28.03.2025
We happy few
The latest ‘world happiness rankings’ are out, with the usual suspects at the top and the bottom. Major change is unlikely so long as imperial power survives, suggests Paul Demarty
Last October, the England football team flew to Helsinki for a match against Finland. Travelling fans were met with the chant: “Happiest country in the world, you’ll never sing that!”
It doesn’t scan terribly well, but it makes the point. The Finns are, these days, world-renowned for their collective good humour. The English, meanwhile, seem a truculent and restive bunch - none more so, indeed, than the hardcore followers of the national team, crushed under the combined weight of infinite entitlement and the metaphysical certainty of defeat.
The Finns get to keep the chant for now, at any rate. The latest annual World Happiness Report has been published, and Finland topped it for the seventh year running. The United States and Germany dropped out of the top 20 for the first time, overtaken by several nations in eastern Europe, who have apparently been nipping at the heels of the wealthier nations. The UK is clinging on to 20th.1
The WHR is a measure of the so-called ‘Cantril ladder’ - a single question that asks people to imagine a ladder with 10 steps: “The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?” This happiness is then attributed to six related factors, including perceived corruption, GDP per capita, “freedom to make life choices”, and life expectancy.
It is not clear how seriously we can take the relative rankings, when they are close together. The researchers helpfully include confidence intervals per country, which vary considerably in size. That said, it is not terrifically surprising to see the US dropping down the rankings, given that life expectancy is trending downwards amid a crisis of trust in institutions (another thing included in the score). As for the Finns, domestically there seems little doubt as to the causes of their indomitability in this little competition. Reporters for the Agence France-Presse newswire talked to a local academic:
Jennifer De Paola, a happiness researcher at the University of Helsinki in Finland, told AFP that Finns’ close connection to nature and healthy work-life balance were key contributors to their life satisfaction. In addition, Finns may have a “more attainable understanding of what a successful life is”, compared to, for example, the United States, where success is often equated with financial gain, she said. Finns’ strong welfare society, trust in state authorities, low levels of corruption and free healthcare and education were also key. “Finnish society is permeated by a sense of trust, freedom, and high level of autonomy,” De Paola said.2
This would seem to be a strong commendation of the famous ‘Nordic model’, and indeed Denmark, Iceland and Sweden completed the top four both this year and last. Relatively flat inequality (compared to the stupendous gulf between rich and poor to be found in countries like the US and UK) is well known to be correlated with better outcomes on a huge variety of social matters, from mental health to crime rates. A generally less precarious existence is a happier one, all things being equal. The apparent happiness of the Nordics has given the world’s social democrats a strong argument on which to hang their hats.
Scepticism
There are, nonetheless, reasons for scepticism about the exercise, at least as to how far we can take its conclusions for granted. The first obvious question, albeit not one (alas) that a short article in the Weekly Worker has a hope of answering definitively, is: what is happiness? I think most of us would roughly concur with the Oxford English Dictionary in calling it “the state of pleasurable contentment of mind; deep pleasure in or contentment with one’s circumstances”. As opposed to wealth, or good fortune, or good health - all of which are essentially objective measures of wellbeing, if not simple matters - happiness is subjective: pleasurable contentment of mind.
Yet perhaps this is not what we think of, when we are asked if we have a happy life. A parent may be happy to have their child, even though the actual day-to-day experience of parenting is one of stress and sleep deprivation. The WHR attempts to measure this through its one survey question - which is not about subjective emotional states, but an overall reflective judgment of life satisfaction. It uses a concrete physical image to avoid some trickier issues in translation - after all, people are more likely to have a word that straightforwardly means ‘ladder’ than exactly equivalent words for something as slippery as happiness.
Yet there is also all this other stuff - GDP, life expectancy, and so on - which is used to explain the different rankings. The researchers claim that these are the most closely correlated with differences in national happiness according to the literature. It must strike any observer, however, that we have here a list of what are essentially liberal ideas of national prosperity. The answers seem to be written into the thing from the outset.
It may well be true that the literature recommends these variables; but then they have to be measured. GDP is a matter of statistical conjuring that radically misrepresents the distribution of economic activity, rendering (for example) the production of intermediate goods in complex supply chains invisible. As for corruption, the standard indices mysteriously omit this country’s involvement in global financial obfuscation, or the effectively legal corruption ensured by the rule of law in its prevalent form as the rule of the highest-paid lawyers.
The presentation of such variables as a comparator in these happiness rankings, year after year, tacitly assumes that we are, after all, more or less at the end of history, and these are the six challenges that will bedevil us forever. Suppose there was a successful socialist revolution that took a huge swathe of the world permanently outside the system in which these variables are so explanatory - how, then, would the good researchers of world happiness compare between the two classes? How, for that matter, do they compare across cultures that, for whatever reason, tend to weight these things differently?
Imperialism
All of this hints at the biggest problem. This data is presented, in part, as a guide for policy-makers to improve their standings - and indeed as an intervention against the extremely narrow set of indicators preferred by standard-issue neoliberalism (capitalist individual freedom, GDP growth, “corruption”, defined as not including the pervasive legal corruption of the advanced capitalist world). That would in turn imply that it is policy-makers in individual countries who are the agents here, who can tweak this or that, launch some social programme or other, to improve national wellbeing.
Yet it is blindingly obvious that these various happiness scores are not independent variables. Way, way down at the bottom of the list this year, we find Afghanistan. Is its weighted Cantril-ladder score of around 1.7 supposed to be unrelated to the Americans’ 6.7, given that the US has imposed brutal narco-warlordism on Afghanistan for two long periods in the last half century - on both occasions to be replaced by medievalist Islamist reaction? Can it be unrelated to the vengefulness of American sanctions after they were chased out of Kabul four years ago with their tails between their legs? Supposing the senior cadres of the Taliban suddenly got obsessed with improving this happiness metric: how on earth would they even start, given the Afghan state has been effectively non-functional for most of the past 40 years?
Next from the bottom is Lebanon: is the misery of its inhabitants unrelated to the deliberately divisive carving of this delicately cross-confessional territory from Ottoman Syria a century ago by the UK (number 20, as noted) and France (27), the designs of its predatory neighbour, Israel (5), and its existence as a flashpoint in the regional competition between Israel, Saudi Arabia (28), the United Arab Emirates (22) and Iran (100)?
Generally, a glance at the bottom half of the league table is unsurprising reading for anyone who has noticed the existence of imperialism. It is a list of places with long histories under the colonial jackboot, and subsequent histories of constant political meddling by the great powers and enforced economic dependency. As the poor African and Asian nations in this cohort suffered from the global balance of power, so did the Nordics benefit: permitted to build powerful welfare states and corporatist economies with powerful unions, in order to shore up the eastern reaches of the ‘free world’, they have weathered the erosion of state capacity in the neoliberal era better than many other countries. With recent western adventurism against Russia having turned hot in the Ukraine war, they remain in a strategically salient position (though perhaps the Trump era problematises this).
The world’s happiness, then, seems a matter of good fortune. (Of course, one archaic use of the word ‘happiness’ is to translate, precisely, good fortune … ) It is determined not by the grab bag of indicators tracked by the WHR - which the researchers admit are correlations rather than causes - but by where you happened to stand during the frenzied era of colonial acquisition. The colonisers have largely had soft landings; the colonised have been pushed from one disaster to the next.
That is the problem with the social democratic read of this data. The social democrat, in Britain or America, asks: ‘Why can’t we be more like Finland?’ (She is perhaps not so foolish as to ask why Liberia can’t be more like Finland.) But this is to treat it as a rhetorical question. In reality, it is a question with definite answers: the fraying social safety net in this country is directly produced by our role in the world system, as the murderous chaos in large parts of Africa or the desperate condition of an Afghanistan results from theirs.
To change these roles is, in the end, to change the system as a whole: to go beyond a national frame of analysis and action. It is also to relegate the liberal ‘just so’ stories implied by the WHR’s explanatory framework. It is useless to complain of corruption, low life expectancy or poor GDP growth in the former colonial world, when these countries are deliberately held by imperialism in conditions where all three are basically inevitable.
We propose the scientific hypothesis that the overturning of relations of domination - between countries, and between economic classes - will have a far more profound effect on the readings of the Cantril ladder. But, of course, the only way to produce the data to test our hypothesis is the long, hard road of revolution.