The World Happiness Report 2022. Is Finland really the happiest country on the planet? A closer look a the numbers

The media recently reported that the Nordic countries again are topping the ranks in the latest poll of the World Happiness Report. At the top of the ranks, for the fifth consecutive year, is Finland! Is the claim really true? I use my own model - Rational Entrepreneurial Thinking - to sort that out. The World Happiness Report's claim that Finland is the happiest country on the planet is false. Finland has the highest rate of Alzheimer's in the World and the highest rate of depression within the EU. The probable explanation is a chain of events, starting with Swedenborg's shift from science to mysticism, which likely influenced Porthan to claim that Finns mainly originate from the east. In reality most Finns originate from Sweden, and the culture that emerged in Tiundaland during the Vendel period, and which dominated the areas around the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic sea. That includes renaissance, science revolution, and enlightenment thinking. When Russia invaded Sveaborg, and Finland became a vassal state, a shift in culture, towards national-romantic or etno-nationalist, and tribalism, occurred. Therefore, the claims made by the authors of the The word happiness report should be rejected. 13 pages.

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The media recently reported that the Nordic countries again are topping the ranking in the latest World Happiness Report:

“The Nordic country and its neighbors Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Iceland all score very well on the measures the report uses to explain its findings: healthy life expectancy, GDP per capita, social support in times of trouble, low corruption and high social trust, generosity in a community where people look after each other and freedom to make key life decisions” (The world's happiest countries for 2022)

There are some minor changes, but still at the top of the ranks, for the fifth consecutive year, is Finland! Congratulations to the people living in Finland!

A second thought on the matter: is the claim really true?

In the late 1990s, I switched from being a performance coach and business owner to become an academic. It lead to two tracks:

1. Business administration, especially organizational learning (Österberg, 2001, 2002, 2004).
   
   
2. Psychology: experimental emotional psychology (Österberg, 2001 (In Swedish)), and social psychology, especially children's emotional and social adjustment as well as cognitive development, as a function of relations to their parents (Österberg. 2004 (In Swedish)). On top of that, after psychologist Daniel Kahneman received the Svenska Riksbanken Prize in Economics in memory of Alfred Nobel for his Amos Tversky's (1937 - 1996) work on “natural stupidity”, I was recruited to be the only one fully funded position at a faculty to write my doctoral thesis. One part of the job was to tutor economists about methods. I chose to develop a model for leadership that influences generative learning and social creativity for problem solving within organizations (Österberg, 2012). I became a psychological scientist (anthropological social neuropsychologist).

In parallel to conducting research on leadership which influences social creativity, I was recruited to be an expert lecturer at various university colleges in Sweden, and in Finland (N>10).

Our species are at risk of “natural stupidity” - the tendency to believe information that is:

• prototypical (Kahneman och Tversky, 1972).
  
  
• often repeated (Tversky och Kahneman, 1973).
  
  
• easy to access (Kahneman and Tversky, 1977).

This is congruent with Dysrationalia - the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence (this includes instrumental and epistemic rationality) (Stanovich, 1993).

In 2018, I was recruited to the University of Helsingfors to investigate the Future of agriculture (food production) from a perspective of entrepreneurial thinking. That included developing a model called Rational Entrepreneurial Thinking (Österberg, 2021, a, b chapter 3 (In Swedish)). The model has a three-factor structure:

1. Epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al. 2010),
   
   
2. Numeracy (Brooks and Pui, 2010).
   
   
3. Disjunctive reasoning (Stanovich, 2009).

When someone, or some group of people makes a claim about something, you should be suspicious about the content of the message and the reason for why the message was communicated. Second, when reviewing the message, focus on simple facts, the numbers are crucial. That's because instrumental and epistemic rationality is based on numeracy. Finally, use many sources to figure out whether the proposal is true or not.

I also have a rule that I try to follow. It's based on an analogy; if the label on the jar says lingon-berry, you expect to find lingon-berry in the jar.

First, what is happiness?

Here is where the little I know about emotional psychology comes handy.

Happiness can mean a variety of things. In neuropsychology, happiness is part of something called PRIMEs.

“Presents a theory that describes motivation and emotion as different aspects of a single process in which emotion involves the readout of motivational potential inherent in hierarchically organized primary motivational/emotional systems (primes). This theory involves an integrated way of thinking about emotion and motivation in their various physiological, expressive, and cognitive aspects. The most basic readout, Emotion I, involves adaptive-homeostatic functions. In species where communication about the state of certain primes became important, Emotion II, involving their outward expression, evolved. With cognition, a 3rd type of readout evolved, Emotion III, involving the direct experience of certain primes. A model of the interaction between primes and cognition is presented, and the unique role of language in human motivation-emotion is discussed” (Buck, 1985).

According to Wikipedia:

“The term happiness is used in the context of mental or emotional states, including positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy.[1] It is also used in the context of life satisfaction, subjective well-being, eudaimonia, flourishing and well-being” (Wikipedia).

According to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“There are roughly two philosophical literatures on “happiness,” each corresponding to a different sense of the term. One uses ‘happiness’ as a value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing. The other body of work uses the word as a purely descriptive psychological term, akin to ‘depression’ or ‘tranquility’. An important project in the philosophy of happiness is simply getting clear on what various writers are talking about: what are the important meanings of the term and how do they connect? While the “well-being” sense of happiness receives significant attention in the contemporary literature on well-being, the psychological notion is undergoing a revival as a major focus of philosophical inquiry, following on recent developments in the science of happiness. This entry focuses on the psychological sense of happiness (for the well-being notion, see the entry on well-being). The main accounts of happiness in this sense are hedonism, the life satisfaction theory, and the emotional state theory. Leaving verbal questions behind, we find that happiness in the psychological sense has always been an important concern of philosophers. Yet the significance of happiness for a good life has been hotly disputed in recent decades. Further questions of contemporary interest concern the relation between the philosophy and science of happiness, as well as the role of happiness in social and political decision-making”.

According to American Psychological Association (APA), happiness is an:

“emotion of joy, gladness, satisfaction, and well-being”.

Lustig (2017), discriminate happiness - I like this, I had enough, from a reward sensation - I like this, I want more.

To get an orientation about stuff like the brain and the mind, listen to Scott Barry Kaufman's interview with Dr. Antonio Damasio: Inside Consciousness.

The people who compile the World Happiness Report aren't psychologists but economists. That indicates that they may not have the proper conceptual understanding of happiness. That assumption is manifested in the fact that their conclusions are based on the Cantril ladder or scale, which does not assess happiness but life-satisfaction (Cantril, 1965).

It's common knowledge that inquiries are tricky. That's because of how the human mind works. The mind has three main faculties: memory, perception and prospection - experiencing the future.

• Perception is the experience of the present, e.g. odor, tactile, visual, auditory, and taste.
  
  
• Memory is not for forming associations or remembering, but for simulating scenarios about the future we don't know much about (Gilbert and Wilson, 2007; Kaku, 2014).
  
  
• Memory is divided into several instances: declarative and non-declarative respectively (Graf and Schacter, 1985; Squire and Zola, 1996).
  
  
• Declarative memory is divided into semantic, episodic and personal semantic (autobiographical).
  
  
• Semantic memory relates to facts - 2+2=4, Paris is the capital of France etc. and is stable over time (ScienceDirect).
  
  
• Autobiographical memory is formed around the age of 5-6 and is susceptible to memory hacking (Nelson and Fivush, 2004; Shaw, 2016).
  
  
• Episodic memory concerns events we have been part of. When we have to remember an event, a copy of the event is not retrieved from memory. Instead, a construction of the sequence of events takes place that is adapted to the current situation (Schacter and Addis, 2007):

“Since the future is not an exact repetition of the past, simulation of future episodes may require a system that can draw on the past in a manner that flexibly extracts and recombines elements of previous experiences—a constructive rather than a reproductive system.” (Schacter and Addis, 2007 , p. 774).

Long story short, there are three things to avoid:

1. asking direct questions.
   
   
2. asking people to remember.
   
   
3. asking people to predict future prospects.

That's because episodic memory, which is involved in both scenarios, is not reproductive, but constructive in a social fashion. In order for inquiries to work properly, they need to be about the present - your current outlook - and latent constructs.

According to Gallup:

“The Cantril Scale measures well-being closer to the end of the continuum representing judgments of life or life evaluation (Diener, Kahneman, Tov, and Arora, 2009). Research conducted across countries around the world (Deaton, 2008) indicates substantial correlations between the Cantril Scale and income. This contrasts with measures of feelings or affect which appear to be more closely correlated with variables such as social time (Harter och Arora, 2008)”.

So, the Cantril ladder or scale is more likely to measure life-satisfaction from an economical perspective.

Adding to that, Finland is not one cohort. Finland, among fifty-five other countries on the planet, is bilingual and bi-cultural. That means Finland has two official languages.

The backstory to that is that after the latest climate change (~11 600 tya), people from northern Europe, the Pontic steppe, and northern Siberia migrated to Fennoscandia (Lamnidis et al. 2018). For an orientation about Climate changes, se Cohen et al. (2020).

During the Vendel period (540 - 750 AD), a power center emerged in Tiundaland (Östra Aros, current day Uppsala), in Svitjod, the predecessor of Sweden (Harrison, 2018). Tiundaland stretched to the Northeast, and included today's northern Uppland and Gästrikland, and was called Tiundalands Rod (Björklund, 2014).

The waters were rich in cod, a source of protein and fish liver oil, food that is crucial to develop physical and mental health. Sea levels at that time were 5-6 meters higher reaching all the way to Tiundaland. Thus, it was possible to sail from Uppsala to the Gulf of Bothnia. This means that Tiundaland was located near the coast - a sea kingdom:

“A thousand years ago, the settlement in Finland was entirely concentrated on the sea coast and waterways... "Water meant connections, communication, the only form of real and regular contact and the only route along which trade and exchange of goods could be carried out in the Fennoscandia of swamps, forests and mountains” (s 7, Klinge, 1984).

“För tusen år sedan var bosättningen i Finland helt koncentrerar till havskusten och vattendragen”...“Vattnet innebar förbindelser, kommunikation, den enda formen för egentlig och regelbunden kontakt och den enda led, längs vilken handel och varuutbyte kunde bedrivas i träskens, skogarnas och bergens Fennoskandien” (s 7, Klinge, 1984).

“On archaeological grounds, we can conclude that settlement in Scandinavia until the first centuries AD was mostly coastal settlement and that at this time the clay plains in the interior began to be cultivated(Lönnroth, Klinge, 1984, s 7).

“På arkeologisk grund kan vi konstatera att bosättningen i Skandinavien fram till de första århundradena efter Kristus närmast var kustbosättning och att man vid denna tid började uppodla lerjordsslätterna i det inre landet” (Lönnroth, Klinge, 1984, s 7).

Satakunda, Latin: Satagundia or Finlandia Septentrionalis, can be divided into Sata=hundred and kunta=association, historically 'parish'. This means that Satakunda and Tiundaland had equal importance. Notably. Finlandia Septentrionalis was a marker for the Germanic and the Nordic (Workman ett al. 1999, s. 66).

“When we combine this strongly marine character of Suethiod with our knowledge that Satakunda and Vakka-Finland – the areas around Uusimaa and Kaland – have had very close connections with the Mälardalen valley very far back, we should be able to see these areas as parts of the old sea kingdom of Suethiod” (Klinge, s. 8).

“Då vi sammanbinder denna Suethiods starkt marina karaktär med vår kunskap om att Satakunda och Vakka-Finland – trakterna kring Nystad och Kaland – mycket långt tillbaka har haft synnerligen nära förbindelser med Mälardalen, så torde man kunna se dessa områden som delar av det gamla sjökungariket Suethiod” (Klinge, s. 8).

“Viking age grave finds that have recently been explored support the opinion derived from Agricola (Mikael Olofsson (1507 – 1557)) that Satakunda and Vakka-Finland would have been connected to the west. Satakunda's regional name and the border fortification system against Tavastland as well as many other factors suggested that this part of today's Finland would have belonged to Suetjiod” (s 8, Klinge, 1984).

“Vikingatida gravfynd som nyligen utforskats stöder den från Agricola (Mikael Olofsson (1507 – 1557) härstammade uppfattning om att Satakunda och Vakka-Finland skulle ha varit knutna västerut. Satakunda landskapsnamn och gränsbefästningssystemet mot Tavastland samt många andra faktorer talat för att denna del av dagens Finland skulle ha hört till Suetjiod” (s 8, Klinge, 1984).

Findings south of Tavastehus also show signs of settlements that date to 600 AD. The southeast coast of the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic sea integrate with Tiundaland/Svitjod. In 2008 – 2010, archaeologists discovered boat graves in Salme, Estonia, dating back to 650 – 700 AD. The boats were clinker-built longships, i.e. the type of ships that began to be built in Tiundaland during the Vendel period. An important observation was that they used sails. One of the ships contained traces of men from the upper classes and the voyage was considered to have been of a diplomatic nature. This is consistent with a crusade (Mägi, 2018;Watson, 2016; Wikipedia).

With the advent of the viking era (~750 ~1050), Tiundaland expanded all the way to Novgorod.

1150 - 1160, king Erik Jedvardssons (1125 - 1160) carried out his supposed crusade, likely following a longstanding tradition of traveling from Tiundaland, through Tiundaland Rod to Satakunda.

In 1477, Uppsala university was founded in Östra Aros/Uppsala, in Tiundaland. This probably boosted entrepreneurial thinking.

For more than 1000 years, until 1808, a very successful Swedish socio-culture was dominating the Gulf of Bothina and the Baltic sea. these cities was founded:

1. Åbo - Founded in the late 13th century, it is the oldest city in Finland.
   
   
2. Borgå - Established in 1346.
   
   
3. Viborg - Founded in 1403.
   
   
4. Nådendal - Established in 1443.
   
   
5. Helsingfors - Founded in 1550.
   
   
6. Raumo - Established in 1550s.
   
   
7. Björneborg - Founded in 1558.
   
   
8. Uleåborg - established in 1605.
   
   
9. Vasa - Founded in 1606.
   
   
10. Kristinestad - Founded in 1649.
    
    
11. Brahestad - Established in 1649.
    
    
12. Jakobstad - Founded in 1652.
    
    
13. Fredrikshamn - established in 1653.
    
    
14. Kuopio - established in 1653 (1775).
    
    
15. Lovisa (Degerby) - established in 1752.

In 1632, the university of Tartu was founded, followed by Royal Academy in Åbo (1640), and the naval fortress Sveaborg (1748).

In parallel, Uralic tribes were lurking in the forests of the inland of the eastern part of the Swedish kingdom. They worshiped the bear (paganism), and spoke languages that didn't resonate with the trading language around the gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic sea.

During the 1540s, a Swedish priest by the name Mikael Olofsson (1510 – 1557) originally from Pärnåbygd situated 82 km east of Helsingfors, aimed to convert these pagans to Christianity. For that very purpose, he invented a standard version of the Uralic languages, and wrote the first translation of the bible.

In 1699 Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 – 1772) enrolled at Uppsala University. His studies continued until 1709. In 1734, Swedenborg published Principia Rerum Naturalium. About ten years later, he began to take an interest in mysticism. In 1758, Swedenborg published Himmel och Helvete, establishing mysticism. It can be assumed that Swedenborg’s interests created a so-called zeitgeist – spirit of the times.

In 1754, at the age of 15,Henrik Porthan (1739 – 1804) enrolled at the Royal Academy in Åbo. In 1760, he defended his master’s thesis in philosophy. In 1777, he was promoted to professor, a title he retained for the rest of his life. He also became rector. Porthan wrote mainly in Latin and Swedish.

It is reasonable to assume that Uppsala University influenced the Royal Academy in Åbo. This implies that Porthan was influenced by Swedenborg, who when Porthan enrolled had shifted his focus to mysticism. But where Swedenborg looked upwards, Porthan looked eastwards, probably inspired by Olofsson/Agricola's attempts to Christianize the tribes in the interior. This may have led to the idea that the original Finn came from his own homeland – Karelia – and spoke Uralic.

In 1808, Russia invaded the Swedish naval fortress Sveaborg, and vice-admiral Cronstedt capitulated,  saving thousands of lives. From 1809 to 1917, Finland became a Russian vassal state, on paper a grand duchy. And Kreml, who since 1240 had been an arch enemy to Svitjod, and from 1384, Sweden, probably wanted Finland to alienate itself from its former brotherland. That probably fueled the national-romantic or etno-nationalist. Fennoman movement (1810).

But Swedish remained the main language in Finland.

In 1835. Elias Lönnrot published a mythology called Kalevala, following the mystic zeitgeist introduced by Swedenborg and Porthan, to imply that Finnish people originated from the east.

In ~1860s, tzar Alexander demanded the Finns to add Uralic as an official language.

1870. 75% of the Finns spoke Swedish.

1910 - 1940, during the language strife, Uralic reached break even. Still, ~50 % of the Finns spoke Swedish.

2022. 47% of the Finns spoke Swedish-Finnish, and 87 % of the Finns speaks Uralic-finnish.

What are the consequences of the bi-lingual struggle?

From the records:

• North Karelia Project. 995 out 10 000 people in North Karelia (typically Uralic-finnish socio-culture) died of cardiovascular disease. In the southwest, in Åbo, with a typical Swedish-finnish socio-culture, 300 Finns died of cardiovascular disease (Teicholz, 2014). Here's the interesting thing. People in Åbo and North Karelia ate a similar diet!
  
  
• Finnish women's relational aggressiveness (Crick and Grotpeter, 1995; Hyde, 2005) is the big challenge (Helsingfors police department, April, 2022).
  
  
• Important update of information that was released in late 2022 - 2023, after this article was published. Finland has the highest prevalence of Alzheimer's per capita of all countries in the world (Sweden is in 10th place) (Österberg, 2022, 2024 a, b, c, d, e, f).
  
  
• 20% of Finnish kids and young people born 1997 or later, suffer from mental issues. The prevalence is greatest in North Karelia (Elina Pekkarinen, Finland's child commissary, November, 2022).
  
  
• Finn's physical and mental health has deteriorated since 2010 (FPA/THL, 2023; Österberg, 2023).
  
• Swedish-speaking Finns have better health and live longer (researchers at Helsingfors city, at a conference at Arbis, 2023).
  
  
• Psychological (relational aggressiveness) and lethal violence against small children has increased (Elina Pekkarinen, Finland's Child commissary, November, 2023).
  
  
• Finland is the most depressive country in the EU (Maj Estlander, November, 2023).
  
  
• 40 % of the Finnish school children have reported that they have been victims of psychological violence (Maj Estlander, November, 2023).

Why are health issues more prevalent in Finland compared to Sweden, EU and the World?

When interviewing people about this, some claim that Finns have special genes (Note. 16% of the Finns originate from the east (Red Cross blood donation, Helsingfors); most Finns have their heritages from the west.)

Another explanation comes from Mark Pagel, a professor of biological anthropology. In 2019, Dr Pagel was invited to Scotland to give a Gifford lecture. During his third lecture about tribalism, Dr Pagel's first example of tribalism: Papua New Guinea. His second example: Finland.

“One really good example, here's Finland, and many of you will know that this part of Finland more or less speaks Finnish, that part of Finland you can't tell, there's no sort of line on the ground when you're driving through there, this part of speak Swedish and they just kind of don't intermarry very much” (Pagel, 2019).

Language creates culture (Reich, 2019).

Dr. Pagel also mentions another marker for tribalism - moral shaming. Such cultures don't change much - they conform - they rely on the local myths.

A consequence of Finland's Uralic tribal culture is malnutrition. Because government officials used cherry picking to suppress the data from Åbo, saturated fats and salt were said to cause cardiovascular disease (THL, 2022). Finland became the No 1 low fat country in the world!

In reality, animal source food is crucial for physical and mental health (Ede, 2019; Österberg, 2019, 2020).

Conclusion. The World Happiness Report's claim that Finland is the happiest country on the planet is false. Finland has the highest rate of Alzheimer's in the World and the highest rate of depression within the EU. The probable explanation is a chain of events, starting with Swedenborg's shift from science to mysticism, which likely influenced Porthan to claim that Finns mainly originate from the east. In reality most Finns originate from Sweden, and the culture that emerged in Tiundaland during the Vendel period, and which dominated the areas around the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic sea. That includes renaissance, science revolution, and enlightenment thinking. When Russia invaded Sveaborg, and Finland became a vassal state, a shift in culture, towards national-romantic or etno-nationalist, and tribalism, occurred. Therefore, the claims made by the authors of the The word happiness report should be rejected.

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