The media piles on to this nonsense every year – based on a calculation that does not measure happiness, but which was re-labeled as “World Happiness Report” by a book publisher because it would sell better: Finland is paying for people to come visit so they can learn how to be happy. Here’s why.
I explained why this metric is bogus, in detail, back when Denmark was the “happiest country”: Denmark Fairy Tales: Is Denmark the happiest country because of this? No. – Social Panic
First, it does not measure happiness. It measures things like
- GDP/capita
- years of life expectancy
- “social support (as measured by having someone”, such as friends and family, “to count on in times of trouble”),
- trust (“perceived absence of corruption”)
- perceived freedom to make choices
- generosity (how many people donated money in the past 30 days)
But the World Happiness Index report never defines happiness nor does it measure any individual’s happiness.
Instead, it gathers together a group of statistical data about large groups of people, applies selected weights to the value of each item, plugs all this into their Stat-o-meter and pops out a single number that they pretend measures happiness!
Most of the countries in North America and Europe, and other areas of the world, rank highly on this “index”. There is very little difference between the top ranked countries.
This fake metric, posted every year, defines “happiness” as living in a Nordic country, and surprise, every year, a Nordic country is selected as the world’s “happiest”, based on metrics that do measure anyone’s happiness. What a croc.
And every year, the media morons fall for this nonsense and publish tons of creative writing exercises proclaiming the reason why country X is the world’s happiest. Since they never read the report, 100% of these creative stories are official disinformation.
