As explained in excruciating detail here, the World’s Happiest Country metric does not measure anyone’s happiness. Instead, it collects some metrics, weights them, drops them into the Stat-o-Meter, and pops out a number they call “happiness”. In fact, the authors of the original report said it does not measure happiness but their editors recommended that title to gain more public interest.

For five years in a row, Finland has been ranked the No. 1 happiest country in the world. A Finnish philosopher and psychology expert shares the habits that make people in Finland so exceptionally satisfied with their lives.

Source: I’m a psychologist in Finland, the No. 1 happiest country in the world—here are 3 things we never do

None of the 3 items mentioned by the Finnish psychologist are used in calculating the metric – they are irrelevant.

The index measures things like GDP per capita, years of life expectancy, how many friends you have, how many people donated to a cause, etc. It does not measure anyone’s actual happiness! What the metric does is define a “happiest country” as a Scandanavian or northern European country (using proxy measures). Thus, every year, a Scandanavian country is declared happiest. Year after year. (In fact, until not long ago, Denmark, the world’s happiest country a few years ago, once had among the highest suicide rates in the world and had the 2nd highest use of anti-depressants in the EU).

From the 2021 report – red dots indicate Scandanavian countries – in fact, we could say that the definition of a WHC is “northern European country” to be more precise.

There are about 200 countries in the world – even the US ranks highly, at #16.

See this link for far more background on this metric: Denmark Fairy Tales: Is Denmark the happiest country because of this? No. – Social Panic

The World’s Happiest Country metric is an annual event showing how easy it is to create effective propaganda to push a point.

Coldstreams