4 ms·

I've just had this topic with friends. How can finland and the nordics be further up than, say, spain? Have they ever been? Sure, materialistic safety is better

I've just had this topic with friends. How can finland and the nordics be further up than, say, spain? Have they ever been? Sure, materialistic safety is better up there. But the way of living, at least in my experience, is way higher. Look at suicide rates and alcoholism and such. I'll spoil it: - Finland 38 - Norway 71 - Spain 137 (fun fact: USA is 31) ranked by suicide. If you visit it, and the vibes and feelings you have don't match the statistics, the statistics are shit I'd say. And maybe cities and rural areas destroy this statistic. But what do I know (but the article agrees with me)

BurningFrog 10mo ago
Note that people who commit suicide don't answer surveys anymore.
- M95D 10mo ago
  People are usually unhappy for a long time before that happens.
bendtb 10mo ago
There is also a religious element to suicide that cannot be overlooked. Also, I Spain your view of Spain is tainted. I think very few people would choose an average city in Spain over e.g. Copenhagen where 20% of the Danish population live.
- GoatOfAplomb 10mo ago
  All the Spanish cities I've visited have looked "perfect", but there's a lot I don't see as a tourist, e.g. that Spain has one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe (10.5%).
  - PLMUV9A4UP27D 10mo ago
    Finland is now close to Spain when it comes to unemployment rate! Let's see how that affects Finland's ranking.
- alephnerd 10mo ago
  The perception of Spain is much more positive in the Anglophone world - it's viewed as a country where cost of living is low, you can nap in the middle of the day, the women/men are hot and easy, the wine is great and cheap, and you can party late at night. In reality the average Spaniard isn't experience the majority of that, as those are perceptions that arose from the rose-tinted glasses of tourists. Most tourists don't know about the Eurozone crisis, the regional disparity, and the consolidation of Spain's economic growth engines to 1-2 cities. Spain is a good developed country with a decent QoL as is reflected by it's HDI and developmental indicators (and the fact that it has outpaced historically richer and more developed Italy is a testament to that), but tourists almost always take a rose-tinted view whereas locals almost always take a negative view. And I think this is the crux of the issue with how the "World Happiness Index" is used in American discourse - in the US almost no one vists Europe or other parts of the World for extended periods of time and most Americans lack familial or social ties in Europe. As such, idealized images of Europe ("a socialist paradise" or "white Christendom under siege") have taken hold in popular discourse and are used as proxies for the American culture war.
  - vjk800 10mo ago
    > The perception of Spain is much more positive in the Anglophone world - it's viewed as a country where cost of living is low, you can nap in the middle of the day, the women/men are hot and easy, the wine is great and cheap, and you can party late at night. If you're a tourist, you get to experience only those parts. If you live there, you have to experience the other 99% of the life also and it's not so great.
    - alephnerd 10mo ago
      Did you even read the second sentence?
  - phony-account 10mo ago
    These measures are bullshit and often just come down to a prevalent societal ‘temperament’ that’s inculcated from birth. I live and have family in Sweden and the rest of my family is in Spain. The Swedes have immense pride in their country and pretty much only talk about the positives. When the winters are dark, cold, rain has been pouring for fourteen days straight and the last time you saw sun was 4 weeks ago, they say “there’s no bad weather just bad clothes”. One day I sat with my cousin and some other relatives in the olive grove of his country place in Spain - sun was shining and we’d been eating delicious locally produced food for hours and drinking wine from his vineyard while he yapped on about how everything in Spain is ‘shit’ (una mierda). And this is why places like Finland are reportedly the ‘happiest’ in the world.
- socalgal2 10mo ago
  Have you eaten everyday food (not gourmet) in Copenhagen?
  - simonask 10mo ago
    Copenhageners eat the same plastic-wrapped salads, organic grass-fed whatever, and whatever the latest green smoothie trend is, as in Southern California. If this is a dig at the largely pork/cabbage/potato-based diet of Northern Europe, you will be relieved to hear they don’t follow it. Source: Am one.
- euroderf 10mo ago
  > There is also a religious element to suicide that cannot be overlooked. Also a genetic component.
  - nephihaha 10mo ago
    Dark winters are a bigger component here. Most Nordic countries get little sun in winter and it gets worse the further north you are.
    - euroderf 10mo ago
      Finland leads the world in per capita coffee consumption. My pet theory is that in the winter it fights depression, and in the summer the sun is out late at night and you're saying to your friends: How could we possibly go to sleep now?! Moar coffee!!
      - nephihaha 10mo ago
        I tend to find coffee increases jitteriness and anxiety in people. Some evidence it may increase depression too.
        euroderf 10mo ago
        Well, maybe not so much fight depression as fight lethargy ?
        nephihaha 10mo ago
        In my experience, even that is not true. It displaces it.
estomagordo 10mo ago
Using suicide rates as a measure for population happiness is very peculiar, given that the people who commit suicide represent fractions of a percent, and would only ever sum up to a rounding error.
- crazygringo 10mo ago
  It's not that peculiar if you assume all countries follow the same type of happiness distribution that is simply shifted/stretched lower or higher. Then, the relative size of a bottom or top absolute threshold is highly meaningful. Even if it's a fraction of a percent, populations are huge and suicide rates are not rounding errors at all -- they're actually quite statistically significant. And as macabre as it is, suicides are objective facts mostly unaffected by methodology, and unaffected by translation issues, cultural differences, etc. This is why suicide rates are actually a powerful mental health statistic, just like height is a powerful physical health statistic, at the population level. There's obviously still a lot both of these metrics don't say, but the fact that they are highly objective makes them extremely valuable.
  - BartjeD 10mo ago
    Suicides are hugely affected by cultural norms. In certain Asian cultures this has quite the history, so this can't be a correct assumption.
    - Karrot_Kream 10mo ago
      Most Asian cultures with suicide problems acknowledge and try very hard to bring those rates down. It isn't just a cultural norm and is in fact a good indicator of the happiness of a population.
      - mrguyorama 10mo ago
        > It isn't just a cultural norm and is in fact a good indicator of the happiness of a population. Prove it
silisili 10mo ago
Not for nothing, but I'm not sure that's a great metric. Venezuela for instance is 178, and it doesn't seem like an overly happy place to be these past few years.
- nephihaha 10mo ago
  In Venezuela people are told to be happy.
refurb 10mo ago
Even if the question was perfectly unbiased and captured happiness, comparing scores from country to country are impossible because the scale differs from country to country. A 10 in Afghanistan is not the same as a 10 in Canada. Societies have different perception of “the best” based on each individuals experience, what society values and what they think is possible. So while helpful in tracking happiness over time within the same country, it can’t be used to compare countries.

BurningFrog 10mo ago

Note that people who commit suicide don't answer surveys anymore.

M95D 10mo ago
People are usually unhappy for a long time before that happens.

bendtb 10mo ago

There is also a religious element to suicide that cannot be overlooked. Also, I Spain your view of Spain is tainted. I think very few people would choose an average city in Spain over e.g. Copenhagen where 20% of the Danish population live.

GoatOfAplomb 10mo ago
All the Spanish cities I've visited have looked "perfect", but there's a lot I don't see as a tourist, e.g. that Spain has one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe (10.5%).
- PLMUV9A4UP27D 10mo ago
  Finland is now close to Spain when it comes to unemployment rate! Let's see how that affects Finland's ranking.
alephnerd 10mo ago
The perception of Spain is much more positive in the Anglophone world - it's viewed as a country where cost of living is low, you can nap in the middle of the day, the women/men are hot and easy, the wine is great and cheap, and you can party late at night. In reality the average Spaniard isn't experience the majority of that, as those are perceptions that arose from the rose-tinted glasses of tourists. Most tourists don't know about the Eurozone crisis, the regional disparity, and the consolidation of Spain's economic growth engines to 1-2 cities. Spain is a good developed country with a decent QoL as is reflected by it's HDI and developmental indicators (and the fact that it has outpaced historically richer and more developed Italy is a testament to that), but tourists almost always take a rose-tinted view whereas locals almost always take a negative view. And I think this is the crux of the issue with how the "World Happiness Index" is used in American discourse - in the US almost no one vists Europe or other parts of the World for extended periods of time and most Americans lack familial or social ties in Europe. As such, idealized images of Europe ("a socialist paradise" or "white Christendom under siege") have taken hold in popular discourse and are used as proxies for the American culture war.
- vjk800 10mo ago
  > The perception of Spain is much more positive in the Anglophone world - it's viewed as a country where cost of living is low, you can nap in the middle of the day, the women/men are hot and easy, the wine is great and cheap, and you can party late at night. If you're a tourist, you get to experience only those parts. If you live there, you have to experience the other 99% of the life also and it's not so great.
  - alephnerd 10mo ago
    Did you even read the second sentence?
- phony-account 10mo ago
  These measures are bullshit and often just come down to a prevalent societal ‘temperament’ that’s inculcated from birth. I live and have family in Sweden and the rest of my family is in Spain. The Swedes have immense pride in their country and pretty much only talk about the positives. When the winters are dark, cold, rain has been pouring for fourteen days straight and the last time you saw sun was 4 weeks ago, they say “there’s no bad weather just bad clothes”. One day I sat with my cousin and some other relatives in the olive grove of his country place in Spain - sun was shining and we’d been eating delicious locally produced food for hours and drinking wine from his vineyard while he yapped on about how everything in Spain is ‘shit’ (una mierda). And this is why places like Finland are reportedly the ‘happiest’ in the world.
socalgal2 10mo ago
Have you eaten everyday food (not gourmet) in Copenhagen?
- simonask 10mo ago
  Copenhageners eat the same plastic-wrapped salads, organic grass-fed whatever, and whatever the latest green smoothie trend is, as in Southern California. If this is a dig at the largely pork/cabbage/potato-based diet of Northern Europe, you will be relieved to hear they don’t follow it. Source: Am one.
euroderf 10mo ago
> There is also a religious element to suicide that cannot be overlooked. Also a genetic component.
- nephihaha 10mo ago
  Dark winters are a bigger component here. Most Nordic countries get little sun in winter and it gets worse the further north you are.
  - euroderf 10mo ago
    Finland leads the world in per capita coffee consumption. My pet theory is that in the winter it fights depression, and in the summer the sun is out late at night and you're saying to your friends: How could we possibly go to sleep now?! Moar coffee!!
    - nephihaha 10mo ago
      I tend to find coffee increases jitteriness and anxiety in people. Some evidence it may increase depression too.
      - euroderf 10mo ago
        Well, maybe not so much fight depression as fight lethargy ?
        nephihaha 10mo ago
        In my experience, even that is not true. It displaces it.

estomagordo 10mo ago

Using suicide rates as a measure for population happiness is very peculiar, given that the people who commit suicide represent fractions of a percent, and would only ever sum up to a rounding error.

crazygringo 10mo ago
It's not that peculiar if you assume all countries follow the same type of happiness distribution that is simply shifted/stretched lower or higher. Then, the relative size of a bottom or top absolute threshold is highly meaningful. Even if it's a fraction of a percent, populations are huge and suicide rates are not rounding errors at all -- they're actually quite statistically significant. And as macabre as it is, suicides are objective facts mostly unaffected by methodology, and unaffected by translation issues, cultural differences, etc. This is why suicide rates are actually a powerful mental health statistic, just like height is a powerful physical health statistic, at the population level. There's obviously still a lot both of these metrics don't say, but the fact that they are highly objective makes them extremely valuable.
- BartjeD 10mo ago
  Suicides are hugely affected by cultural norms. In certain Asian cultures this has quite the history, so this can't be a correct assumption.
  - Karrot_Kream 10mo ago
    Most Asian cultures with suicide problems acknowledge and try very hard to bring those rates down. It isn't just a cultural norm and is in fact a good indicator of the happiness of a population.
    - mrguyorama 10mo ago
      > It isn't just a cultural norm and is in fact a good indicator of the happiness of a population. Prove it

silisili 10mo ago

Not for nothing, but I'm not sure that's a great metric. Venezuela for instance is 178, and it doesn't seem like an overly happy place to be these past few years.

nephihaha 10mo ago
In Venezuela people are told to be happy.

refurb 10mo ago

Even if the question was perfectly unbiased and captured happiness, comparing scores from country to country are impossible because the scale differs from country to country. A 10 in Afghanistan is not the same as a 10 in Canada. Societies have different perception of “the best” based on each individuals experience, what society values and what they think is possible. So while helpful in tracking happiness over time within the same country, it can’t be used to compare countries.