STOCKHOLM (AP) – The coronavirus has brought a year of fear and anxiety, loneliness and blockage, as well as illness and death, but an annual report on happiness around the world released on Friday suggests the pandemic has not crushed people’s spirits.
The editors of the 2021 World Happiness Report found that although emotions changed with the onset of the pandemic, long-term life satisfaction was less affected.
“What I’ve found is that when people have a long-term perspective, they’ve shown a lot of resilience over the last year,” said Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, one of the report’s co-authors in New York.
The annual report, produced by the UN network of sustainable development solutions, ranks 149 countries based on gross domestic product per person, healthy life expectancy and residents’ views. Surveys ask respondents to indicate on a scale of 1-10 how much they claim socially that they feel they have something if it doesn’t go well, their freedom to make their own life choices, their sense of how corrupt their society is and how generous they are. .
Due to the pandemic, surveys were conducted in just under 100 countries for this year’s World Happiness Report, the ninth to be compiled since the project began. The index rankings for the other nations were based on estimates from previous data.
The results of both methods made European countries occupy nine of the top 10 places on the list of the happiest places in the word, with New Zealand completing the group. The top 10 countries are Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Austria.
It was the fourth year in a row that Finland came out on top. The United States, which was ranked 13th five years ago, slipped from 18th to 19th. On a shortlist that ranks only those countries surveyed, the United States ranked 14th.
“Every year we find that the satisfaction of life is the happiest in the social democracies of northern Europe,” said Sachs. “People feel safe in those countries, so the trust is high. The government is considered credible and honest, and trust in each other is high. ”
Finland’s comparative success in reducing COVID-19 could have contributed to the country’s long-standing confidence in their government. The country has taken swift and extensive measures to stop the spread of the virus and has one of the lowest COVID-19 mortality rates in Europe.
“And in Finland, of course, people have suffered,” Anu Partanen, author of The Nordic Theory of Everything, said in Helsinki on Friday. “But again in Finland and the Nordic countries, people are really lucky, because society still supports a system that buffers such shocks.”
Overall, the index showed little change in happiness levels compared to last year’s report, which is based on pre-pandemic information.
“I asked two kinds of questions. One is about life in general, the evaluation of life, we call it. How’s your life going? The other is about mood, emotions, stress, anxiety “, said Sachs. “Of course, we are still in the midst of a deep crisis. But the answers to the assessment of long-term life have not changed decisively, although the disruption of our lives has been so profound. ”
Issues that affect the well-being of people living in the United States include racial tensions and growing income inequality between the richest and poorest residents, happiness experts say.
“As to why the United States is much lower than other similar or even less rich countries, the answer is simple,” said Carol Graham, an expert at The Brookings Institution who was not involved in the report. “The United States has larger gaps in the ranking of happiness between rich and poor than most other rich countries.”
Co-author of the report Sonja Lyubormirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, noted that American culture shows signs of wealth, such as big houses and more cars, more than other countries, “and material things do not I make you happy. ”
On the contrary, people’s perception that their country is managing the pandemic well has contributed to an overall increase in well-being, Sachs of Colombia said. Several Asian countries did better than in last year’s ranking; China moved from 84th to 94th last year.
“It was a difficult time. People look beyond it when looking for the long term. But there are also many people who suffer in the short term, “he said.
The Finnish philosopher Esa Saarinen, who was not involved in the report, believes that the Finnish character himself could explain why the country continues to lead the index.
“I think Finns are quite the kind of content at a certain level, being just what we are,” he said. “We don’t have to be more.”
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Seth Borenstein of Washington DC contributed to this report.