Northern Europe and Western Europe again have the happiest people.

Those sky-high happiness surveys, it turns out, are mostly bunk. Asking people “Are you happy?” means different things in different cultures. In Japan, for instance, answering “Yes” seems like boasting, Booth points out. Whereas in Denmark, it’s considered “shameful to be unhappy,” newspaper editor Anne Knudsen says in the book.

Moreover, there is a group of people that believes the Danes are lying when they say they’re the happiest people on the planet. This group is known as “Danes.”

“Over the years I have asked many Danes about these happiness surveys — whether they really believe that they are the global happiness champions — and I have yet to meet a single one of them who seriously believes it’s true,” Booth writes. “They tend to approach the subject of their much-vaunted happiness like the victims of a practical joke waiting to discover who the perpetrator is.”

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Visitors say Danes are joyless to be around. Denmark suffers from high rates of alcoholism. In its use of antidepressants it ranks fourth in the world. (Its fellow Nordics the Icelanders are in front by a wide margin.) Some 5 percent of Danish men have had sex with an animal. Denmark’s productivity is in decline, its workers put in only 28 hours a week, and everybody you meet seems to have a government job. Oh, and as The Telegraph put it, it’s “the cancer capital of the world.”


So how happy can these drunk, depressed, lazy, tumor-ridden, pig-bonking bureaucrats really be?

Sorry, liberals, Scandinavian countries aren’t utopias

Want proof that the liberal social-democratic society works? Look to Denmark, the country that routinely leads the world in happiness surveys. It’s also notable for having the highest taxes on Eart…

nypost.com

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A surprising number of Danes agree with me, though: They also think their homeland is stultifyingly dull. Newspaper columnist Anne Sophia Hermansen, of the broadsheet Berlingske, caused a small kerfuffle recently when she expressed her feelings about what she saw as Denmark’s suffocating monoculture: “It is so boring in Denmark. We wear the same clothes, shop in the same places, see the same TV, and struggle to know who to vote for because the parties are so alike. We are so alike it makes me weep.”

Another prominent newspaper commentator, Jyllands-Posten’s Niels Lillelund, pinpointed a more serious side effect of the Danes’ Jante Law mentality: “In Denmark we do not raise the inventive, the hardworking, the ones with initiative, the successful or the outstanding; we create hopelessness, helplessness, and the sacred, ordinary mediocrity.”

The Danish Don't Have the Secret to Happiness

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

www.theatlantic.com

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Peter King said:

Congratulations to the Finnish, they are once again (5th year in a row) the happiest people on earth. Denmark is second, Iceland is third, Switzerland is fourth and the Netherlands is fifth.


6. Luxembourg
7. Sweden
8. Norway
9. Israel
10. New Zealand

Germany, the UK, the US, Australia and France do not come near the top 10 countries. The worst performers in the list of Western Countries (first world countries) are Belgium and France.

Even though the Netherlands and Belgium are neighboring countries, part of the Belgian people are Dutch speaking as we are, they are the center of Europe, but still they rank down on the list just above France.

Lowest all around is of course Afghanistan, but war and occupation will do that for you. The Ukrainians will most likely fall deep on the list as will Russia. Another country that might be affected is Finland due to them bordering Russia. But as these polls were taken before the Russian invasion.

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OrphanSlug said:

I am not doubting the OP, but it would be nice to see the source to see where all nations ended up and the methodology used.

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Peter King said:

Germany, the UK, the US, Australia and France do not come near the top 10 countries.

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bluesmoke said:

The manner of discussion in France is argument. Belgians are upset with itself and the world for being mistaken as French. There ya go.

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