> The Gallup World Poll, which remains the principal source of data in this report, asks respondents to evaluate their current life as a whole using the image of a ladder, with the best possible life for them as a 10 and the
worst possible as a 0. Each respondent provides a numerical response on this scale, referred to as the Cantril Ladder. Typically, around 1,000 responses are gathered annually for each country. Weights are used to construct population-representative national averages for each year in each country.
We base our happiness ranking on a three year average of these life evaluations since the larger sample size enables more precise estimates
Huh... Finland is #1 in happiness but has the third highest suicide rate in Western Europe (behind Belgium, France, and Switzerland) [1]. Belgium is medium happy, but has the 15th highest suicide rate in the world, substantially above the US. The UK is second lowest happiness, but has one of the lowest suicide rates in Europe. The difference in happiness between Finland and the US appears huge, yet their suicide rates are similar (Finland is next after the US of the countries on the happiness list)
I vaguely recall reading before that happiest countries had increased suicide rates because if everyone around you is doing great and you're not, it increases feelings of shame and hopelessness, that there's something wrong or broken with you specifically. If life is tough and everyone is struggling, it sucks but feels less personally damning.
Anecdotally, the most depressed times in my life were when circumstances were objectively fine and I still couldn't manage to feel any less than terrible. Like, "This is as good as it's ever going to get???" Ironically having actual problems gave me both something to attribute the bad feelings to, and hope that I would feel better once I resolved the problems.
Well Mexico seems to be quite happy and with not a lot of suicide, but they have incredibly cheap recreational drugs and it's quite accessible and not particularly frowned upon to enjoy a putería on the reg and on the side.
Yeah, when people try to bring these "X country is happier than Y" studies into conversations, I always tell them: the only thing those studies capture is how well the population's been trained to report that they're happy.
The training goes the other way in the US. Politicians, advertisers and the media all have a stake in telling you how unhappy you should be and it's surprisingly effective.
What a disappointing comment on HN. Did you check who published it, what the methodology used was, before commenting?
Of course not. Easier to be snarkier than to research and understand.
For the record: The World Happiness Report is published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, in partnership with Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and an independent editorial board.
It always has been. Obviously no offense to any country, but Palestine and Ukraine which are quite literally in the middle of conflicts are “happier” than places like India tells you that happiness is a vague concept and the methodology to measure it is quite dubious.
You can’t even do that. The number of samples vary across the years and the number of samples do not account for population size. Australia for a population of 27M has a sample size of 1000 meanwhile India with a population of 1.5B gets a sample size of 3000. At that point the data might as well be just an error. It’s like going to NYC and asking 17 people whether they like Katz’s Deli. You will not get a representative sample at all on whether NYC likes Katz’s Deli. Might as well ask the Ouija board at that point.
Happiness can be studied in a lot of ways, and none of them is complete or accurate. Momentary happiness is possible in a miserable life and vice versa.
I suspect this survey does tell us something over time, if methodology is stable.
I don't think this survey tells us anything at all. Happiness is hard to define, personal, and capricious. It's better to not have studies than to have pretend science that people mistake for real science.
Maybe not going bankrupt because of medical expenses as the only first world country with universal healthcare? When it comes to the hierarchy of needs, not dying because of unaffordable or unavailable healthcare I’m sure ranks near the top.
There is no objective measure where the median American is better off than the median European.
I’m saying this as a born and bread American citizen who is fortunate enough to be on the better side of the economic divide.
> This is another article in a long tail of anti-American and anti-Western content that has been cropping up online for about two years now. It's getting to be a very popular subject.
1. Finland
2. Denmark
3. Iceland
4. Sweden
5. Netherlands
It's just an interesting assertion you're making, I suppose.
It is anti American not in the sense of “I think America is a bad/immortal place” but much more in the sense of “we objectively can measure that in accordance to Americans, America is bad for Americans”..
Now this could be true or not. It is anti American. If it is fair/true or not it’s an other question.
It’s pretty wild how people lump the collective West and the US together. Maybe that worked in the past, but the US as it is today is definitely not how one would imagine a western country.
Being the dominant western force, it is the current model for “the west”. It’s pretty wild how people say “the west” and are intending to not include the US front and center of that.
Thank god the Netherlands is only #5. It’s high, but not too high. That said, the Finns probably got surveyed right after exiting the sauna. Is that fair?
It really is - your life needs deep importance. Work is one of the things that provides that. If you feel like you're not important you're going to be unhappy.
I used to think like that. It made me miserable. What's made me happy has been to come to terms with it not mattering one iota whether it feels like I'm important.
That's not to say it's not a good feeling when someone finds utility in something I've done, but a nice walk also gives me the same good feeling.
One can find fulfilment in anything. You may think someone lazing on a beach all day is wasting their life, and they may think the same about a drone who is sitting in a windowless office for 60 hours a week from age 21 to 65 so their bosses can get richer. Family, community, art, relaxation, work - what is important in life is entirely up to you.
Not just that, normal citizens are getting poorer at a very rapid rate. Groceries, housing, healthcare, education are all more and more unaffordible every day. Inflation is eating away the American middle class lifestyle.
Switzerland has a slightly high suicide rate (not the best inverse metric of happiness but a correlation on unhappiness at least) for a country with such high standards of living, so if we look into suicide rates over time we also see a conundrum that over the past 20+ years the suicide rate is overall decreasing but has mostly flattened out. But from what I've observed anecdotally it still has problems like other developed countries with legacy industries declining (see: watchmakers and other artisanal crafts trades rather than mining) where boomers in the country are pretty miserable and that will probably be noticed in macro level statistics.
I would speculate Republicans are wildly happier when "their team is 'winning'" and Democrats would have a boost in happiness with Democrats in power, but nowhere near the swing of Republicans. Democrats, IMO, are more aware of the *real* current and longterm problems the US faces while Republicans listen to whatever Republicans say the "problems" are - "problems" that are too often very outlandish and not based in reality.
I agree that both probably swing depending on who’ “winning”, although I bet that generally the Dems tend to be significantly less happy and therefore swing less, relatively.
I suspect the results would be skewed significantly by whether or not the questions asked seemed overtly political in nature. If you probe people in general quality of life measures and carefully avoid loaded language, you’d likely find both sides are suffering in the US in real terms due to cost of living and loneliness crises. These are trends that have been prevailing since at least the 80s and were accelerated by mass media and the Internet.
But tribal loyalty is a powerful force, so as soon as the questions or questioner appears partisan in any way, people form ranks for “their side” and you’d be hard pressed to get an honest response, least of all one that reflects badly on their team at the helm.
- Gun problems being an issue of the person holding the gun or gun related deaths being a necessary evil - evidence from practically every country on earth with strict gun rules shows otherwise. Less guns = less gun deaths full stop.
- Climate change being fake, chemtrails, Geoengineering, weather manipulation.
- Science, particularly medical research being fake. Covid vaccines being harmful, etc.
Taking political constraints into account, the Biden Administration was just about the most successful and effective, in policy terms, of the past 50 years. Unfortunately the political landscape is pretty unfavorable, with GOP-supportive media, a GOP-aligned Supreme Court and super wealthy people, increasingly extremist state governments in many parts of the country, decades of corporate consolidation, weakening civic institutions, and an electorate that largely ignores the details. Biden himself was never a great orator and his public charisma suffered further with age, but as far as governing goes, he did a great job. Harris would also have been an excellent president.
Unfortunately building and fixing things (or just keeping things working, negotiating compromises, and so on) takes a lot of time and effort, and doesn't make for great pithy slogans or rile people up.
The term was "excited", not "successful and effective". The excitement for Obama vs. Biden was not even close. ("Yes we can!" vs. "Let's elect our doddering but normal 80ish white guy, not the crazy 80ish white guy!")
I can't disagree with that. I was initially excited (and later pretty disappointed) with Obama, especially with the amount of time he wasted trying to engage with people obviously acting in bad faith, with the way he let himself be pushed around by folks who were aligned against his ideals, and with the extent to which he disengaged after leaving office. Clinton was sadly an even bigger disappointment. I had initially very low expectations of Biden, didn't vote for him in the 2020 primary, and was quite impressed with his actual governing.
What topic areas specifically are you interested in? I'm assuming you don't want a list of hundreds of bullet points of small legislative or administrative changes. The most newsworthy things are stuff like getting us out of the forever wars in the Middle East, standing up to Putin and rallying NATO and other allies to support Ukraine, making big investments in American manufacturing and alternative energy, working to reign in large corporations and protect consumers and the public in a wide variety of ways big and small, protecting workers' salaries and fair treatment, improving access to healthcare and keeping costs down, protecting women's access to healthcare despite a hostile misogynist Supreme Court, working to relieve punishing student loans (again with opposition from the Court), ...
The FTC and his war on corporations was a failure none of the lawsuits went anywhere and it made the environment worse for startups. Now VC funding is nowhere near the level it use to be outside of large AI companies because large tech companies are squeamish of acquisitions - lLimiting the path to successful exits.
What they are doing now is hiring out all of the people they want from startups and leaving the undesirables in a lurch and decimating VCs investments - Google, Microsoft and Amazon have all used this playbook.
The problem with “administrative changes” is that they can easily be undone.
And he didn’t “protect women’s healthcare” at all. The red states are still seeing women die because doctors are afraid to perform abortions when the life of the mother is in danger and blue states aren’t - the status quo.
The very reason that Biden is an inconsequential President was because everything he did was easily undone between his lack of willingness to step aside even though he and everyone else knew he should and trying to do things through executive orders.
The Supreme Court is another symptom of old people not retiring when they should, dying on the bench allowing a Republican President to nominate replacements.
You seem to be singularly focused on VC funding for startups and decision-making by managers inside large tech companies as your metric of how the US economy is doing. In my opinion this is a poor criterion for analyzing the success of national political parties, since political changes have only limited influence on these, and they are in conflict with improving many other parts of the economy affecting much larger numbers of people.
By a wide range of economic metrics, the US economy during the Biden administration was incredibly successful. We somehow managed to reign in inflation caused by the follow-on disruptions coming from Covid pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine war, while maintaining full employment and avoiding negative economic effects expected by most economists. Real wages went up. Federal investments set up long-term gains for US manufacturing. The US economy did better than just about every other industrialized economy in the world during the same time period.
Blaming Biden for the following administration doing everything it can to trash the economy and reverse every bit of progress he made is ridiculous. It's like blaming the fire department for the actions of an arsonist. Again, if you want sweeping legislation and long-term commitment to policy changes, you need to elect (and keep electing) enough votes in Congress.
How is employment doing these days in the tech sector? You know the sector that is been driving the stock market for over a decade? What did he do to rein in corporations? Are any of them less powerful than thet were in 2020?
Exactly what did he do that had any long lasting impact? Obama had the ACA.
Biden in fact was the worse Democratic President for not stepping aside early enough and letting the DNC have a real primary. It was sheer selfishness and ego.
Biden came into office in the middle of a Covid crisis substantially caused by the previous administration (which he then was unfairly blamed for the effects of by people arguing in bad faith). During the first two years of Biden's presidency the Democrats had a tied 50–50 Senate (including 2 prima donna Senators who repeatedly undermined Democrats' legislative priorities) and a narrow House majority. During the second two years they had a 51–49 Senate majority and lost control of the House. They never had the votes for anything like the ACA. But within the very difficult constraints of a 50–50 Senate with no possibility of abolishing the filibuster (i.e. requiring 60 votes, and thus significant GOP support, to pass any legislation), the Dems were remarkably effective in 2021–2022, exceeding my expectations.
If you want to see sweeping legislation, you have to elect a Congress that with enough votes to pass it. Blaming Biden for not having the votes is an expression of political cluelessness.
> During the first two years of Biden's presidency the Democrats had a tied 50–50 Senate (including 2 prima donna Senators who repeatedly undermined Democrats' legislative priorities) and a narrow House majority.
Look up the Senate Parliamentarian and how the Democrats used them as an excuse to not get anything done.
They could have played hardball with their rogue Senators but they didn't.
He worked to use our tax dollars to spur re-investment in America. From factory construction and utility jobs to grid resilience and innovation. Not to mention that zero to few Republicans voted for these, yet they are the largest benefactors. Texas massive growth spurt in Green energy can thank Biden, but they won't even though they are happy to take the infrastructure investments and enjoy the cheaper energy and jobs. I'll just be happy if I dont have to deal with another Great Texas Freeze.
Also, and even though, the coal mining communities didn't vote for him he made sure to single out investment specifically to coal communities "it announced $428 million in grants for 14 projects in coal communities, creating 1,900 jobs and leveraging $500 million in private investments."
Those also include tax reform (to collect from super-rich tax evaders, expire the deep corporate tax cuts etc) and prescription drug reform to lower prices among other things like investing in green energy projects for low income communities. He brought investment back into this country without sucker punching our allies.
Imo, that's what my tax dollars are for, for reinvestment back into building this country -- not to give rich business friends that donate meme coins to a family account extra large tax cuts or giving bonuses for rounding up brown people (including US citizens - google if you want links) and empower a federal immigration force to throw out any integrity and character they had before being told to make a spectacle.
Anyway there is a lot in there is you care to read up on it.
How is Intel doing these days? They have already kicked out one poor performing CEO and no company wants to use Intel for chip fabs. Nvidia is partnering with Intel on design - not fabrication.
How much do you want to bet that in four years nothing he did will have made a difference and Trump is going to undo it? That wouldn’t have been an issue if Biden had stepped aside and announced he wasn’t going to run for reelection earlier. Again results count. The few things he “accomplished” are going to be undone because he didnt step aside.
And all of his “prescription reforms” weren’t put into law and were easy to undo by the next administration.
The Republicans no matter how hard they try can’t kill the ACA and are probably going to vote to increase funding. The ACA would have been a lot easier to kill if Obama hadn’t won reelection. Biden should have known he couldn’t win.
The ACA is an accomplishment that stood the test of time. Everything that Biden did will be inconsequential because he didn’t step aside to try to secure what he did.
Not to mention the Chips act just threw money at a flailing Intei without any strategy. There was a strategy behind Obama’s getting through the financial crises and the ACA
The ACA was passed with 60 Democratic Senate votes and not a single GOP vote in House or Senate.
Biden had a 50–50 Senate, counting Manchin and Sinema among the 50. If you think he "should have" passed similar legislation and consider his failure to do so to be some kind of failure of willpower, then you fundamentally don't understand how our political system works. If the Dems don't have the votes, it's nonsensical to blame them for not being able to pass legislation that is opposed by 100% of the GOP.
The ACA was a big accomplishment, and it managed to go through during the exactly 72 working days since 1980 when the Democrats had such a majority in Congress and the Presidency. (We all owe an incredible debt of gratitude for that to Nancy Pelosi, who was personally responsible for getting it over the finish line after Ted Kennedy died in office.) If the Dems consistently had large congressional majorities, they could make much more progress. If you want to see that happen, make sure they get the votes.
I have repeatedly said what I think he should have done - announced after the mid terms that he wasn’t going to seek re-election, let there be a real primary and if another Democrat could have been elected they could have solidified the foundation he set.
Excusing that is like commending a surgeon for saving a life and then not washing his hands during follow up and killing the patient allowing the wound to get infected.
And why haven’t the democrats had a platform that could convince enough people to vote for them in the Senate since then?
The Democratic majority didn’t happen by accident. Howard Dean pushed for the “50 state strategy” in 2008. The current Democrats are feckless
In other words, you think the Dems "should" have won the election in 2024, and that they didn't was entirely down to on Biden's personal decisions. Because they didn't win that election, everything that the GOP and voters do afterward is now Biden's fault personally.
The first part is a counter-factual hypothesis that seems wrong, which you keep insisting on without any evidence. The second part is thoroughly fallacious.
To first order, the summary is that you don't think Biden or his administration deserves credit for anything they actually did, while simultaneously thinking they deserve blame for a large number of things that other people did that they were personally opposed to and worked against.
Do you really think that if there had been a real primary Kamala would have been the nominee? She was part of an unpopular administration and she couldn’t distance herself from it.
You did see the first debate didn’t you? Could there possibly have beeb a worse strategy than what the DNC did?
Biden doesn’t get a participation trophy for doing things that were innaffective.
> Gay and trans people are not going back in the closet
We do not know this and social progress can't be taken for granted. We've seen many countries regress rapidly when totalitarian regimes (especially theocracies) got their foothold in power. Directly (Iran) or by proximity (Poland).
It's a naive story of the 90's that social progress is always upwards. Liberalism both social and economic is definitely on the back foot.
In the short term progress doesn't look linear, but women can vote, can open credit cards without a husband, interracial marriage isn't going anywhere.
Despite the current drama I do believe that in the long term today's culture wars will sound just as quaint.
The legal argument for in Loving v. Virginia was the same argument that was rejected when Roe v. Wade overturned in Dobbs. Thomas actually calls out the other major cases, basically asking for a chance to overturn those as well, specifically Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. He's not going to overturn Loving given that hes in an interracial marriage himself, but whoever replaces him when he finally retires might, and he would have done all of the work getting case law to that point.
With that caveat, the conclusion there is that "The liberal-conservative happiness gap persists across all demographics".
Meaning there is no demographic category in which liberals are happier than conservatives — "conservative gays and lesbians report higher happiness than heterosexual liberals".
If our happiness is connected to political party affiliation, we're in big trouble. The actual party doesn't matter. The true hallmark of totalitarianism is when every aspect of civil society is politicized.
> true hallmark of totalitarianism is when every aspect of civil society is politicized
No? The true hallmarks of totalitarianism are a lack of political competition (usually due to repression) and the state controlling “all aspects of society, including the family, religion, education, business, private property, and social relationships” [1].
Ancient Athens was a famously political society. It was not totalitarian.
I agree. We've got a uniparty with two wings that doesn't allow any serious competition. We fight over things that will soon seem trivial in hindsight.
I believe this is more accurate, although it's not just happiness. They measure MHQ, i.e. Mind Health Quotient with various mental health related metrics.
I just looked at the report for the first time and it's quite insane how bad young people are feeling globally. Old people seem to be fine on average everywhere. The distributions don't even overlap i.e. the most unwell old people (Ukraine, UK, etc.) are doing better than the most well-being young people (Nigeria, Tanzania) on country average basis.
The article has a paywall for me and I was curious about their methodology. Fortunately, Wikipedia has some information:
"Nationally representative samples of respondents are asked to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale."
I believe that these self-reported surveys are partly testing the cultural acceptability of complaining—that is, the more unacceptable it is to complain, the happier one comes out in the scoring. How well that corresponds to 'actual' happiness is, of course, a different question.
I base this on experience with some of the 'happy' cultures on the list. However, I would be interested in knowing whether HN members from Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and the Netherlands (to name the top 5) agree with this concept or not.
Half Dutch half American. I find the Dutch complain a decent bit more, but I find that there is more to complain about in the States. Maar wat is het leven zonder klagen?
One thing I've noticed being back recently: cost of living has gotten very unaffordable in Amsterdam the last time I was back. Cost of basic goods is on par with what I'm used to paying in major American cities, but my Dutch relatives often earn a decent bit less. I wonder if this will affect Dutch happiness in future surveys once affordability exceeds more and more people's earnings.
I'm Norwegian, and we're down to 7th place, but I've lived half my life in the UK, and I can tell you that Norwegians will complain just as much as people in the UK, if not far more whenever I visit family.
It's the national sport. In fact, if you tell most Norwegians about coming 7th on a World Happiness ranking, odds are high most of us will complain loudly about that too, thinking we deserve a higher spot, and that there's no ways the Finns and especially Swedes can be higher than us on the list (being beaten by the Danes is okay).
In other words, I don't think this matches cultural acceptability of complaining at all. Norwegians will express dissatisfaction loudly and about everything (don't get a Norwegian started on the quality of the roads, or taxes; at the same time, don't get a majority of Norwegians started on "American conditions" or the political parties that might bring them about by lowering taxes), while still generally living pretty great lives.
There are cultural differences, but once you have the baseline, I think the delta is more interesting, so how happiness has changed in a country throughout the years.
Wouldn't the cultural factor of complaining not mean as much since it's a survey for scientific purposes?
For example, it's considered weird to talk about how many times I went to the bathroom this week but if asked by a doctor I would be more willing to provide the information
How does nerd-sniping with Waymo work? Is it about nerd-sniping a person so they get hit by a Waymo, or is it about nerd-sniping the Waymo itself, distracting it before having a human hit it?
D'oh, I think I got nerd-sniped there for a second.
It is obvious to anybody who has ever been to the Nordic countries: They are far from being the happiest people in the world. A lot of them are very miserable, for reasons that I could never deduce.
Is it? As someone from Norway, who has spent plenty of time in the other Nordic countries, I'd disagree strongly. We'll complain a lot. Until you ask us to actually rank how happy we are with our lives.
If you base you impression on what people are saying without explicitly asking how happy they are with their lives, then you're getting an impression that's biased by almost an eagerness to complain, despite at the end of the day generally being very satisfied.
This makes sense to me. Also, sometimes complaining isn't a sign of unhappiness - it's a sign one has standards and the self-esteem to stick up for them.
You're disagreeing with yourself. Somebody who complains a lot and in other ways shows how miserable they are does not become happy by saying they are happy. You can maybe lie to yourself that you are happy, but you can't fool others. Although Norwegians and Danes are generally happier than Finns and Swedes.
No, I am not. Complaining does not require unhappiness at all. That there are lots of things I'd like to be better does not mean I'm not happy. That I enjoy complaining does not make me unhappy either - on the contrary, it makes me happier.
> You can maybe lie to yourself that you are happy
This is inherently paradoxical and hence nonsensical. If you successfully convince yourself that you are happy, you are happy.
> Although Norwegians and Danes are generally happier than Finns and Swedes.
That you think you know better than people themselves whether they are happy is just rude and insulting.
You are the person focusing on complaining specifically. I stated that the Nordics are far from being the happiest people in the world, and that is not by counting how much people complain.
> This is inherently paradoxical and hence nonsensical. If you successfully convince yourself that you are happy, you are happy.
If people are visibly unhappy but tell you that they are very happy, that doesn't mean that they've become happy by convincing themselves. That's like a guy screaming and punching you while he's saying that he's very calm. It's not reality, it's delusion.
When somebody successfully convinces themselves to be happy, they don't continue their lives showing all the behaviour and attitudes of an unhappy person. You can also outwardly tell that they are happy.
> That you think you know better than people themselves whether they are happy is just rude and insulting.
> You are the person focusing on complaining specifically. I stated that the Nordics are far from being the happiest people in the world, and that is not by counting how much people complain.
Explain to us in what way you have determined that you know better than people themselves how happy they are, then, please.
> When somebody successfully convinces themselves to be happy, they don't continue their lives showing all the behaviour and attitudes of an unhappy person. You can also outwardly tell that they are happy.
Given what you've written I have no reason to believe that you are capable of telling whether people are happy or not at all, as I simply don't believe you will pick out genuine markers of unhappiness from culturally or personality dependent traits that are not.
We have been under attack for years and it is definitely working. Hell, at this point it’s not off the table that our democracy itself will fall to this attack. I’d be incredibly impressed by the effectiveness, if it were not so frankly depressing.
Our president won't condemn violence and Politicians on the right all fan the flames while holding everyone to higher standards than the president himself when it comes to violent rhetoric.
Gun violence regardless of position is still always in the news, and the party in power has no intention of doing anything about it.
The political elite actively shun science.
Tech billionaires are all licking the boot - so the hopes some had that those with money and large corporate entities would keep the government in check are long gone.
Politicians actively endanger our international relationships with the entire world. Everybody in the world looks at us like a laughing stock.
The elite actively welcome and cheer for AI taking peoples jobs.
The economy is shit meanwhile our leaders lie to our faces about how tariffs and their own economic policies work and pointing at wall street gains meanwhile the majority of Americans don't invest in the first place.
Our rights are being stripped. Military/National Guard is actively deployed in the streets in places, and there is threat of deployment in other places (hint left leaning places). Any speech not aligned with the presidents values is criticized and threatened at a national scale.
Politics is just a reality TV show made for clicks and our current leaders are basically the equivalent if children bickering. "Transparency" is completely gone - they ran on transparency and then immediately flipped, who coulda seen that coming.
There is literally nothing to be happy about here unless you're already rich.
I'm not rich, but I'm still happy. I have little reason not to be.
I woke up today and the sun shining and birds chirping. I made myself and my partner breakfast, greeted people on my way to work. I got a good amount of work done, then had a nice lunch and now I'm taking a little break.
My life is better than it was growing up and substantially better than how bad it was for my ancestors.
Perhaps my expectations are lower than yours or perhaps I'm more focused on the present and my actual experiences rather than ruminating on whatever sensationalistic news story of the day is or what could happen, but while I can't say I'm happy about most of what you describe, they don't affect my day-to-day happiness. I'm not going to worry about things I can't change that may or may not affect me.
Are you familiar of the parable of the Monk and the Minister? It goes something like this:
Two close friends grow up and part ways. One becomes a monk, the other one becomes a minister to the king.
Many years later they meet again.
As they catch up, the minister, wearing fancy clothes, pities on the homely monk. Trying to help, he says: "You know, if you could learn to cater to the king you wouldn't have to live on rice and beans."
To which the monk replies: "If you could learn to live on rice and beans you wouldn't have to cater to the king!"
It seems this is self-reported. And we Germans certainly wouldn't admit that we're living pretty good lives overall. There's always something to complain about.
It's mostly people just rating their own lives, which leaves it open to people in different cultures reporting the same actual happiness differently. In some cultures, saying you're happy is bragging, so people understate. In others, rating it low is complaining, so people report overly happy.
I see World Happiness Report as primarily a measure of what's considered the most socially acceptable way to discuss happiness across cultures. In the USA, people often brag about how miserable they are, for example.
It's not all about finance. From my recent visits to Mexico everyone there seems much happier and friendlier than in the US and Europe. It was honestly quite striking. I have no theory what causes this (maybe large families?), but it was really quite obvious.
I have an unsubstantiated theory that people in Latin America largely realize their institutions are completely broken or ineffectual, thus they and their local community are on their own in life. Thus it is pointless to be angry about a lot of things people in other places are angry about (corruption, government, immigrants, prices, corporations, etc) because it's a total lost cause, it's not like they could vote it away even if they tried. The end result is their sphere of worries basically are constrained to their immediate family, work, and community all of which are things they not only have control over but actually probably will care about them.
Mexico is finally shedding their neoliberal order and getting stuff built and people taken care of (instead of foreign investors). President Sheinbaum has like an 80% approval rating.
Crime isn't high. No real risk of random violence in my experience (unlike the US, e.g. >weekly school shootings etc.). Taxes and economy, they aren't good right now true.
> From the 2000–01 to 2021–22 school years, there were 1,375 school shootings at public and private elementary and secondary schools, resulting in 515 deaths and 1,161 injuries.
1,700 people out of ~50 million K-12 students in a 22 year period.
.003352% chance of injury or worse over 22 years. And now I realize the denominator should be bigger because it doesn't count faculty/staff or college students.
There's no reason to live in fear of school shootings. (But there should still be much greater gun control.)
When there is a school shooting, you should count everyone in the school as deeply affected. Maybe the district.
From wikipedia it looks like there's 13,000 school districts in the US - so 1 in 10 (!!!!) has had a school shooting in the last 22 years. Am I doing this right?
You are assuming that each school shooting is in a separate district in the calculation. That is not necessarily the case, especially with some large school district serving many more students than a small rural district.
But I agree with you that it affects the school and community deeply, even in surrounding communities. I live in Texas, and the whole state was deeply affected after Uvalde. A relative's school got evacuated a few weeks later out of what happened to be a false alarm, with the relative forced to exit the school hands above their head to show they didn't have a gun. They were on the complete other side of the state, probably like a 6 hour drive away.
I think only concentrating on those that were shot or injured ignores the impact of being exposed to gun violence, especially during formative years in a situation where it's in the building you're in and results in the death or injury of your friends. Hundreds of thousands of people in the USA have experienced being in a school shooting event.
I also think that it's fair to think about other examples of exposure to violence and not just the Parent's example of weekly school shootings. Speaking of gun violence, I'm not sure I know anyone personally in the USA who haven't been impacted by it, whether that's knowing someone who was hurt, having to lock down at work or home, having to drive a different route home because of an active shooting, or just hearing it and then hearing the sirens. Of course, these are not all equal, but it's interesting to think about.
Aren't the Nordic countries listed at the top also the highest consumers of anti-depressants? I only know this because having travelled to the Copenhagen airport many times with Danish colleagues, one of them mentioned it when we saw the inevitable "Welcome to the happiest country on Earth" posters.
This report lists OECD countries but excludes the US. If the US were included, the report suggests the US would be among the top (either highest or second-highest) in terms of DDD per 1,000 inhabitants.
That could be because the "happy" countries have good health systems with wide coverage, so the people that need anti-depressants get them. In the "sad" countries people with depression often don't get to see a doctor, so a whole lot of people have undiagnosed and unmedicated depression.
Putting aside the silliness of trying to quantify happiness, that could just as easily be a marker of wealth or western fascination with chemicals. I've visited extremely poor countries & from what I can tell, antidepressants aren't going to make a dent in many if not most issues humans face.
Everything is expensive, our president is the dumbest person to ever live, we're constantly at threat of random shootings, and did I mention everything is expensive?
People in Mexico are much poorer and the country has huge crime and corruption problems. Just the disappeared people and especially women alone are massively concerning and likely worse per capita than US school shootings. Yet somehow they are happier there.
I think it’s about momentum. The perception is that the US is in some ways getting worse and Mexico is getting better.
Who is better off, the software engineer who lost her $250k job and had to settle for a new job that pays $150k, or the teacher who found a new job and got a raise from $50k to $70k? The software engineer might be better off while simultaneously less happy about their situation.
I've heard a lot of worries from friends, especially friends with kids, I had never heard before. Mostly gun violence and the loss of women's rights, which some friends have voiced as restricting their options in where they will work and live that they never had before. That, and the new anxiety about bringing your phone on a plane, which I share.
An increase in phone searches at points of entry and broad threats of detention and passport revocation if you're critical of Trump / supportive of Palestine / a "member" of the latest "terrorist organization" Antifa
All the anti-trans stuff has basically guaranteed that I can never live or work in half the country, because it would be fundamentally unsafe for some family members to even visit me there.
"You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’
But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.
What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. So it is not the will of my[a] Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.
They are just happy that Europeans or Muslims are not slaughtering them and also have the ability to defend if such cases arise (despite said Europeans being not happy about that and actively trying to degrade that). Looks like they went from fourth to eighth, and IMHO having hostages still held in Gaza is the biggest contributor of unhappiness.
The U.S. killed less than 6,000 people in their invasion. What you are referring to is a civil war and a terrible comparison for Israel's ongoing war against Gaza.
The last Iraq incursion was directly responsible for the rise of ISIS in the area, giving them a stronghold for mass slaughter throughout Iraq and Syria.
Saddam Hussein was obviously a murderous psychopath, albeit one who held tight enough reign to mostly subordinate the other psychopaths in the area, so you can ask the question about our culpability in switching that trolley onto a new set of tracks.
The civil war didn't kill those people, the bullets that went into the brain of the casualties did. Flippantly conflating the two things does not do your argument any good.
Now of course the bullets were inspired by a guy pulling a trigger, the guy pulling the trigger was inspired by the civil war (more specifically to name one example, the the ISIS-Kurdish one in the northern region of Iraq and Syria), the civil war was inspired by the power vacuum, and the power vacuum was inspired by the toppling of Saddam, and the toppling of Saddam was inspired by the USA blowing up the Iraqi regime.
Whether the US is culpable, again, I left as a question. But they did pull the lever for the trolley.
You understand by this reductionist logic you are responsible for the sins of the entire world. By being born your actions triggered through your existence all terrible things that have happened since.
I can’t believe you’d be this dumb. This is well trodden moral philosophy bullshit.
I can't believe you'd be as dumb as to compare being born to blowing up a bunch of people, leading to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths[] (mostly of civilians), many of which who now with their livelihoods and homes blown up and radicalized against the west, then were easy fodder to join any jihadist with a dollar and a plan with newly equipped with captured M16/M4s and Humvees and freshly freed up territory.
And apparently, it's wrong to just question if the USA might have culpability for the aftermath of that.
Perhaps when you’re surrounded and significantly outnumbered by people who want you dead, and have almost succeeded in doing so very recently, you get a sense of purpose.
> > and significantly outnumbered by people who want you dead,
> False
Can you provide some sort of evidence to your response? AFAIK surrounding countries are not fond of Jews as evidenced by lack of Jews in those countries.
Some years ago I moved back to Finland (#1) after several years in the US (now at #24).
While the quality of life really is objectively better with children, the secret to these rankings is probably the calibration inherent in the question. Finnish people just don’t have high expectations. Every positive development is a welcome surprise.
Americans are primed to want it all and seem to constantly compare themselves against unachievable standards on social media. “The American Dream” is more illusionary than ever. Everybody is a temporarily inconvenienced billionaire. This can be positive when it produces a drive that builds things, but it seems to mostly produce unhappiness right now because it’s so out of balance.
the secret to these rankings is probably the calibration inherent in the question. Finnish people just don’t have high expectations. Every positive development is a welcome surprise.
Yes but that calibration is also the secret to happiness.
I have lived in Thailand for the last ~8yrs. It's unfortunate not to see it on the list as I think generally speaking Thais are much happier than either US (where I travel a lot for work) or Australians (my home country).
A big chunk of that is the expectations, they don't need many material things to enjoy life and place a much higher emphasis on community and social standing (which isn't primarily derived from material wealth).
Your occupation in Thailand has a very large impact on your social standing - more than the income you derive from it. i.e doctors are extremely well respected, however public doctors more so than private ones despite the latter being more wealthy.
Sense of community is something that builds you up rather than the Western trope of comparing yourself to your neighbour that breaks you down.
That very simple difference seems to have an outsized impact on how happy folk are here.
There are exceptions and Bangkok is much more Western but if you live out in the country like me then Thailand is a very happy place.
While what you said may be true, it's also likely that (I assume) being an expat you are generally living in large urban areas and interacting with the top N% of the country in terms of wealth and opportunity. Go a bit deeper and the reality may be very different.
As a US citizen I just want affordable healthcare, housing, and a system that supports families. I think for the younger generation where this isn't attainable it causes a lot of unhappiness and leads to greater stressors. Also we are at a big low with faith in our political system across the pillars of government. I think for most of us we don't want it all, we just want our basic needs met without worrying about losing then tomorrow.
> Finnish people just don’t have high expectations. Every positive development is a welcome surprise.
You’re just covering up the real truth: Finnish happiness is a result of everyone having access to a sauna :)
Mina rakastan löyly, haluan saunassa nyt!
(What I hope I said: ‘I love throwing water on the sauna rocks and the experience of the resulting steam, I want to go into a sauna now’)
———————
On a more serious note, do you think the ever present threat of Russia and obligatory military service affects the expectations of Finnish people? Meaning, there is an actual tangible threat bordering Finland, which last invaded just 86 years ago (and forced Finland to ally with a country we won’t name so they would emerge from WWII independent, only Norway and Finland managed to achieve that, every other European country bordering the USSR was behind the iron curtain)
Do you think that keeps Finnish people’s expectations more grounded? Or is it something else entirely?
>While the quality of life really is objectively better with children, the secret to these rankings is probably the calibration inherent in the question.
that's not really a secret or calibration issue though, that gets to the core of what happiness is, a relational property between expectation and reality. It's not an objective measure like income or height.
I don't think the notion of an 'objective' quality of life even makes a lot of sense. Quality of life is always measured against some concrete alternative, not against some abstract scale or points based system. Two people are going to have very different attitudes towards some way of life purely depending on what direction they come from.
I would genuinely be shocked if North Korean's aren't happy. They're basically told they live in the best place on earth, have no basis for comparison to believe otherwise, and the sphere of influence of any particular average N Korean is narrow enough that if they were sad it would basically be artificially constraining their sadness to ones about personal failures they probably would rather not believe they have.
It's not starving, not having healthcare etc that makes you sad so much I think as thinking others are getting it while you are not, or believing that someone is pulling something over you rather than the situation being in your hands. If you think you're doing the best you can and your own success or failure is up to you, it's hard to be particularly sad about the situation compared to someone in another position.
I said that I thought not having eg. healthcare doesn't make you as sad as not having it while someone else does.
Nothing I've used in that relative comparison breaks the science you quote. And I do not need a citation to think something rather than to state it is fact. It would be odd indeed to require a citation to think of something.
No need for the snark, it’s very obviously a flawed heuristic which can obviously be improved with some adjustments. But this isn’t meant to be a research proposal. It was a simple example meant to illustrate a simple point.
Point being, some people like to whine even when they know damn well 99% of the world would happily trade places with them, and for very good reasons.
When I say our for-profit healthcare system is cruel, expensive and ineffective overall, am I whining?
When I say it sucks that we spend $1T on "defense" while raising taxes on working class people, is that whining?
Those things make people less happy.
Is your diagnosis the people are whining and that's why the US isn't at the top of the rankings like Denmark is? Do Danes just whine less?
I want to share one of my favorite quotes which is apt:
“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” -- James Baldwin
Wasn't intending snark. I figured it was a goofy way to point out the flaw in your implicit position that emigration data would be more meaningful than the survey. It still might be, it would just depend a lot more on laws and the marketing of economic opportunities than happiness IMO.
> Point being, some people like to whine even when they know damn well 99% of the world would happily trade places with them, and for very good reasons.
Well yeah, but this is an broad survey, not people whining.
People don't simply emigrate when conditions are bad or even horrible.
There are many barriers which can be almost impossible to surmount: learning a new language, leaving your friends behind, having to finding a job (what if you don't speak the language), having to sell you house and car, etc.
Americans are so drunk on the liberalism kool-aid that they think they can just relocate and instantly be accepted into new communities.
This doesn't work, and when it is observed empirically by our subject, he complains about "racism" etc. - except ofc. white-knighting and doubling down on this against non-"expat" black/brown "subhumans".
What was it that happened between 2023 and 2024? Here's all i can think of but none of these really explain it:
* Major terrorist attack in israel; its obvious we care way too much about this random country on the other side of the planet but even so i can't see that impacting people's happiness this hard.
* general populace now knows LLMs exist and may someday potentially perform jobs which were previously thought to be immune to automation but i would expect this to be offset by the people amazed by this technology.
* It's becoming increasingly apparent that our then-current president might actually suffer from a more serious case of Alzheimer's than reagan did; simultaneously it is becoming increasingly apparent that the only viable alternative is going to be trump again.
#3 is the only one that sort-of makes sense but I have doubts that people are this invested in presidential circuses on a personal level.
wait, is your point that there is some mystery about what happened to make the US even less happy? ... what didn't happen? It's hard to think of anything good that has happened in the last few years. Every month is scarier and more uncertain than the last.
i mean specifically between '23 and '24, i don't remember much happening on the national level then. COVID's been in the background for a few years and trump hasn't been re-elected yet.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted for asking a question that's simple and prompted by the graph visual. Everyone's so focused on talking about why people are unhappy in general, but why did it drop that much between 2023 and 2024 specifically? If it was politics, I'd have expected the drop to come between 2024 and 2025, unless it was the idea of the election itself that caused it. Any other explanation, and why wouldn't it have been the same in 2022-2023?
As an older person (52 y/o) who remembers a time when a lot more people I know (of all ages) were optimistic about the future, I believe the major factor leading to generalized anxiety currently is not about one event, but all the additive effects of massive and ever increasing wealth inequality piling up year over year.
That combined with little to no hope that either political party will do a damn thing to fix it (Democrats at least have some politicians who actually want to, but they are stymied by their own leadership, never mind the problem of not having any real national level political power currently).
Agreed. Even as someone only on the tail end of the millennial generation, the total disappearance of hope in the past 10-15 years (but especially in the last 5) has been palpable. There's a tweet that's been floating around recently that says something along the lines of "basically nobody under 40 expects good things to happen ever again", and I think that sums it up pretty accurately.
But that isn't new. Housing has been unaffordable for anybody who wasn't alive in the '70 for at least 15 years now. Healthcare has been a clusterfluck that it's been a major talking point in at least six consecutive presidential elections.
As far as the data presented in the chart goes, 'Happiness' is shown steadily climbing for a few years before '23, then it takes a massive dip in '23 then in '24 it declines but at a significantly slower rate than '23. Unless the way they measure 'happiness' is inaccurate and unreliable (in which case this whole article is garbage) there has to be an event that correlates with that.
Ok, but how did those things change between 2023 and 2024? The same party was in power and there wasn't a single monolithic wealth grab that happened that year.
This has all the scientific rigor of a "which Disney princess are you?" quiz.
> The Gallup World Poll, which remains the principal source of data in this report, asks respondents to evaluate their current life as a whole using the image of a ladder, with the best possible life for them as a 10 and the worst possible as a 0. Each respondent provides a numerical response on this scale, referred to as the Cantril Ladder. Typically, around 1,000 responses are gathered annually for each country. Weights are used to construct population-representative national averages for each year in each country. We base our happiness ranking on a three year average of these life evaluations since the larger sample size enables more precise estimates
Huh... Finland is #1 in happiness but has the third highest suicide rate in Western Europe (behind Belgium, France, and Switzerland) [1]. Belgium is medium happy, but has the 15th highest suicide rate in the world, substantially above the US. The UK is second lowest happiness, but has one of the lowest suicide rates in Europe. The difference in happiness between Finland and the US appears huge, yet their suicide rates are similar (Finland is next after the US of the countries on the happiness list)
Suicide rates aren't everything, but they are certainly telling a very different story. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
I vaguely recall reading before that happiest countries had increased suicide rates because if everyone around you is doing great and you're not, it increases feelings of shame and hopelessness, that there's something wrong or broken with you specifically. If life is tough and everyone is struggling, it sucks but feels less personally damning.
Anecdotally, the most depressed times in my life were when circumstances were objectively fine and I still couldn't manage to feel any less than terrible. Like, "This is as good as it's ever going to get???" Ironically having actual problems gave me both something to attribute the bad feelings to, and hope that I would feel better once I resolved the problems.
The science has spoken: the only way to be happy in Western society is to kill yourself.
Well Mexico seems to be quite happy and with not a lot of suicide, but they have incredibly cheap recreational drugs and it's quite accessible and not particularly frowned upon to enjoy a putería on the reg and on the side.
Coincidence? I think not.
Destroying your brain and pumping crime shouldn't be the solution to suicide.
Then why is US so low in happiness even though it's leading in suicides?
Yeah, when people try to bring these "X country is happier than Y" studies into conversations, I always tell them: the only thing those studies capture is how well the population's been trained to report that they're happy.
The training goes the other way in the US. Politicians, advertisers and the media all have a stake in telling you how unhappy you should be and it's surprisingly effective.
I'm the princess from Brave, in case you were wondering.
What a disappointing comment on HN. Did you check who published it, what the methodology used was, before commenting?
Of course not. Easier to be snarkier than to research and understand.
For the record: The World Happiness Report is published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, in partnership with Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and an independent editorial board.
https://www.worldhappiness.report/
> "which Disney princess are you?" quiz.
Dory, obviously.
Xenomorph Queen
Vanellope von Schweetz
It always has been. Obviously no offense to any country, but Palestine and Ukraine which are quite literally in the middle of conflicts are “happier” than places like India tells you that happiness is a vague concept and the methodology to measure it is quite dubious.
You shouldn't use it to compare other nations, but compare the same nation to it's prior years to see a trend.
You can’t even do that. The number of samples vary across the years and the number of samples do not account for population size. Australia for a population of 27M has a sample size of 1000 meanwhile India with a population of 1.5B gets a sample size of 3000. At that point the data might as well be just an error. It’s like going to NYC and asking 17 people whether they like Katz’s Deli. You will not get a representative sample at all on whether NYC likes Katz’s Deli. Might as well ask the Ouija board at that point.
How would you prefer they change it?
Happiness can be studied in a lot of ways, and none of them is complete or accurate. Momentary happiness is possible in a miserable life and vice versa.
I suspect this survey does tell us something over time, if methodology is stable.
I think the "death of despair" stats are a fairly significant marker of overall unhappiness. Look them up.
I don't think this survey tells us anything at all. Happiness is hard to define, personal, and capricious. It's better to not have studies than to have pretend science that people mistake for real science.
Maybe not going bankrupt because of medical expenses as the only first world country with universal healthcare? When it comes to the hierarchy of needs, not dying because of unaffordable or unavailable healthcare I’m sure ranks near the top.
There is no objective measure where the median American is better off than the median European.
I’m saying this as a born and bread American citizen who is fortunate enough to be on the better side of the economic divide.
The parent was asking how one might change the survey, not the US.
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> This is another article in a long tail of anti-American and anti-Western content that has been cropping up online for about two years now. It's getting to be a very popular subject.
1. Finland
2. Denmark
3. Iceland
4. Sweden
5. Netherlands
It's just an interesting assertion you're making, I suppose.
For example?
If you are also including this article.. I mean, it's not anti-western and I can't even see how it's anti-American. It's reporting survey results.
Here is how I read OP:
It is anti American not in the sense of “I think America is a bad/immortal place” but much more in the sense of “we objectively can measure that in accordance to Americans, America is bad for Americans”.. Now this could be true or not. It is anti American. If it is fair/true or not it’s an other question.
It’s pretty wild how people lump the collective West and the US together. Maybe that worked in the past, but the US as it is today is definitely not how one would imagine a western country.
Being the dominant western force, it is the current model for “the west”. It’s pretty wild how people say “the west” and are intending to not include the US front and center of that.
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Thank god the Netherlands is only #5. It’s high, but not too high. That said, the Finns probably got surveyed right after exiting the sauna. Is that fair?
* Direct link to 2025 report: https://www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2025/
* Rankings: https://data.worldhappiness.report/table
* Data for the US specifically: https://data.worldhappiness.report/country/USA
The main thing I found interesting was the big jump in "Benevolence" for 2020-2021, presumably related to the pandemic.
Happiness is irrelevant, productivity is the only metric that matters. Joking, not joking.
Get off HN and back to work you.
It really is - your life needs deep importance. Work is one of the things that provides that. If you feel like you're not important you're going to be unhappy.
I used to think like that. It made me miserable. What's made me happy has been to come to terms with it not mattering one iota whether it feels like I'm important.
That's not to say it's not a good feeling when someone finds utility in something I've done, but a nice walk also gives me the same good feeling.
One can find fulfilment in anything. You may think someone lazing on a beach all day is wasting their life, and they may think the same about a drone who is sitting in a windowless office for 60 hours a week from age 21 to 65 so their bosses can get richer. Family, community, art, relaxation, work - what is important in life is entirely up to you.
*that can provide that, as can many other things
America is rich, but normal citizens aren't making money anymore.
Not just that, normal citizens are getting poorer at a very rapid rate. Groceries, housing, healthcare, education are all more and more unaffordible every day. Inflation is eating away the American middle class lifestyle.
I don't leave the house anymore. Am I considered normal?
Long social distancing. It's a thing.
I wonder what's happening with Switzerland, as it seem to also be dropping on the graph
Austerity.
Switzerland has a slightly high suicide rate (not the best inverse metric of happiness but a correlation on unhappiness at least) for a country with such high standards of living, so if we look into suicide rates over time we also see a conundrum that over the past 20+ years the suicide rate is overall decreasing but has mostly flattened out. But from what I've observed anecdotally it still has problems like other developed countries with legacy industries declining (see: watchmakers and other artisanal crafts trades rather than mining) where boomers in the country are pretty miserable and that will probably be noticed in macro level statistics.
Switzerland has been such an odd place where its population enjoys an enlightened high quality life funded on the back of the world’s shadiest wealth.
And in the midst of that is down to one final bank which if it collapsed is worth something like 20x the gdp of the nation in holdings.
So maybe the Swiss are waking up to how much more delicate their situation may be.
Would be interesting to see happiness segmented by Democrats/ Republicans.
I would speculate Republicans are wildly happier when "their team is 'winning'" and Democrats would have a boost in happiness with Democrats in power, but nowhere near the swing of Republicans. Democrats, IMO, are more aware of the *real* current and longterm problems the US faces while Republicans listen to whatever Republicans say the "problems" are - "problems" that are too often very outlandish and not based in reality.
I agree that both probably swing depending on who’ “winning”, although I bet that generally the Dems tend to be significantly less happy and therefore swing less, relatively.
I suspect the results would be skewed significantly by whether or not the questions asked seemed overtly political in nature. If you probe people in general quality of life measures and carefully avoid loaded language, you’d likely find both sides are suffering in the US in real terms due to cost of living and loneliness crises. These are trends that have been prevailing since at least the 80s and were accelerated by mass media and the Internet.
But tribal loyalty is a powerful force, so as soon as the questions or questioner appears partisan in any way, people form ranks for “their side” and you’d be hard pressed to get an honest response, least of all one that reflects badly on their team at the helm.
Can you give me a specific problem that is not based in reality that republicans discuss?
Republicans routinely discuss:
- Trans people being an issue.
- Gun problems being an issue of the person holding the gun or gun related deaths being a necessary evil - evidence from practically every country on earth with strict gun rules shows otherwise. Less guns = less gun deaths full stop.
- Climate change being fake, chemtrails, Geoengineering, weather manipulation.
- Science, particularly medical research being fake. Covid vaccines being harmful, etc.
- "The great replacement theory"
- White genocide in countries around the world
- Jan 6th not being an atrocity.
- Ending non-existent wars.
Among many others.
How about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors' pets. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77l28myezko
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conspiracy_theories_pr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_grooming_conspiracy_theo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement_conspiracy_t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italygate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempts_to_overturn_the_2020_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation_about_the_2024_...
As someone who leans left. I doubt too many Democrats were excited about Biden. He was just “not Trump”. People actually liked Obama and Clinton.
Taking political constraints into account, the Biden Administration was just about the most successful and effective, in policy terms, of the past 50 years. Unfortunately the political landscape is pretty unfavorable, with GOP-supportive media, a GOP-aligned Supreme Court and super wealthy people, increasingly extremist state governments in many parts of the country, decades of corporate consolidation, weakening civic institutions, and an electorate that largely ignores the details. Biden himself was never a great orator and his public charisma suffered further with age, but as far as governing goes, he did a great job. Harris would also have been an excellent president.
Unfortunately building and fixing things (or just keeping things working, negotiating compromises, and so on) takes a lot of time and effort, and doesn't make for great pithy slogans or rile people up.
The term was "excited", not "successful and effective". The excitement for Obama vs. Biden was not even close. ("Yes we can!" vs. "Let's elect our doddering but normal 80ish white guy, not the crazy 80ish white guy!")
I can't disagree with that. I was initially excited (and later pretty disappointed) with Obama, especially with the amount of time he wasted trying to engage with people obviously acting in bad faith, with the way he let himself be pushed around by folks who were aligned against his ideals, and with the extent to which he disengaged after leaving office. Clinton was sadly an even bigger disappointment. I had initially very low expectations of Biden, didn't vote for him in the 2020 primary, and was quite impressed with his actual governing.
What did he accomplish?
What topic areas specifically are you interested in? I'm assuming you don't want a list of hundreds of bullet points of small legislative or administrative changes. The most newsworthy things are stuff like getting us out of the forever wars in the Middle East, standing up to Putin and rallying NATO and other allies to support Ukraine, making big investments in American manufacturing and alternative energy, working to reign in large corporations and protect consumers and the public in a wide variety of ways big and small, protecting workers' salaries and fair treatment, improving access to healthcare and keeping costs down, protecting women's access to healthcare despite a hostile misogynist Supreme Court, working to relieve punishing student loans (again with opposition from the Court), ...
The FTC and his war on corporations was a failure none of the lawsuits went anywhere and it made the environment worse for startups. Now VC funding is nowhere near the level it use to be outside of large AI companies because large tech companies are squeamish of acquisitions - lLimiting the path to successful exits.
What they are doing now is hiring out all of the people they want from startups and leaving the undesirables in a lurch and decimating VCs investments - Google, Microsoft and Amazon have all used this playbook.
The problem with “administrative changes” is that they can easily be undone.
And he didn’t “protect women’s healthcare” at all. The red states are still seeing women die because doctors are afraid to perform abortions when the life of the mother is in danger and blue states aren’t - the status quo.
The very reason that Biden is an inconsequential President was because everything he did was easily undone between his lack of willingness to step aside even though he and everyone else knew he should and trying to do things through executive orders.
The Supreme Court is another symptom of old people not retiring when they should, dying on the bench allowing a Republican President to nominate replacements.
You seem to be singularly focused on VC funding for startups and decision-making by managers inside large tech companies as your metric of how the US economy is doing. In my opinion this is a poor criterion for analyzing the success of national political parties, since political changes have only limited influence on these, and they are in conflict with improving many other parts of the economy affecting much larger numbers of people.
By a wide range of economic metrics, the US economy during the Biden administration was incredibly successful. We somehow managed to reign in inflation caused by the follow-on disruptions coming from Covid pandemic and the Russia–Ukraine war, while maintaining full employment and avoiding negative economic effects expected by most economists. Real wages went up. Federal investments set up long-term gains for US manufacturing. The US economy did better than just about every other industrialized economy in the world during the same time period.
Blaming Biden for the following administration doing everything it can to trash the economy and reverse every bit of progress he made is ridiculous. It's like blaming the fire department for the actions of an arsonist. Again, if you want sweeping legislation and long-term commitment to policy changes, you need to elect (and keep electing) enough votes in Congress.
How is employment doing these days in the tech sector? You know the sector that is been driving the stock market for over a decade? What did he do to rein in corporations? Are any of them less powerful than thet were in 2020?
Exactly what did he do that had any long lasting impact? Obama had the ACA.
Biden in fact was the worse Democratic President for not stepping aside early enough and letting the DNC have a real primary. It was sheer selfishness and ego.
Results count - not excuses.
Biden came into office in the middle of a Covid crisis substantially caused by the previous administration (which he then was unfairly blamed for the effects of by people arguing in bad faith). During the first two years of Biden's presidency the Democrats had a tied 50–50 Senate (including 2 prima donna Senators who repeatedly undermined Democrats' legislative priorities) and a narrow House majority. During the second two years they had a 51–49 Senate majority and lost control of the House. They never had the votes for anything like the ACA. But within the very difficult constraints of a 50–50 Senate with no possibility of abolishing the filibuster (i.e. requiring 60 votes, and thus significant GOP support, to pass any legislation), the Dems were remarkably effective in 2021–2022, exceeding my expectations.
If you want to see sweeping legislation, you have to elect a Congress that with enough votes to pass it. Blaming Biden for not having the votes is an expression of political cluelessness.
> During the first two years of Biden's presidency the Democrats had a tied 50–50 Senate (including 2 prima donna Senators who repeatedly undermined Democrats' legislative priorities) and a narrow House majority.
Look up the Senate Parliamentarian and how the Democrats used them as an excuse to not get anything done.
They could have played hardball with their rogue Senators but they didn't.
Again what did he do? The Covid vaccine was created and approved before he was elected.
You really think people were excited about Biden like Obama or Clinton?
> Again what did he do?
Inflation Reduction Act [0][1]
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act [2][3]
CHIPS and Science Act [4]
He worked to use our tax dollars to spur re-investment in America. From factory construction and utility jobs to grid resilience and innovation. Not to mention that zero to few Republicans voted for these, yet they are the largest benefactors. Texas massive growth spurt in Green energy can thank Biden, but they won't even though they are happy to take the infrastructure investments and enjoy the cheaper energy and jobs. I'll just be happy if I dont have to deal with another Great Texas Freeze.
Also, and even though, the coal mining communities didn't vote for him he made sure to single out investment specifically to coal communities "it announced $428 million in grants for 14 projects in coal communities, creating 1,900 jobs and leveraging $500 million in private investments."
Those also include tax reform (to collect from super-rich tax evaders, expire the deep corporate tax cuts etc) and prescription drug reform to lower prices among other things like investing in green energy projects for low income communities. He brought investment back into this country without sucker punching our allies.
Imo, that's what my tax dollars are for, for reinvestment back into building this country -- not to give rich business friends that donate meme coins to a family account extra large tax cuts or giving bonuses for rounding up brown people (including US citizens - google if you want links) and empower a federal immigration force to throw out any integrity and character they had before being told to make a spectacle.
Anyway there is a lot in there is you care to read up on it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act#Projec...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Investment_and_...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Investment_and_...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act
How is Intel doing these days? They have already kicked out one poor performing CEO and no company wants to use Intel for chip fabs. Nvidia is partnering with Intel on design - not fabrication.
How much do you want to bet that in four years nothing he did will have made a difference and Trump is going to undo it? That wouldn’t have been an issue if Biden had stepped aside and announced he wasn’t going to run for reelection earlier. Again results count. The few things he “accomplished” are going to be undone because he didnt step aside.
And all of his “prescription reforms” weren’t put into law and were easy to undo by the next administration.
The Republicans no matter how hard they try can’t kill the ACA and are probably going to vote to increase funding. The ACA would have been a lot easier to kill if Obama hadn’t won reelection. Biden should have known he couldn’t win.
What Trump does is on him, not Biden. You asked what Biden did.
The ACA is an accomplishment that stood the test of time. Everything that Biden did will be inconsequential because he didn’t step aside to try to secure what he did.
Not to mention the Chips act just threw money at a flailing Intei without any strategy. There was a strategy behind Obama’s getting through the financial crises and the ACA
The ACA was passed with 60 Democratic Senate votes and not a single GOP vote in House or Senate.
Biden had a 50–50 Senate, counting Manchin and Sinema among the 50. If you think he "should have" passed similar legislation and consider his failure to do so to be some kind of failure of willpower, then you fundamentally don't understand how our political system works. If the Dems don't have the votes, it's nonsensical to blame them for not being able to pass legislation that is opposed by 100% of the GOP.
The ACA was a big accomplishment, and it managed to go through during the exactly 72 working days since 1980 when the Democrats had such a majority in Congress and the Presidency. (We all owe an incredible debt of gratitude for that to Nancy Pelosi, who was personally responsible for getting it over the finish line after Ted Kennedy died in office.) If the Dems consistently had large congressional majorities, they could make much more progress. If you want to see that happen, make sure they get the votes.
I have repeatedly said what I think he should have done - announced after the mid terms that he wasn’t going to seek re-election, let there be a real primary and if another Democrat could have been elected they could have solidified the foundation he set.
Excusing that is like commending a surgeon for saving a life and then not washing his hands during follow up and killing the patient allowing the wound to get infected.
And why haven’t the democrats had a platform that could convince enough people to vote for them in the Senate since then?
The Democratic majority didn’t happen by accident. Howard Dean pushed for the “50 state strategy” in 2008. The current Democrats are feckless
In other words, you think the Dems "should" have won the election in 2024, and that they didn't was entirely down to on Biden's personal decisions. Because they didn't win that election, everything that the GOP and voters do afterward is now Biden's fault personally.
The first part is a counter-factual hypothesis that seems wrong, which you keep insisting on without any evidence. The second part is thoroughly fallacious.
To first order, the summary is that you don't think Biden or his administration deserves credit for anything they actually did, while simultaneously thinking they deserve blame for a large number of things that other people did that they were personally opposed to and worked against.
Do you really think that if there had been a real primary Kamala would have been the nominee? She was part of an unpopular administration and she couldn’t distance herself from it.
You did see the first debate didn’t you? Could there possibly have beeb a worse strategy than what the DNC did?
Biden doesn’t get a participation trophy for doing things that were innaffective.
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> Gay and trans people are not going back in the closet
We do not know this and social progress can't be taken for granted. We've seen many countries regress rapidly when totalitarian regimes (especially theocracies) got their foothold in power. Directly (Iran) or by proximity (Poland).
It's a naive story of the 90's that social progress is always upwards. Liberalism both social and economic is definitely on the back foot.
In the short term progress doesn't look linear, but women can vote, can open credit cards without a husband, interracial marriage isn't going anywhere.
Despite the current drama I do believe that in the long term today's culture wars will sound just as quaint.
> interracial marriage isn't going anywhere
The legal argument for in Loving v. Virginia was the same argument that was rejected when Roe v. Wade overturned in Dobbs. Thomas actually calls out the other major cases, basically asking for a chance to overturn those as well, specifically Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. He's not going to overturn Loving given that hes in an interracial marriage himself, but whoever replaces him when he finally retires might, and he would have done all of the work getting case law to that point.
There's more to it than the politicization of the people.
Since the survey is for the country I wonder if patriotism would factor in what a person would say about their happiness
Conservatives outperform liberals in self-reported happiness and mental health when controlling for demographics.
“Outperform” is a strange way of putting this. When did happiness and mental health become a contest?
Happiness and health are objective goods, in this case quantified.
It's probably directly linked to their higher level of religiosity.
This is observed among atheists.
What demographics and what does it mean to control them for statistics?
> What demographics
All of the ones you'd see most commonly: age, sex, race, religion, level of education, marital status, etc.
> control
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlling_for_a_variable
There's a Nate Silver article "What explains the liberal-conservative happiness gap?" at https://www.natesilver.net/p/what-explains-the-liberal-conse..., although it seems to equate happiness with mental health.
With that caveat, the conclusion there is that "The liberal-conservative happiness gap persists across all demographics".
Meaning there is no demographic category in which liberals are happier than conservatives — "conservative gays and lesbians report higher happiness than heterosexual liberals".
Lol.
If our happiness is connected to political party affiliation, we're in big trouble. The actual party doesn't matter. The true hallmark of totalitarianism is when every aspect of civil society is politicized.
> true hallmark of totalitarianism is when every aspect of civil society is politicized
No? The true hallmarks of totalitarianism are a lack of political competition (usually due to repression) and the state controlling “all aspects of society, including the family, religion, education, business, private property, and social relationships” [1].
Ancient Athens was a famously political society. It was not totalitarian.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism
I agree. We've got a uniparty with two wings that doesn't allow any serious competition. We fight over things that will soon seem trivial in hindsight.
So, basically California is under Totalitarianism.
If anyone is curious, Howtown did a video a little while ago on some of the methodology of this:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg1--c2r8HE
General overview:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
There's also the mental state of the world report by Sapien Labs, which tells a different story: https://mentalstateoftheworld.report
I believe this is more accurate, although it's not just happiness. They measure MHQ, i.e. Mind Health Quotient with various mental health related metrics.
I just looked at the report for the first time and it's quite insane how bad young people are feeling globally. Old people seem to be fine on average everywhere. The distributions don't even overlap i.e. the most unwell old people (Ukraine, UK, etc.) are doing better than the most well-being young people (Nigeria, Tanzania) on country average basis.
Interesting that Mexico is much higher than the U.S.! I could believe it though.
The article has a paywall for me and I was curious about their methodology. Fortunately, Wikipedia has some information:
"Nationally representative samples of respondents are asked to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
It could be named the "lack of ambition" report.
Or equally lack of envy or discontent.
"Why are the Europeans happy when they're so poor?"
The two are not mutually exclusive.
I believe that these self-reported surveys are partly testing the cultural acceptability of complaining—that is, the more unacceptable it is to complain, the happier one comes out in the scoring. How well that corresponds to 'actual' happiness is, of course, a different question.
I base this on experience with some of the 'happy' cultures on the list. However, I would be interested in knowing whether HN members from Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and the Netherlands (to name the top 5) agree with this concept or not.
Half Dutch half American. I find the Dutch complain a decent bit more, but I find that there is more to complain about in the States. Maar wat is het leven zonder klagen?
One thing I've noticed being back recently: cost of living has gotten very unaffordable in Amsterdam the last time I was back. Cost of basic goods is on par with what I'm used to paying in major American cities, but my Dutch relatives often earn a decent bit less. I wonder if this will affect Dutch happiness in future surveys once affordability exceeds more and more people's earnings.
I'm Norwegian, and we're down to 7th place, but I've lived half my life in the UK, and I can tell you that Norwegians will complain just as much as people in the UK, if not far more whenever I visit family.
It's the national sport. In fact, if you tell most Norwegians about coming 7th on a World Happiness ranking, odds are high most of us will complain loudly about that too, thinking we deserve a higher spot, and that there's no ways the Finns and especially Swedes can be higher than us on the list (being beaten by the Danes is okay).
In other words, I don't think this matches cultural acceptability of complaining at all. Norwegians will express dissatisfaction loudly and about everything (don't get a Norwegian started on the quality of the roads, or taxes; at the same time, don't get a majority of Norwegians started on "American conditions" or the political parties that might bring them about by lowering taxes), while still generally living pretty great lives.
Plenty of eastern European countries on that list above US, so your theory has no real basis.
You buried your thesis statement.
"US is not actually unhappy. The survey is broken" or somesuch.
I guess a cultural willingness to complain could also have a feedback effect on the 'actual' happiness.
Exactly. This is like saying "the people aren't unhappy, they just think they are unhappy". Well if they think they are unhappy then they are unhappy.
There are cultural differences, but once you have the baseline, I think the delta is more interesting, so how happiness has changed in a country throughout the years.
Wouldn't the cultural factor of complaining not mean as much since it's a survey for scientific purposes?
For example, it's considered weird to talk about how many times I went to the bathroom this week but if asked by a doctor I would be more willing to provide the information
Yes it has nothing to do with healthcare, education, work-life balance etc. Must be something else.
and commuting, not sure if nerd-snipping with Waymo is going to help here.
How does nerd-sniping with Waymo work? Is it about nerd-sniping a person so they get hit by a Waymo, or is it about nerd-sniping the Waymo itself, distracting it before having a human hit it?
D'oh, I think I got nerd-sniped there for a second.
It is obvious to anybody who has ever been to the Nordic countries: They are far from being the happiest people in the world. A lot of them are very miserable, for reasons that I could never deduce.
Is it? As someone from Norway, who has spent plenty of time in the other Nordic countries, I'd disagree strongly. We'll complain a lot. Until you ask us to actually rank how happy we are with our lives.
If you base you impression on what people are saying without explicitly asking how happy they are with their lives, then you're getting an impression that's biased by almost an eagerness to complain, despite at the end of the day generally being very satisfied.
This makes sense to me. Also, sometimes complaining isn't a sign of unhappiness - it's a sign one has standards and the self-esteem to stick up for them.
You're disagreeing with yourself. Somebody who complains a lot and in other ways shows how miserable they are does not become happy by saying they are happy. You can maybe lie to yourself that you are happy, but you can't fool others. Although Norwegians and Danes are generally happier than Finns and Swedes.
No, I am not. Complaining does not require unhappiness at all. That there are lots of things I'd like to be better does not mean I'm not happy. That I enjoy complaining does not make me unhappy either - on the contrary, it makes me happier.
> You can maybe lie to yourself that you are happy
This is inherently paradoxical and hence nonsensical. If you successfully convince yourself that you are happy, you are happy.
> Although Norwegians and Danes are generally happier than Finns and Swedes.
That you think you know better than people themselves whether they are happy is just rude and insulting.
You are the person focusing on complaining specifically. I stated that the Nordics are far from being the happiest people in the world, and that is not by counting how much people complain.
> This is inherently paradoxical and hence nonsensical. If you successfully convince yourself that you are happy, you are happy.
If people are visibly unhappy but tell you that they are very happy, that doesn't mean that they've become happy by convincing themselves. That's like a guy screaming and punching you while he's saying that he's very calm. It's not reality, it's delusion.
When somebody successfully convinces themselves to be happy, they don't continue their lives showing all the behaviour and attitudes of an unhappy person. You can also outwardly tell that they are happy.
> That you think you know better than people themselves whether they are happy is just rude and insulting.
Oh, the insolence!
> You are the person focusing on complaining specifically. I stated that the Nordics are far from being the happiest people in the world, and that is not by counting how much people complain.
Explain to us in what way you have determined that you know better than people themselves how happy they are, then, please.
> When somebody successfully convinces themselves to be happy, they don't continue their lives showing all the behaviour and attitudes of an unhappy person. You can also outwardly tell that they are happy.
Given what you've written I have no reason to believe that you are capable of telling whether people are happy or not at all, as I simply don't believe you will pick out genuine markers of unhappiness from culturally or personality dependent traits that are not.
We have been under attack for years and it is definitely working. Hell, at this point it’s not off the table that our democracy itself will fall to this attack. I’d be incredibly impressed by the effectiveness, if it were not so frankly depressing.
Our president won't condemn violence and Politicians on the right all fan the flames while holding everyone to higher standards than the president himself when it comes to violent rhetoric.
Gun violence regardless of position is still always in the news, and the party in power has no intention of doing anything about it.
The political elite actively shun science.
Tech billionaires are all licking the boot - so the hopes some had that those with money and large corporate entities would keep the government in check are long gone.
Politicians actively endanger our international relationships with the entire world. Everybody in the world looks at us like a laughing stock.
The elite actively welcome and cheer for AI taking peoples jobs.
The economy is shit meanwhile our leaders lie to our faces about how tariffs and their own economic policies work and pointing at wall street gains meanwhile the majority of Americans don't invest in the first place.
Our rights are being stripped. Military/National Guard is actively deployed in the streets in places, and there is threat of deployment in other places (hint left leaning places). Any speech not aligned with the presidents values is criticized and threatened at a national scale.
Politics is just a reality TV show made for clicks and our current leaders are basically the equivalent if children bickering. "Transparency" is completely gone - they ran on transparency and then immediately flipped, who coulda seen that coming.
There is literally nothing to be happy about here unless you're already rich.
I'm not rich, but I'm still happy. I have little reason not to be.
I woke up today and the sun shining and birds chirping. I made myself and my partner breakfast, greeted people on my way to work. I got a good amount of work done, then had a nice lunch and now I'm taking a little break.
My life is better than it was growing up and substantially better than how bad it was for my ancestors.
Perhaps my expectations are lower than yours or perhaps I'm more focused on the present and my actual experiences rather than ruminating on whatever sensationalistic news story of the day is or what could happen, but while I can't say I'm happy about most of what you describe, they don't affect my day-to-day happiness. I'm not going to worry about things I can't change that may or may not affect me.
>Tech billionaires are all licking the boot
I never understood that. What is the point of amassing all that money and power if you have to grovel to terrible people?
Are you familiar of the parable of the Monk and the Minister? It goes something like this:
Two close friends grow up and part ways. One becomes a monk, the other one becomes a minister to the king.
Many years later they meet again.
As they catch up, the minister, wearing fancy clothes, pities on the homely monk. Trying to help, he says: "You know, if you could learn to cater to the king you wouldn't have to live on rice and beans."
To which the monk replies: "If you could learn to live on rice and beans you wouldn't have to cater to the king!"
I was told that the billionaires run the goverment, so I don't know what you are talking about.
Germany lower that the US ? That is a bit questionable to me.
It seems this is self-reported. And we Germans certainly wouldn't admit that we're living pretty good lives overall. There's always something to complain about.
This year it looks like Germany is higher on the scale. I am surprised by Mexico being really high.
It's mostly people just rating their own lives, which leaves it open to people in different cultures reporting the same actual happiness differently. In some cultures, saying you're happy is bragging, so people understate. In others, rating it low is complaining, so people report overly happy.
I see World Happiness Report as primarily a measure of what's considered the most socially acceptable way to discuss happiness across cultures. In the USA, people often brag about how miserable they are, for example.
It's not all about finance. From my recent visits to Mexico everyone there seems much happier and friendlier than in the US and Europe. It was honestly quite striking. I have no theory what causes this (maybe large families?), but it was really quite obvious.
I have an unsubstantiated theory that people in Latin America largely realize their institutions are completely broken or ineffectual, thus they and their local community are on their own in life. Thus it is pointless to be angry about a lot of things people in other places are angry about (corruption, government, immigrants, prices, corporations, etc) because it's a total lost cause, it's not like they could vote it away even if they tried. The end result is their sphere of worries basically are constrained to their immediate family, work, and community all of which are things they not only have control over but actually probably will care about them.
Mexico is finally shedding their neoliberal order and getting stuff built and people taken care of (instead of foreign investors). President Sheinbaum has like an 80% approval rating.
It's a few spots higher than the US this year.
Actually two.
I'm surprised that Germany is that high... it's decent in summer, miserable the rest of the year
They have standards.
Why? Germany has been in a sustained economic decline now for many years and has seen the shuttering of manufacturing and skyrocketing housing costs.
Americas mistakes are not as unique to us as Europeans keep telling themselves.
High crime, high taxes, stagnating economy. I am surprised Germany landed this high on the list.
I would be surprised if their ranking would be increased if any of these were addressed.
What high crime? I'm assuming we're using the US as a reference here given the audience of this site.
Crime isn't high. No real risk of random violence in my experience (unlike the US, e.g. >weekly school shootings etc.). Taxes and economy, they aren't good right now true.
> From the 2000–01 to 2021–22 school years, there were 1,375 school shootings at public and private elementary and secondary schools, resulting in 515 deaths and 1,161 injuries.
1,700 people out of ~50 million K-12 students in a 22 year period.
.003352% chance of injury or worse over 22 years. And now I realize the denominator should be bigger because it doesn't count faculty/staff or college students.
There's no reason to live in fear of school shootings. (But there should still be much greater gun control.)
When there is a school shooting, you should count everyone in the school as deeply affected. Maybe the district.
From wikipedia it looks like there's 13,000 school districts in the US - so 1 in 10 (!!!!) has had a school shooting in the last 22 years. Am I doing this right?
I'd say far worse. So much US discourse is about school shootings, that it's clear it's affecting people far outside the school districts themselves.
It's affectional national politics.
You are assuming that each school shooting is in a separate district in the calculation. That is not necessarily the case, especially with some large school district serving many more students than a small rural district.
But I agree with you that it affects the school and community deeply, even in surrounding communities. I live in Texas, and the whole state was deeply affected after Uvalde. A relative's school got evacuated a few weeks later out of what happened to be a false alarm, with the relative forced to exit the school hands above their head to show they didn't have a gun. They were on the complete other side of the state, probably like a 6 hour drive away.
I think only concentrating on those that were shot or injured ignores the impact of being exposed to gun violence, especially during formative years in a situation where it's in the building you're in and results in the death or injury of your friends. Hundreds of thousands of people in the USA have experienced being in a school shooting event.
I also think that it's fair to think about other examples of exposure to violence and not just the Parent's example of weekly school shootings. Speaking of gun violence, I'm not sure I know anyone personally in the USA who haven't been impacted by it, whether that's knowing someone who was hurt, having to lock down at work or home, having to drive a different route home because of an active shooting, or just hearing it and then hearing the sirens. Of course, these are not all equal, but it's interesting to think about.
Aren't the Nordic countries listed at the top also the highest consumers of anti-depressants? I only know this because having travelled to the Copenhagen airport many times with Danish colleagues, one of them mentioned it when we saw the inevitable "Welcome to the happiest country on Earth" posters.
> Aren't the Nordic countries listed at the top also the highest consumers of anti-depressants?
Here's a report of the countries with most antidepressant users in the world 2024 (https://ceoworld.biz/2024/05/12/revealed-countries-with-most...):
1. Iceland
2. Portugal
3. UK
4. Canada
5. Australia
6. Sweden
7. Spain
8. New Zealand
9. Chile
10. Belgium
This report lists OECD countries but excludes the US. If the US were included, the report suggests the US would be among the top (either highest or second-highest) in terms of DDD per 1,000 inhabitants.
That could be because the "happy" countries have good health systems with wide coverage, so the people that need anti-depressants get them. In the "sad" countries people with depression often don't get to see a doctor, so a whole lot of people have undiagnosed and unmedicated depression.
Putting aside the silliness of trying to quantify happiness, that could just as easily be a marker of wealth or western fascination with chemicals. I've visited extremely poor countries & from what I can tell, antidepressants aren't going to make a dent in many if not most issues humans face.
Turns out people are happy living places where they can get help and treatment.
Probably happy where you can get a job.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_antidepre...
> The OECD have not included the United States in these reviews, but if added the country would have the highest or second-highest rate.
Nordic countries are also not on the top of the list.
This is basically just a list of developed countries where people can afford luxury medication.
It could also be a matter of the seasons in the case of Iceland.
Everything is expensive, our president is the dumbest person to ever live, we're constantly at threat of random shootings, and did I mention everything is expensive?
People in Mexico are much poorer and the country has huge crime and corruption problems. Just the disappeared people and especially women alone are massively concerning and likely worse per capita than US school shootings. Yet somehow they are happier there.
I think it’s about momentum. The perception is that the US is in some ways getting worse and Mexico is getting better.
Who is better off, the software engineer who lost her $250k job and had to settle for a new job that pays $150k, or the teacher who found a new job and got a raise from $50k to $70k? The software engineer might be better off while simultaneously less happy about their situation.
People on the internet said the same things about W, and thought things couldn't get worse.
Oops.
A state by state breakdown would be more interesting.
Many US states are larger than multiple EU countries combined.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-states-where-america...
I've heard a lot of worries from friends, especially friends with kids, I had never heard before. Mostly gun violence and the loss of women's rights, which some friends have voiced as restricting their options in where they will work and live that they never had before. That, and the new anxiety about bringing your phone on a plane, which I share.
> and the new anxiety about bringing your phone on a plane
This one I am not familiar with. What's the latest development here?
An increase in phone searches at points of entry and broad threats of detention and passport revocation if you're critical of Trump / supportive of Palestine / a "member" of the latest "terrorist organization" Antifa
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/16/brian-mast-m...
All the anti-trans stuff has basically guaranteed that I can never live or work in half the country, because it would be fundamentally unsafe for some family members to even visit me there.
I can’t take this seriously, there is no way in which people are systematically unhappier today than during Covid, just to give one example.
Well covid brought in wfh which for a lot of people was a big boost to QOL.
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If you have such disdain for this community, you can always go to a different website instead of begging to be banned for being abrasive and tiresome.
Sadly, Christ compels me to educate the ignorant.
"You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’
But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.
Matthew 5:21-22
https://www.gotquestions.org/raca.html
I'm sure he'll understand when I explain statistics to him.
What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. So it is not the will of my[a] Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.
Matthew 18:12-14
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See: Zone of Interest - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zone_of_Interest_(film)
Socialized healthcare. We don't have healthcare for everybody, but ship shitloads of Cash to Israel. This can't he healthy.
They are just happy that Europeans or Muslims are not slaughtering them and also have the ability to defend if such cases arise (despite said Europeans being not happy about that and actively trying to degrade that). Looks like they went from fourth to eighth, and IMHO having hostages still held in Gaza is the biggest contributor of unhappiness.
US killed far more in Iraq, so might be unrelated.
The U.S. killed less than 6,000 people in their invasion. What you are referring to is a civil war and a terrible comparison for Israel's ongoing war against Gaza.
The last Iraq incursion was directly responsible for the rise of ISIS in the area, giving them a stronghold for mass slaughter throughout Iraq and Syria.
Saddam Hussein was obviously a murderous psychopath, albeit one who held tight enough reign to mostly subordinate the other psychopaths in the area, so you can ask the question about our culpability in switching that trolley onto a new set of tracks.
Yes but the US is not ISIS and did not do that. So be clear and stop conflating.
That's one take on the trolley problem, but it's a controversial one for a reason.
US did not kill those people, a civil war did. Flippantly conflating the two things does not do your argument any good.
The civil war didn't kill those people, the bullets that went into the brain of the casualties did. Flippantly conflating the two things does not do your argument any good.
Now of course the bullets were inspired by a guy pulling a trigger, the guy pulling the trigger was inspired by the civil war (more specifically to name one example, the the ISIS-Kurdish one in the northern region of Iraq and Syria), the civil war was inspired by the power vacuum, and the power vacuum was inspired by the toppling of Saddam, and the toppling of Saddam was inspired by the USA blowing up the Iraqi regime.
Whether the US is culpable, again, I left as a question. But they did pull the lever for the trolley.
You understand by this reductionist logic you are responsible for the sins of the entire world. By being born your actions triggered through your existence all terrible things that have happened since.
I can’t believe you’d be this dumb. This is well trodden moral philosophy bullshit.
I can't believe you'd be as dumb as to compare being born to blowing up a bunch of people, leading to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths[] (mostly of civilians), many of which who now with their livelihoods and homes blown up and radicalized against the west, then were easy fodder to join any jihadist with a dollar and a plan with newly equipped with captured M16/M4s and Humvees and freshly freed up territory.
And apparently, it's wrong to just question if the USA might have culpability for the aftermath of that.
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
Its not genocide though. Feel free to provide a link to the legal judgement.
You mean this one? https://www.un.org/unispal/document/commission-of-inquiry-re...
Perhaps when you’re surrounded and significantly outnumbered by people who want you dead, and have almost succeeded in doing so very recently, you get a sense of purpose.
> Perhaps when you’re surrounded
False
> and significantly outnumbered by people who want you dead,
False
> and have almost succeeded in doing so very recently,
False
> not mentioning settlements, seizure of land, imprisonment, precious campaigns on Gaza strip, apartheid, etc...
> > and significantly outnumbered by people who want you dead,
> False
Can you provide some sort of evidence to your response? AFAIK surrounding countries are not fond of Jews as evidenced by lack of Jews in those countries.
Also the only western country with a birth rate above replacement, IIRC.
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>People are feeling good south of the border. Can't wait to join them.
What happened to the narco-state situation, murder by the thousands, etc? It's all gone already?
Mexico is putting out some fine cinema recently.
Mexico might be the new California.
It was also the old California.
>> Mexico might be the new California
More like the new Oregon...the new place where people are justifiably pissed off about all the Californians moving there.
Any recommendations?
The first thing that comes to mind is the work of directors Alphonso Cuarón, Guillermo Del Toro, and Alejandro González Iñárritu.
Arguably these are largely American productions, but creatively they’re at the top of the field. Cuarón, in particular, takes my breath away.
Roma is amazing and the documentary about it made me appreciate it even more. The insane attention to historical detail!
Everyone unhappy with Mexico isn’t in Mexico anymore!
The American capitalists might have something to say about that tho!
Blow off your credit card payments. It's the only sane course.
Some years ago I moved back to Finland (#1) after several years in the US (now at #24).
While the quality of life really is objectively better with children, the secret to these rankings is probably the calibration inherent in the question. Finnish people just don’t have high expectations. Every positive development is a welcome surprise.
Americans are primed to want it all and seem to constantly compare themselves against unachievable standards on social media. “The American Dream” is more illusionary than ever. Everybody is a temporarily inconvenienced billionaire. This can be positive when it produces a drive that builds things, but it seems to mostly produce unhappiness right now because it’s so out of balance.
the secret to these rankings is probably the calibration inherent in the question. Finnish people just don’t have high expectations. Every positive development is a welcome surprise.
Yes but that calibration is also the secret to happiness.
All happiness is relative to expectation.
I have lived in Thailand for the last ~8yrs. It's unfortunate not to see it on the list as I think generally speaking Thais are much happier than either US (where I travel a lot for work) or Australians (my home country).
A big chunk of that is the expectations, they don't need many material things to enjoy life and place a much higher emphasis on community and social standing (which isn't primarily derived from material wealth). Your occupation in Thailand has a very large impact on your social standing - more than the income you derive from it. i.e doctors are extremely well respected, however public doctors more so than private ones despite the latter being more wealthy.
Sense of community is something that builds you up rather than the Western trope of comparing yourself to your neighbour that breaks you down.
That very simple difference seems to have an outsized impact on how happy folk are here.
There are exceptions and Bangkok is much more Western but if you live out in the country like me then Thailand is a very happy place.
While what you said may be true, it's also likely that (I assume) being an expat you are generally living in large urban areas and interacting with the top N% of the country in terms of wealth and opportunity. Go a bit deeper and the reality may be very different.
As a US citizen I just want affordable healthcare, housing, and a system that supports families. I think for the younger generation where this isn't attainable it causes a lot of unhappiness and leads to greater stressors. Also we are at a big low with faith in our political system across the pillars of government. I think for most of us we don't want it all, we just want our basic needs met without worrying about losing then tomorrow.
> Finnish people just don’t have high expectations. Every positive development is a welcome surprise.
You’re just covering up the real truth: Finnish happiness is a result of everyone having access to a sauna :)
Mina rakastan löyly, haluan saunassa nyt!
(What I hope I said: ‘I love throwing water on the sauna rocks and the experience of the resulting steam, I want to go into a sauna now’)
———————
On a more serious note, do you think the ever present threat of Russia and obligatory military service affects the expectations of Finnish people? Meaning, there is an actual tangible threat bordering Finland, which last invaded just 86 years ago (and forced Finland to ally with a country we won’t name so they would emerge from WWII independent, only Norway and Finland managed to achieve that, every other European country bordering the USSR was behind the iron curtain)
Do you think that keeps Finnish people’s expectations more grounded? Or is it something else entirely?
>While the quality of life really is objectively better with children, the secret to these rankings is probably the calibration inherent in the question.
that's not really a secret or calibration issue though, that gets to the core of what happiness is, a relational property between expectation and reality. It's not an objective measure like income or height.
I don't think the notion of an 'objective' quality of life even makes a lot of sense. Quality of life is always measured against some concrete alternative, not against some abstract scale or points based system. Two people are going to have very different attitudes towards some way of life purely depending on what direction they come from.
Yeah, these surveys seem to miss the cultural nuances. Totally agree with your assessment.
For some grounding, I would like to see how many US citizens migrate to those happy countries vs how many happy citizens migrate to the US.
Actions speak louder.
Almost no one from North Korea emigrates to the US. Conclusion: North Koreans are very happy.
I would genuinely be shocked if North Korean's aren't happy. They're basically told they live in the best place on earth, have no basis for comparison to believe otherwise, and the sphere of influence of any particular average N Korean is narrow enough that if they were sad it would basically be artificially constraining their sadness to ones about personal failures they probably would rather not believe they have.
It's not starving, not having healthcare etc that makes you sad so much I think as thinking others are getting it while you are not, or believing that someone is pulling something over you rather than the situation being in your hands. If you think you're doing the best you can and your own success or failure is up to you, it's hard to be particularly sad about the situation compared to someone in another position.
Citation is needed for this:
> It's not starving, not having healthcare etc that makes you sad so much I think as thinking others are getting it while you are not…
While social comparison is proven to be part of happiness, the science is quite strong that starving or being sick makes someone unhappy.
I said that I thought not having eg. healthcare doesn't make you as sad as not having it while someone else does.
Nothing I've used in that relative comparison breaks the science you quote. And I do not need a citation to think something rather than to state it is fact. It would be odd indeed to require a citation to think of something.
I agree with your larger point, but to be fair if you have to compare the U.S. to North Korea, that’s probably a bad sign.
No need for the snark, it’s very obviously a flawed heuristic which can obviously be improved with some adjustments. But this isn’t meant to be a research proposal. It was a simple example meant to illustrate a simple point.
Point being, some people like to whine even when they know damn well 99% of the world would happily trade places with them, and for very good reasons.
> some people like to whine
When I say our for-profit healthcare system is cruel, expensive and ineffective overall, am I whining?
When I say it sucks that we spend $1T on "defense" while raising taxes on working class people, is that whining?
Those things make people less happy.
Is your diagnosis the people are whining and that's why the US isn't at the top of the rankings like Denmark is? Do Danes just whine less?
I want to share one of my favorite quotes which is apt:
“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” -- James Baldwin
Wasn't intending snark. I figured it was a goofy way to point out the flaw in your implicit position that emigration data would be more meaningful than the survey. It still might be, it would just depend a lot more on laws and the marketing of economic opportunities than happiness IMO.
> Point being, some people like to whine even when they know damn well 99% of the world would happily trade places with them, and for very good reasons.
Well yeah, but this is an broad survey, not people whining.
> some people like to whine
When I say our for-profit healthcare system is cruel, expensive and ineffective overall, am I whining?
When I say it sucks that we spend $1T on "defense" while raising taxes on working class people, is that whining?
People don't simply emigrate when conditions are bad or even horrible.
There are many barriers which can be almost impossible to surmount: learning a new language, leaving your friends behind, having to finding a job (what if you don't speak the language), having to sell you house and car, etc.
Yeah homeless drug addicts living on the streets of San Francisco aren't all migrating to Denmark so they must be happy.
If they're high all the time they must be happy.
It's extended difficult for most people to change their country so it's not a good measure feelings
Is this coping attempt?
Spoken like a true American.
Americans are so drunk on the liberalism kool-aid that they think they can just relocate and instantly be accepted into new communities.
This doesn't work, and when it is observed empirically by our subject, he complains about "racism" etc. - except ofc. white-knighting and doubling down on this against non-"expat" black/brown "subhumans".
Japan is filled with such "last-Samurai" larpers.
Tf? I’m not even American
What was it that happened between 2023 and 2024? Here's all i can think of but none of these really explain it:
* Major terrorist attack in israel; its obvious we care way too much about this random country on the other side of the planet but even so i can't see that impacting people's happiness this hard.
* general populace now knows LLMs exist and may someday potentially perform jobs which were previously thought to be immune to automation but i would expect this to be offset by the people amazed by this technology.
* It's becoming increasingly apparent that our then-current president might actually suffer from a more serious case of Alzheimer's than reagan did; simultaneously it is becoming increasingly apparent that the only viable alternative is going to be trump again.
#3 is the only one that sort-of makes sense but I have doubts that people are this invested in presidential circuses on a personal level.
wait, is your point that there is some mystery about what happened to make the US even less happy? ... what didn't happen? It's hard to think of anything good that has happened in the last few years. Every month is scarier and more uncertain than the last.
i mean specifically between '23 and '24, i don't remember much happening on the national level then. COVID's been in the background for a few years and trump hasn't been re-elected yet.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted for asking a question that's simple and prompted by the graph visual. Everyone's so focused on talking about why people are unhappy in general, but why did it drop that much between 2023 and 2024 specifically? If it was politics, I'd have expected the drop to come between 2024 and 2025, unless it was the idea of the election itself that caused it. Any other explanation, and why wouldn't it have been the same in 2022-2023?
As an older person (52 y/o) who remembers a time when a lot more people I know (of all ages) were optimistic about the future, I believe the major factor leading to generalized anxiety currently is not about one event, but all the additive effects of massive and ever increasing wealth inequality piling up year over year.
That combined with little to no hope that either political party will do a damn thing to fix it (Democrats at least have some politicians who actually want to, but they are stymied by their own leadership, never mind the problem of not having any real national level political power currently).
Agreed. Even as someone only on the tail end of the millennial generation, the total disappearance of hope in the past 10-15 years (but especially in the last 5) has been palpable. There's a tweet that's been floating around recently that says something along the lines of "basically nobody under 40 expects good things to happen ever again", and I think that sums it up pretty accurately.
But that isn't new. Housing has been unaffordable for anybody who wasn't alive in the '70 for at least 15 years now. Healthcare has been a clusterfluck that it's been a major talking point in at least six consecutive presidential elections.
As far as the data presented in the chart goes, 'Happiness' is shown steadily climbing for a few years before '23, then it takes a massive dip in '23 then in '24 it declines but at a significantly slower rate than '23. Unless the way they measure 'happiness' is inaccurate and unreliable (in which case this whole article is garbage) there has to be an event that correlates with that.
Ok, but how did those things change between 2023 and 2024? The same party was in power and there wasn't a single monolithic wealth grab that happened that year.