the data. Scandinavia doesn’t just seem a lot less happy than headlines suggest each year; if you look at a variety of metrics that have at least as much connection to a layperson’s understanding of happiness as the single metric used by the World Happiness Report, countries like Finland don’t do especially well.
Two distinguished economists, David Blanchflower and Alex Bryson, set out in a recent paper to discover what would happen to the world happiness rankings if they looked at a broader range of indicators—and what they found is a totally different picture.
Instead of relying on a single metric of life satisfaction, Blanchflower and Bryson consider eight survey questions which have widely been asked in different countries around the world. The first four questions measure different dimensions of positive affect, asking whether respondents experienced enjoyment, smiled or laughed a lot, and felt well-rested the day before. (Their measure of positive affect also incorporates answers to the Cantril Ladder.)
The next four questions used by Blanchflower and Bryson measure different dimensions of negative affect. They ask respondents whether they experienced sadness yesterday; whether they worried during a lot of the day; whether they experienced anger; and whether they were in physical pain.
What Blanchflower and Bryson found is striking. Responses to the Cantril Ladder barely seem to correlate with expressions of either positive or negative affect. Denmark, for example, came top of their ranking on the Cantril Ladder. But, like most other Scandinavian countries, Denmark did much worse on both metrics of positive affect such as how likely respondents had been to smile or laugh a lot the previous day (111th out of 164 countries) and on metrics of negative affect such as whether they had worried a lot (93rd out of 164.)
As a result, the ranking presented by Blanchflower and Bryson looks totally different from the more famous version published by the UN. Finland, for example, falls to 51st place. Conversely, countries like Japan, Panama, and Thailand, none of which do especially well on the official ranking by the UN, suddenly appear a lot happier; all of them are ranked above Finland and other supposed top performers.
Another surprise suggests that the story about happiness in the United States is not nearly as bleak as is usually suggested. For it turns out that happiness varies widely across America—and some parts of the country are seemingly the happiest in the world.
Once you break the United States into its component states, it becomes clear that parts of the country really are doing quite badly. West Virginia, for example, ranked 101st out of 215 countries and states, making it about as happy as much poorer places like Sri Lanka and Mauritania. But some other U.S. states are, according to Blanchflower and Bryson’s ranking, among the happiest in the world. Seven of them—Hawaii, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas—are at the very top of the list, meaning that their residents are happier than those of the happiest country in the world (which turns out to be Taiwan, located in East Asia rather than Northern Europe). All in all, the residents of 34 U.S. states, plus those of the District of Columbia, have higher average levels of happiness than do the Finns.
In a culture obsessed with happiness and wellness, there will always be huge demand for content that sells readers on the one great hack for how to improve their lives. Want to live to a ripe old age? Eat like the residents of “blue zones” such as Sardinia or Okinawa. Want to be happy even though you’re not rich? Move to Bhutan, a country often portrayed as having figured out the key to happiness because the government announced in 2008 that it would henceforth be focusing on growing its “Gross National Happiness Index.”
But that one great hack for how to improve your life nearly always turns out to be a sham. The residents of blue zones aren’t especially likely to live long because of their unique diets; more likely, blue zones are distinguished by poor recordkeeping, leading to an abnormally high number of people defrauding the government by overstating their own age or continuing to collect pension checks for deceased relatives. Similarly, the government of Bhutan may talk a big game about prioritizing happiness over economic growth, but in reality, it doesn’t do particularly well in either the World Happiness Report or on Blanchflower and Bryson’s alternative metric—and the steady flow of people leaving Bhutan appear to believe that they could lead much happier lives elsewhere.
This suggests that, for all of the evident shortcomings of a purely economistic mindset, attempts to abandon tried-and-tested metrics like GDP for newfangled indicators like happiness rankings may do more harm than good. After all, it remains extremely hard to measure happiness—and even if we could somehow come up with a reliable metric, we’d have precious little idea of which government policies could actually boost this outcome.
More broadly, supposedly serious news outlets still have a long way to go in subjecting publicity exercises like the World Happiness Report to appropriate journalistic scrutiny. It is easy to see why editors are tempted to assign some beat reporter without expertise in the social sciences to write up a fun little story about how much happier those enlightened Scandinavians are compared to benighted Americans. But if the media wants to live up to its self-appointed role as a gatekeeper of reliable information, it can’t continue to be complicit in the spread of such shoddy clickbait.
Over the last years, media outlets like the Times, universities like Oxford, and international institutions like the UN have devoted themselves to the fight against so-called “misinformation.” It is certainly true that our political discourse is awash with dangerous distortions and outright lies. But any institution which wishes to address that problem must start by looking into the mirror—and cease spreading “elite misinformation” like the World Happiness Report.
A version of this article was originally published by Persuasion.
Yascha Mounk writes a weekly column on Substack. He is the author, most recently, of The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. Read his last piece in The Free Press, “The Not-So-Marvelous Mrs. Merkel.”
