STOCKHOLM (AP) – The coronavirus brought with it a year of fear and anxiety, loneliness and incarceration, and illness and death, but an annual report on happiness around the world released Friday suggests the pandemic is not affecting people’s minds. crushed.
The editors of the World Happiness Report 2021 found that while emotions changed as the pandemic started, longer-term life satisfaction was less affected.
“What we’ve found is that when people look at the long term, they’ve shown a lot of resilience over the past year,” said Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, one of the report’s co-authors, from New York.
The annual report, prepared by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, ranks 149 countries based on gross domestic product per person, healthy life expectancy and the opinions of residents. Surveys ask respondents to rate, on a scale of 1-10, how much social support they think they will have when things go wrong, their freedom to make their own life choices, their awareness of how corrupt their society is and how generous they to be.
Due to the pandemic, the surveys were conducted in just under 100 countries for this year’s World Happiness Report, the ninth compiled since the project’s inception. Index rankings for the other countries were based on estimates of past data.
According to the results of both methods, European countries occupy nine of the top 10 places on the happiest places of the word list, with New Zealand complementing the group. The top 10 countries are Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Austria.
It was the fourth consecutive year that Finland came out on top. The United States, which ranked number 13 five years ago, slid from 18th to 19th place. On a shortened list of only the countries surveyed, the US finished in 14th place.
“We find year after year that satisfaction with life is said to be happiest in the social democracies of Northern Europe,” said Sachs. “People feel safe in those countries, so confidence is high. The government is seen as credible and fair, and mutual trust is high. “
Finland’s relative success in curbing COVID-19 may have contributed to the continued confidence of the country’s people in their government. The country has taken rapid and comprehensive measures to stop the spread of the virus and has one of the lowest COVID-19 death rates in Europe.
“Of course people have suffered in Finland too,” said Anu Partanen, author of “The Nordic Theory of Everything” in Helsinki on Friday. “But again, in Finland and the Scandinavian countries, people are really lucky 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 was based on pre-pandemic information.
“We asked two kinds of questions. One is about life in general, we call it life evaluation. How is your life going? The other is about mood, emotions, stress, anxiety, ”said Sachs. “Of course we are still in the middle of a deep crisis. But the responses to long-term life evaluation did not change decisively, even though the disruption in our lives was so profound. “
Issues affecting people’s well-being in the United States include racial tensions and growing income inequality between the richest and poorest residents, happiness experts say.
“As for why the US ranks much lower than other comparable or even less wealthy countries, the answer is simple,” said Carol Graham, an expert at The Brookings Institution who was not involved in the report. “The US has greater differences in happiness scores between rich and poor than most other wealthy countries.”
Report co-author Sonja Lyubormirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, noted that American culture values signs of wealth, such as big houses and multiple cars, more than other countries. happy.”
Conversely, people’s perception that their land was coping well with the pandemic contributed to an overall increase in well-being, Sachs said in Columbia. Several Asian countries performed better than last year; China rose to 84th place from 94th last year.
“This has been a difficult period. People look past it when they are looking for the long term. But there are also many people who suffer in the short term, ”he said.
Finnish philosopher Esa Saarinen, who was not involved in the report, thinks the Finnish character himself could help explain why the country continues to lead the index.
“I think Finns are pretty happy on some level because they are exactly what we are,” he said. “We don’t have to be real anymore.”
Seth Borenstein in Washington DC contributed to this report.