This week I’ve seen many items about “This is why Finland is the world’s happiest country” – and 100% of these stories are wrong. Not one reporter – not one – has actually looked at the original report in detail. The result is a mass disinformation campaign by morons in the media.
The World Happiness Index does not measure even one person’s happiness. Instead, the authors of the report look at a number of country-wide metrics, run them through their Stat-O-Meter and out pops a single number – that does not measure happiness.
The creators of the original report wrote books about their index – and their publisher told them to call it the World Happiness Index because that title would get better sales.
Here is what the index measures:
75% of the ranking system is based on six measures:
- 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)
None of those measures “happiness” not represents the views of any individual. See the link, below, for the details.
Every year, the WHI report is updated and every year it selects a Nordic country as the “world’s happiest.” This is because it defines “happiness” as “living in a Nordic country” – and surprise, each year, a Nordic country is selected.
The metric, as reported by the media every year is nonsense that has nothing to with happiness. Yet we see endless follow-on stories and social media posts saying “This is why we are the world’s happiest” – yet, not one of those items listed is an actual factor in calculating the metric.
Second, the difference between the upper countries is tiny – the reality is that a lot of people live in many countries that rank highly on this scale.
Third, historically, the World Happiness Index report is issued just in advance of key UN meetings and is intended as a propaganda lobbying effort to influence the meetings.
I go into extreme detail as to why this concept of “World’s Happiest Country” is nonsense and BS: Denmark Fairy Tales: Is Denmark the happiest country because of this? No. – Social Panic
Not one “journalist” has looked into the details of this report – instead, they further the myth by promulgating official media disinformation.
