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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27092 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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You know these polls always remind me of the “happiness surveys” that show that Finland is the happiest country in the world.

In the abstract, the rankings have some truth to them. They are broadly correlated with GDP. The countries with the lowest happiness rank are places like Congo and Yemen. The highest countries are - Costa Rica aside - all rich. But zoom in and some discrepancies become apparent. Greece has a far, far lower happiness ranking than many poorer countries - roughly the same as Libya, which has been in a civil war for 15 years. And if you visit the top countries like Finland and Iceland, they don’t seem that happy. Not only are these cultures quite unfriendly, lonely, cold, deal with depressing and harsh winters etc, they also have much greater problems with alcoholism and suicidal than the “less happy” Mediterraneans. They laugh less, they smile less (no offence, but this is just something that one notices immediately in them).

I don’t really think that Finns are actually so much happier than Greeks. In fact, I often think they’re less happy. So what really explains the difference? Social pressure. Finns read every day about how rich and happy they’re supposed to be, how low their unemployment is, how their social fabric is the envy of the world, how un-corrupt they are, how lucky they are to have been born Finns. The depressed alcoholic Finn whose cousin just committed suicide last month ticks ‘8’ on the happiness survey because - his temporary problems aside - he is pretty lucky, right? The Greek sits back on his terrace overlooking an azure sea, ouzo in hand, another day of pretending to work complete, and thinks doesn’t he read all the time about how corrupt Greece is, and how many problems it has, and how Greece is the basket case of Europe or something - and there was some struggle with the debt crisis 15 years ago etc etc? So he puts down ‘5’.

The reality and the survey are two different worlds. It’s not about how happy you are, it’s about how happy you feel you’re supposed to be. In the end, people believe what they’re told. How they act varies more.

Happiness survey is an example of how social scientists, uh, think about survey design in a way that deserves a book titled "How to Lie With Survey Design". Weirdly enough the "happiness survey" doesn't ask "how happy are you", it uses a thought experiment called Cantril ladder:

Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. 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?

Obviously it conditions on the culturally shared notions and idiosyncratic capacity to imagine "best possible life you can imagine". Like, pervasive pessimism is one symptom of major depressive disorder, I would not be surprised if a seriously depressed person rated quite okay because he/she may not even think it possible to be a happy in the best possible life.

I have seen this complaint made several times when Cantril ladder comes up, and never seen a good response.

Yeah, that doesn’t represent happiness, that measures how you feel you measure, literally, on the social ladder. Is there research that asks something more like, “How happy are you, 1-10?”

Wow, that's mind blowing. I've been hearing about these surveys my entire life and never knew that they had this critical weakness. I now understand why Americans don't score that high -- the delta between American life as it is (pretty great) and as Americans imagine it could be (virtuous yeoman farmer utopia/fully luxury automated gay space communism) is massive. You don't mistrust social 'scientists' enough. You think you do, but you don't.

Mexico at #11 right behind the Nordics is interesting. I don't know enough about Mexico to guess how they rank so high. And Afghanistan ranked dead last is also interesting. I suspect that the bottom half of the rankings is marred by poor quality sampling; they probably emailed a bunch of professors at the University of Kabul instead of riding out into the desert to interview Taliban patriarchs, who are presumably quite happy.

Mexico at #11 right behind the Nordics is interesting. I don't know enough about Mexico to guess how they rank so high.

This does not surprise me. Outside of having a sunny and generally happy physical climate, Mexicans (in general) culturally accept a huge amount of flaws in the world and have consequently low expectations that they generally can meet. Additionally, you have the factor of parts of Mexico being pre-industrial poor and those people moving to modern cities which lets them run ahead of the hedonic treadmill for a while. Low expectations plus a modern, industrial economy seems to be a recipe for optimism. Post WW2 Europe and USA were similar cases of low expectations from war and depression meeting a growing industrial economy.

Countries that report higher happiness scores also have higher suicide rates, a trend that also holds across US states. It is worse to be depressed when your neighbors are happier.

Costa Rica aside

Costa Rica performs much better by purchasing power than it’s GDP would suggest, and it’s surrounded by basket cases so it looks even better in comparison.

Greece has a far, far lower happiness ranking than many poorer countries - roughly the same as Libya, which has been in a civil war for 15 years. And if you visit the top countries like Finland and Iceland, they don’t seem that happy. Not only are these cultures quite unfriendly, lonely, cold, deal with depressing and harsh winters etc, they also have much greater problems with alcoholism and suicidal than the “less happy” Mediterraneans.

While Finnish suicide and alcohol use rates have actually gone down considerably in recent years (suicide rates most likely due to active anti-suicide campaigning, alcohol use due to same trends in youth drinking as elsewhere), they're still indeed higher than in Greece, though there might be a cultural factor here (ie. autistic/secular Nordic cultures are more likely to honestly report suicides as suicides as cultures where your cousin didn't commit a suicide, he just, uhh, went on a walk and must have slipped and fell down a cliff, perhaps there was an accident or something, you can give him a church burial etc.) However, at least according to this, Finns feel less lonely than Greeks.

Happiness studies are still probably bunk, but so are a lot of other studies that you can compare here.

Uh, didnt Finnish drinking decline due to a government campaign?

This is the first I’ve ever heard of such campaign.

Over a decade ago, Scott cautioned people against using depression/suicide metrics as a proxy for how happy or functional a society is. Other than climate, the most obvious secular difference between Greece and Finland is hours of daylight, which is known to have a major impact on suicide rates. After Greenland, Finland reports the highest rates of seasonal affective disorder in the world, while Greece is twentieth.

Happy and functional are two vastly different things. The same is true even within a family. There are terribly unhappy people with entire well structured family lives - a paid off mortgage, a marriage without fighting or much drama, three children, no financial troubles, and very happy people whose lives are far messier.

Scott presents several reasons why Finns and Danes might have high suicide rates even though they have well functioning societies: these include things like lack of daylight, boring and bland diets, etc. But what if lack of daylight actually does make you much less happy? Scott says that black Americans have lower rates of depression than white Americans. OK - my impression is indeed that black Americans are often happier than white Americans (there are even plausible Motte-friendly reasons why this might be the case)!

I don’t buy Scott’s last theory that suicide is just a function of societal development level or something like that. I think it most likely that after a certain development threshold where individuals don’t have to worry about daily survival and the prevailing society doesn’t consider suicide an extreme taboo, it’s mostly about sunlight hours experienced (this accounts for weird discrepancies between places that are sunnier but have fewer daylight hours, and for places that have fewer of both but where people spend more time outside during the day, albeit mediated for altitude (like in the ‘big sky’ states).

The sunlight hours theory is suspect. I would expect them to have adapted to it over the millennia, the same way they evolved lighter skin. Meanwhile, in places with ample sunlight, people do their best to avoid it: historically in the form of the siesta, nowadays awake but in an enclosed, air-conditioned space.

They aren't avoiding indirect sunlight though. In Scandinavia shit gets really dark for most of the day during winter.

You go to school/work when it's dark and you leave after the sun has gone down. You go months without really seeing the sun even if you live far south of when the sun literally doesn't go up during the day like in Kiruna, Narvik or Tromsø.

I have plenty of family far in the north of Sweden and they meet a ton of people who try to move there. Those people usually worry about that cold but that is almost never an issue, the cold is easy to deal with. The reason people leave again is because they don't understand just how dark it gets and how that really feels.

All that said, I also find the sunlight theory suspect on similar grounds to you. It's not like people are trapped there and there is no statistically significant difference in suicide rates based on latitude once you control for how rural a county is. People are killing themselves in the countryside, not the cities, and even that is greatly affected by demographic differences.

the “happiness surveys” that show that Finland is the happiest country in the world.

FWIW, the reaction here in Finland to those surveys is always ”Lolwtf? Are you fucking kidding me?”

I don’t really think that Finns are actually so much happier than Greeks. In fact, I often think they’re less happy. So what really explains the difference? Social pressure. Finns read every day about how rich and happy they’re supposed to be, how low their unemployment is, how their social fabric is the envy of the world, how un-corrupt they are, how lucky they are to have been born Finns.

While there may be something to your theory, this is old news. Finland now experiences double digit unemployment of 10,9% with youth unemployment approaching 25%. They are now worst in EU, worse than Spain. The same for GDP per capita which stagnated basically since 2008. Their famous education and good results in PISA tests is also history as it plummeted from first place in 2006 to out of top 10 today. There is something rotten in state of Finland.

Can we plot the graphs of immigration, unemployment and education and and see whether there is correlation between them.

Yes, we can. The wiki page has a bunch.

No, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t show what you’re expecting, because a giant chunk of the immigration comes from the Baltics and other post-Soviet countries. I didn’t find data which separated those out over time.

Thanks and nice job! You just saved me from erroneously reifying my priors here. Appreciate it.

Well, I think the question is still open. No idea how many of the immigrants post-2014 are fleeing Ukrainians vs. economic migrants, Russian dissidents, Chinese, who knows what else. So if you find country of origin + time data, let me know!

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