Happiness revisited: Is Denmark really the shit?
A new study re-crunches the data and scrambles the rankings in surprising ways
When I began this blog in 2016, Denmark had been ranked as the happiest country in the world in most editions of the World Happiness Report (WHR). It has been overtaken by Finland in the years since 2017, although it’s managed to hold on to the No. 2 position. I wondered whether I should change the title to “The Second-happiest People,” but that would also be only temporarily accurate.
I also wrote at the outset that Denmark’s precise ranking is not as significant as the regional cluster, with small northern European social democracies always dominating the top positions, often within the margin of error of one another. In 2022, Finland scored 7.842 (on a 10-point scale) and Denmark 7.620, followed closely by Switzerland, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden.
This is a tribute to the Nordic social model, which emphasizes egalitarianism, solidarity, and social justice. These countries have high income and social mobility, and their citizens have a high level of trust in one another and in their institutions. They’re also leaders in gender equality, with a high proportion of women in parliament.
Varieties of happiness
The WHR scores reflect “Life Satisfaction”; they are based on a single measure in the Gallup World Poll (GWP) called the Cantril Ladder: How close are you to living your best possible life (10 on the scale)? There are other global surveys, and their results vary. The early rankings were based on GDP per capita. The OECD Better Life Index, the UN Sustainable Development Reports, and the World Bank’s Human Development Index use various combinations of components such as income, education, life expectancy, and inequality.
The GWP supplements the Cantril scores with measures of Subjective Well-Being based on feelings about both positive and negative experiences. The countries that score highest on positive emotions don’t always rank high on negative emotions (the negative rankings are inverted: a high one means a low incidence of negative experiences).
Economists with a new formula
Now a new study sets out to synthesize these data into a more comprehensive measure. “Wellbeing Rankings,” a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is written by economists David Blanchflower and Alex Bryson. Drawing on earlier studies, it combines a modified version of the GWP findings and the Gallup US Daily Tracker Poll (USDT), compiling a ranking of 164 countries, 50 US states, and the District of Columbia—215 regions total. In addition to Life Satisfaction, it uses the survey responses on Subjective Well-Being: three measures of “positive affect” and four of “negative affect.” The survey questions sound like this:
“Did you experience the following feelings during a lot of the day yesterday? How about enjoyment? — Yes/No? … Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?... Did you feel well-rested yesterday?”
“Did you experience the following feelings during a lot of the day yesterday? How about physical pain? — Yes/No? … How about sadness? …worry? … anger?”
Always caveats
First, the inclusion of the individual US states obscures the country rankings because the states dominate the high positions—16 of the top 20. So if a country ranks number 50 overall, for example, we don’t know its rank among countries until we subtract the many US states that rank above it. The states’ USDT scores are much higher than the score for the USA as a whole (150), which is from the international GWP. The lowest state, West Virginia, is No. 101. The authors note that this divergence might derive partly from the small sample size for the USA in the GWP relative to its large population.
The second caveat is that the GWP data aren’t current. This is not an update but rather an adjusted composite of a large sample over the decade from 2008 to 2017. It reflects the economic hardship of the Great Recession but predates the pandemic, inflation, January 6, and Ukraine.
Third, what follows are a layman’s superficial observations on a complex research field (i.e., amateur nerd warning!).
The results
Here is a selection from the overall results of the Wellbeing Rankings showing the positive and negative components and the Cantril Life Satisfaction score. The list includes Denmark; Finland; the top region, Hawaii; the top country, Taiwan; and a few others for comparison.
This small sample falls neatly into three regional tiers with a new frontrunner: Asia, the Nordics, and the Anglosphere. Taiwan and China jump far above their Cantril Life Satisfaction rankings because of extremely low negative affect (assuming the Chinese weren’t afraid to answer the questions honestly). Finland and Denmark drop out of the top ten, although the other Nordics don’t.1 At No. 38, Denmark trails 27 US states, so internationally it ranks 11th.
All the countries rank higher on negative than positive affect, except the USA and Canada with extreme imbalances the other way. When you subtract all 50 states and DC from the USA’s score, the country still lands far below the rest of the industrialized world. It’s like a different country from the USDT respondents’.
Breaking down “affect”
The countries are listed again by overall Well-being. It’s striking how much the individual affect rankings vary within the countries as well as between them. Looking down the columns, you don’t find steadily rising numbers. Offhand, the two clearest patterns that emerge are that only one country, Canada, smiles much and only the two Asian countries are well-rested (all characterizations here are relative since it’s a ranking, not an absolute scale).
Denmark’s composite positive affect score of 71 masks a big gap between the very highest enjoyment score and the very low smiling and well-rested ratings (111 and 109—worse than up to 60 or 70 other countries). The consistently mediocre negative affect scores stand in stark contrast to the top rankings on the first two parameters
Finland has the very lowest anger but lots of worry and other negative experiences. For Taiwan and China, anger is the only negative parameter on which they aren’t very close to the top (and it can’t be only anger toward each other). The USA is embroiled in all the negative emotions, which are much more prevalent than in the other countries except for Canada. Given America’s wealth and power—even if its GWP sample is somewhat unrepresentative—this is the saddest anomaly in the study.
The Danish paradox
Do the Danes really enjoy life more than the rest of the world? Although they can be fun-loving like anyone else, to the casual observer of their usual public faces that title seems a stretch. It’s not surprising that they report little smiling and laughter. Nor that Hamlet’s “melancholy Dane” epithet endures. In fact, on all the affective measures besides enjoyment, they rank far below their standard of living.
It could be a quieter, inward form of enjoyment based on the more objective factors that go into the Life Satisfaction rating: income, social support, trust, work-life balance. Not the emotional exuberance of Brazilian soccer fans. The Danes are well-adjusted and manage their practical affairs sensibly. They recognize and appreciate their good fortune. They enjoy the elements that contribute to their Life Satisfaction, as it were, combining the retrospective and day-to-day dimensions of the first two parameters.
The USA’s ranking shows that material prosperity doesn’t necessarily bring subjective well-being; the usual explanation is its high inequality. For Denmark, the security of the social welfare state, with its relatively low inequality, is no guarantee either. Danish leftists decry its degradation into “the competition state,” where citizens are enjoined to contribute to the country’s economic performance on the global market. Well-being generally correlates with prosperity, but prosperity can also bring stress and give diminishing returns.
Expat dissatisfaction
Can this tell us anything about the discrepancy between the Danes’ Life Satisfaction and the relative unhappiness of expatriates living in Denmark? Expats are attracted to Denmark’s high quality of life, agreeable working culture, and high-tech vibe. But in a survey of expat professionals by Internations, they rate the country nearly last of 52 destinations in personal categories such as “ease of settling in” and “finding friends” and in the bottom half overall. To expats, while Danes are friendly enough toward (Western) foreigners in casual circumstances, they often seem to guard their privacy and feel no need to expand their circle of familiars (leaving aside a minority’s animus toward non-Western immigrants).
Of course this is a gross simplification from a small sample; there are plenty of hospitable, good-humored, curious, and generous people here. But the gulf between the Danes’ Life Satisfaction and their relatively dispirited emotional life could explain expats’ impression that the Danes are content to enjoy their contentment among themselves and sometimes come off as unwelcoming and a little self-satisfied. But maybe they’re just not feeling well: too tired and worried and in too much pain to smile.
Expert advice from the colonized
One morning at a square on a pedestrian street in Copenhagen where I walked to work, one of the destitute Greenlanders who hung out there called out in a hoarse voice to the stream of trudging commuters:
“It doesn’t cost anything to smile, Danes!”
Eleventh-happiest isn’t so bad, he was telling them; it could be much worse!
Further info
There’s much more of interest in the report, especially if you understand statistical methods. Otherwise, check out Gallup’s more accessible interactive site on “the World’s Emotional Temperature.” You can drill down into the individual affective parameters from 2021, including a few new ones, and they might surprise you. Nos. 1 and 2 for “Learn something interesting yesterday” are the Philippines and Senegal. Japan, a most prosperous, peaceful, and orderly country, reports the second-lowest experience of being “treated with respect.”
What do you think about the new study? Does it fit your image of Denmark? Does it make sense or tell you anything new? Leave a comment.
h/t Tyler Cowen
After Taiwan, the top countries are Austria, Netherlands, Iceland, Norway, Thailand, Switzerland, China, Sweden, Ireland, and Japan.