Today is World Happiness Day. So, like every year on 20 March, you are likely to see a lot of headlines reporting on the publication of the annual World Happiness Report. ‘Finland is again ranked the happiest country in the world [while] the US falls to its lowest-ever position’, a headline in the Associated Press ran this morning. Forbes even got philosophical, promising ‘5 Life Lessons From Finland, Once Again the World’s Happiest Country’.
Published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University, the basic message of the report has remained the same since its launch in 2012. The happiest countries in the world are in Scandinavia; this year, Finland is followed by Denmark, Iceland and Sweden. America, despite being one of the richest large countries in the world, persistently underperforms: this year, the United States only comes in 24th out of the 147 countries covered in the report, placing it behind much poorer countries like Lithuania and Costa Rica.
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