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Common Dreams reports
Nordic countries with strong social welfare structures fared best, as they have in previous years, on the United Nation's annual accounting of global happiness--while the United States finished in 18th place, down four spots from 2017.
Finland was ranked number one on the World Happiness Report, compiled by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. The country was joined by other Scandinavian nations--Norway, Denmark, and Iceland--in the top four, followed by Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, and Australia.
[...] the United States finished in 18th place, down four spots from 2017.
[...] The drop followed President Donald Trump's first year in office, during which the majority of Americans reported disapproval of the country's top elected official, and hundreds of thousands protested his regressive policies on immigration, women's reproductive rights, and gun control--as well as widespread concerns that the president is blatantly profiting off his position in public office.
The past year also saw reports of America's widening wealth gap, with the average upper middle-class household holding 75 times more wealth than low-income families.
Trump's tax law, pushed through Congress despite the disapproval of 53 percent of Americans, only heightened the perception of many people that the government is intent on transferring wealth to the richest Americans while the majority live paycheck to paycheck.
The World Happiness Report ranks countries according to per capita GDP, social support, life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and corruption levels.
Life expectancy in the U.S. dropped for the second year in a row in 2017, with researchers suggesting that the opioid addiction epidemic and inequality are related to the decline.
Reigning political ideologies in the highest-ranking nations contrast sharply with that of the U.S., noted the researchers.
The countries in the top 10 tend to "believe that what makes people happy is solid social support systems, good public services, and even paying a significant amount in taxes for that", said [Jeffrey D. Sachs, editor of the World Happiness Report].
(Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Monday March 19 2018, @09:44AM (25 children)
My reaction to Trump's comment about shithole countries and encouraging immigration from Norway was "why would anyone want to move from Norway to a shithole country like Trumpistan?". This just proves the point.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MostCynical on Monday March 19 2018, @10:10AM (3 children)
Is it more a statement of how bad the countries further down the list must be, that the U.S. is so high?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday March 19 2018, @10:23AM (1 child)
It was a comment on Trump. Depressing thing is that it looks like the usual anti-Trump trolling, which it wasn't meant to be.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Monday March 19 2018, @10:30AM
Fake President Pull-My-Finger of the People's Democratic Republic of America :-)
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @04:31PM
Username appropriate.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday March 19 2018, @12:34PM (13 children)
Everything is always going badly when the other guys are in charge. It's all part of the theater the lizard people stage to keep the rabble busy and distracted. You see, the obvious answer to the horrible job the other guys are doing is to vote in more of our guys. Then, when they do a horrible job, too, we get to say things like, 'the other guys blocked what we really wanted to do so we need even more of our guys!', or, 'so our guys weren't as good as we thought but at least they're better than those other guys, because those guys suck.'
Doesn't anybody else want to get off that merry-go-round?
Let's measure results consistently without spin. I bet if we did that most countries would not be scoring as high as they would have everyone else believe.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Troll) by RS3 on Monday March 19 2018, @03:33PM (3 children)
Truly one of the most insightful comments I've ever read here. Also, pretty much stating what should be obvious, but people seem to live in a fantasy world more and more.
As I've stated here before, I'm very politically neutral. When I see everyone jumping on a bandwagon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwagon_effect [wikipedia.org], (or "merry-go-round" if you like) my usual reaction is to take a step back, look at everything, and try to get a big-picture view.
I take very little stock in surveys. I don't care what the statisticians say- your tiny sample is not a predictor of true popular opinion. Elections are a great example: how many times they poll and declare a "landslide" victory before the actual election, only to find out they're very wrong. And you can certainly argue that elections are not a true representation of popular opinions, but rather the collective of those who are willing to go vote. Same with these polls. I find the questions flawed (full of assumptions) and limiting (lousy choices), too tiny a percentage of total population sampled, etc.
And I think it's difficult to measure: I know some pretty grumpy people (none here, of course!) who seem perfectly happy to stay grumpy.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @09:33PM (2 children)
The size of the sample relative to the size of the population has no bearing on the statistical significance of the results. The sample size affects only the margin of error, which is independent of the population size -- it depends only on the specific question being asked about the population and the number of samples.
Usually researchers will choose a question and the desired margin of error, and then the required sample size can be determined from those alone.
Rough example: I have a shipping container full of papayas, and I would like to know what proportion of the papayas in it are tasty. I might select 1000 papayas uniformly at random from the container, eat them all, and find that 950 of them were tasty and 50 of them were not. I can then conclude, with some confidence level, that 95% of the papayas in the entire container will be tasty.
The problems with most surveys of people is not the sample size, but sampling bias, where particular groups of the population are systematically excluded from the sample. There are various ways this can happen. When we exclude any portion of the population we get no information about it, and if the size of that portion is significant relative to the margin of error, we can have a problem.
Maybe I only test papayas near the front of the container. If all the non-tasty papayas are in the back (maybe the person packing it deliberately put them there) then even with a very large sample size I will miss all of them and could erroneously conclude with high confidence that 100% of the papayas in the container are tasty.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 20 2018, @02:41AM (1 child)
Don't forget that pollsters can ask all the wrong questions. Consider two questions:
"Will Trump, or Clinton make a better president?"
The question makes it's own basic presumptions. A better question would be,
"Are either Trump or Clinton qualified to be president?"
Many people would have struggled to answer the first question. Few people would have had any problem answering the second question, "NO!"
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday March 21 2018, @12:51AM
But...but...we didn't have "none of the above" as option.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Monday March 19 2018, @04:33PM (2 children)
Some "guys" really are worse than others.
For a very recent example, check out the news yesterday that the Trump administration was going to rescind a bunch of rules on the airlines which Obama's administration had created, such as not being allowed to keep people trapped in an airplane on the tarmac for over 3 hours. So look forward to your air travel becoming MUCH more torturous with Trump in office. It doesn't help that the airline industry is an oligopoly enforced by the government (foreign airlines aren't allowed to operate routes between 2 US airports).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Monday March 19 2018, @05:20PM (1 child)
Did you see the look on Trump's face when Obama was giving his piss-take speach. You could see the cogs turning in Trump's brain as he was thinking "everything this guy's done, I'm going to undo", as he was so clearly seething. And sure enought, that's what he's done. The guys I know tend to be soft democrats, and they've been very positive about what Obama's changes did to their state (in both meanings), so I can fully understand it that mindlessly reversing all those changes will contribute to increased shitholiness.
Fuck me, my country's a total shithole according to this list (although with lots of upward velocity). I think that's because most of the migrants coming in are from the country that used to occupy us, and, understandably, we give them the cold shoulder. We've also got a bunch of not-a-real-citizen types (who are here because of that occuption, and who refuse to learn the local language), which also counts against us. After having lived in Finland (I still travel there for work monthly), I think this place is better than Finland, so why we're in position #63 I really don't know.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 21 2018, @12:56AM
Hey I love free jazz. Just get a few folk together and jam away the night. Of course someone has to buy the beer, wine etc and of course the boo. The latter is not a big problem anymore in Cal and Oregon.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by i286NiNJA on Monday March 19 2018, @09:34PM
We don't have to measure anything. All the "guys" suck and they're both getting worse. The republicans have been leading the way since 2000.
It would be better to identify the least corrupt people in washington, probably something like Bernie, the corpse of eisenhower and mccain's brain tumor.
(Score: 2) by corey on Monday March 19 2018, @09:41PM (3 children)
Other users are praising this post but it doesn't make ant sense to me. Not sure why its 5 insightful...
What's lizard people got to do with happiness?
Sounds like an upset conservative US-er that progressive nations were happier.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday March 20 2018, @06:16PM (1 child)
I am no conservative. Honestly i am surprised the US scored that high.
The lizard people bit is a commentary on the self-defeating tribalism fed and encouraged by those elites in the US who really hold all the power and whose grip on the levers of society transcends party and ideology. The "sides" in politics make a great show of fighting each other over trivial issues, but when the power-elites want something like trillion dollar bank bailouts, they instantly become bi-partisan and pass the measure quietly.
It's a sham.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Thursday March 22 2018, @04:20PM
In this light that was a much better post than I thought.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday March 21 2018, @01:03AM
The main problem is the people most qualified to run for office are not going to toss their hats in the ring. Who was it said, "who ever wants to be president is in no way qualified for the job"?
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday March 20 2018, @01:13AM
As someone who lives in an actual democracy (and one that ranked a fair bit higher than the US) I would say that your real problem is that you only have the choice of our guys and their guys.
Where I live, I can reasonably expect to have the choice of 5 political parties that will wind up gaining seats in our house.
So, if "my guys" do badly, I can vote for "their guys" (except they're arseholes, so I won't) or those other guys (some of whom are girls) or those other other guys (but they're a bit odd, so maybe not) or those other other other guys (who I sometimes agree with) or those other other other other guys (who I also sometimes agree with).
See, the thing is, we limited the amount of money our guys can spend come election time, so those other guys can't outspend us, and what do you know? We wound up with a marketplace of ideas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @01:28PM (4 children)
Oh how cute you are. You want some real eye opener, search for highest use of Anti-depressants per capita. Now tell me are they really that happy or is it something else.
(Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Monday March 19 2018, @02:54PM (3 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @03:31PM
hi
the link doesnt say how marketing and how doctors are reimbursed for prescribing unnecesasry medications that act as a placebo for people that dont need them, or better, cause issues that can necessitate other prescriptions and treatments.
if you dont have a problem, we can make you feel bad until we find one
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @05:55AM (1 child)
If you swallow the hype, that's Disneyland ($135 per day per person; if you take the day off from work, $97). [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday March 21 2018, @01:33AM
I know coding is cheap. But $12 per hour? Coders were making 5 times that in the 1980s. That's why when I saw where this software stuff was going 4 decades ago, I stuck with facilities. Just about any hairless monkey can code. It just takes practice. Now reading 200 pages of blueprints and 4+ volumes of specifications requires some real skill. People still call me for work even though they know I'm retired. And The money they want to toss at me is totally ridiculous. I'd be tempted, but I'm happy just being able to go sailing (or fishing like TMB) whenever I want. I don't live in a big mansion, but my kids and nieces and nephews all got to go to good universities and doing good on their own now. Plus I'm blessed with good health mainly because I didn't spend years in a cube or dark room staring at a computer screen.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Monday March 19 2018, @03:32PM (1 child)
But if you are going to move to the USA, perhaps you should move to the SF Bay Area, which has two cities in the top-five happiest cities in the USA in 2018:
https://wallethub.com/edu/happiest-places-to-live/32619 [wallethub.com]
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Monday March 19 2018, @04:13PM
Also, Fremont, has a very high number of immigrants, which implies that it is good to have immigrants living in your community.