STOCKHOLM (AP) – The coronavirus has brought a year of fear and anxiety, loneliness and openness and illness and death, but an annual report on happiness around the world, released on Friday, indicates that the pandemic is not in people’s minds did not crush.
The editors of the 2021 World Happiness Report found that although emotions change as the pandemic sets in, less life satisfaction is less affected.
“What we have found is that when they look at the long view, they have shown a lot of resilience over the past year,” said Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, one of the co-authors of the report, from New York.
The annual report, produced by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, ranks 149 countries based on gross domestic product per capita, a healthy life expectancy and the opinions of residents. Surveys ask respondents to indicate on a 1-10 scale how much social support they feel when something goes wrong, 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, the surveys in this year’s World Happiness Report, the ninth one compiled since the start of the project, were conducted in slightly less than 100 countries. The index ranking for the other countries is based on estimates of data from the past.
The results of both methods caused European countries to occupy nine of the ten best places on the list of the happiest places of the word, with New Zealand rounding out the group. The top 10 countries are Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Austria.
This was the fourth consecutive year that Finland came out on top. The United States, which was at number 13 five years ago, dropped from 18th to 19th place. On a shortlisted list of only the countries surveyed, the US took 14th place.
“We find year after year that life satisfaction is believed to be the happiest in the social democracies in Northern Europe,” Sachs said. ‘People feel safe in those countries, so confidence is high. It is seen that the government is credible and honest, and the trust in each other is high. ”
Finland’s comparative success in curbing COVID-19 may have contributed to the continued confidence of the country’s people in their government. The country has taken swift and extensive measures to stop the spread of the virus and has one of Europe’s lowest COVID-19 mortality rates.
“In Finland, too, people have obviously suffered,” Anu Partanen, author of “The Nordic Theory of Everything”, said in Helsinki on Friday. “But also in Finland and the Nordic countries, people are really happy because society still supports a system that buffers these kinds of shocks.”
Overall, the index showed little change in happiness levels compared to last year’s report, which is based on pre-pandemic information.
“We asked two kinds of questions. The one is about life in general, life evaluation, we call it. How are you? “The others are about mood, emotions, tension, anxiety,” Sachs said. “Of course we are still in a deep crisis. But the answers about long-term life evaluation have not changed decisively, even though the disruption in our lives has been so deep. ”
Issues affecting the well-being of people in the United States include racial tension and growing income inequality among the richest and poorest residents, say happy experts.
“Why the US is much lower than other similar or even less affluent countries, the answer is simple,” said Carol Graham, an expert at The Brookings Institution who was not involved in the report. “The US has larger gaps in happiness rankings between rich and poor than most other affluent countries.”
Sonja Lyubormirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, reported that American culture more than other states praises signs of wealth, such as large houses and various cars, and that material things make us not so happy. ”
Conversely, people’s perceptions that their country is handling the pandemic well have contributed to an overall increase in well-being, Columbia’s Sachs said. Several Asian countries fared better than they did last year in the rankings; China moved from 94th place last year to 84th place.
“It was a difficult time. People look past it when they look at the long term. But there are also many people who are suffering in the short term, ”he said.
The Finnish philosopher Esa Saarinen, who was not involved in the report, believes that the Finnish character himself can help explain why the country still leads the index.
“I think Finns are in a way quite substantive to just be who we are,” he said. “We don’t really have to be anymore.”
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Seth Borenstein in Washington DC contributed to this report.