Monday, April 11, 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 year in a row, is Finland! Is the claim really true? I use My own model - Rational Entrepreneurial Thinking - to sort that out. Result. The report does not assess happiness but life-satisfaction. And the report does not take into account that Finland has two cultures. And the lead author has not yet answered the questions I sent him, including a reminder. 7 pages.

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The media recently reported that the Nordic countries again are topping the ranks in the latest poll of the 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 year in a row, is Finland! Congratulations to the people living in Finland!

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

Around the year 2000 I wrote my bachelor thesis in emotional psychology (Österberg, 2001 (In Swedish)) The thesis dealt with happiness.

I then went on to explore children's emotional and social adjustment as well as cognitive development, as a function of relations to their parents (Österberg. 2004 (In Swedish)). 

In my latest research project, I developed a model called Rational Entrepreneurial Thinking (Österberg, 2021, a, b chapter 3 (In Swedish)). The model has a three-factor structure: 
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. 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?  

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.

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

Second, the people who performed the assessment aren't psychologists but economists. 

That may indicate that they don't have the proper conceptual understanding of Happiness. 

That is manifested in the fact that their conclusions are based on the Cantril ladder  or scale, which doesn't assess happiness but life-satisfaction (Cantril, 1965). 

Also, it's common knowledge that Inquiries are tricky. That's because of how the human mind works. Long story short, there are two things to avoid, asking people to remember, and asking people to predict future prospects. That's because episodic memory, which is involved in both scenarios are not reproductive, but constructive in a social fashion (Schacter and Addis, 2007). In order for inquiries to work properly, they need to be about the present - you current outlook.

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 & Arora, 2008) (lLink).
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: For the past thousand years Swedish-Finnish was dominating, giving the country its constitution, enlightenment, and universities. More recently, from 1850-ish, Ural-Finnish has become the administrative language. 

Now, Swedish-Finnish is still prevalent in the south and south-west where most of the Finns (~5 000 000) live, whereas Ural-Finnish is more prevalent in the inland and to the north where a minority of people live (~500 000).

The backstory to that is that people moved or migrated to this area after the ice started to reside after the most recent climate change some nine thousand years ago.

For an orientation of Climate changes, se Cohen et al. (2020).

And the migration came from the south, the east, and the north was dominated by sami people (Lamnidis et al. 2018). 

During the viking-era (750-1050 AD), trading over the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic sea was common. And at the end of that era, a process started to include Finland into the then Swedish kingdom, or Svitjod (only in Swedish) - the area around lake Mälaren, and its then capital Uppsala. Finland, at that time, meant the southern parts.

1550, King Gustav Vasa founded Helsingfors.

1561, Estonia was included into the Swedish king.

1632, Queen Christina founded the university of Tartu.

1640, Queen Christina founded the Åbo Royal Academy, later to become University of Helsingfors.

1748, the building of fortress Sveaborg was initiated.

1808, Russia invaded Sveaborg, and vice-admiral Cronstedt capitulated.

The new russian lords wanted Finland to alienate themselves from Sweden, and therefore a movement called Fennomania was initiated.

1835, Elias Lönnrot published a mythology called Kalevala, implying that Finnish People originated from the east.  

1860, the Sannfinländarna, was founded for the same purpose.

1870, 75 % av the Finns spoke Swedish.

1910, 50 % of the Finns spoke Swedish.

2022, 47 % of the Finns spoke Swedish. 

This suggests that Finland has two divided cultures. And when sampling people you have to take into consideration both these cultures. 

One great example is the North Karelia project - Finland's prime nutritional study and the pride of the University of Helsingfors (founded by Swedish Queen Christina (1629 - 1689) in 1640).

The North Karelia project was part of a larger project, the Seven Countries study (SCS). Because Finland has two cultures, they sampled subjects from two areas. So, there's a second cohort, which seldom, or rather never, is mentioned - the southwest (Åbo) to the shores of Gulf of Bothnia.

So if you ask anyone in Finland about the North Karelia project, they will tell you that this very successful project showed that saturated fat and cholesterol were the cause of the many cases of cardiovascular disease (CVD; 995 out of 10 000).

Now this was very important, because another cohort in the SCS, in Crete, nine (9) out of 10 000 suffered from CVD. That's a  significant difference. 

And because of the zeitgeist and a study published by Swedish biochemist Haqvin Malmros (1895-1995) in 1950, the researchers was convinced they could fix the problem by reducing butter and salt from the diet, But what about the cohort from the Åbo area?

In 2014 investigative journalist Nina Teicholz published her book The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. On page 37-38 she covered the two Finnish cohorts which was part of the Seven countries study

Here's the interesting thing. People in Åbo and North Karelia ate the same diet! But in Åbo, 300 people out of 10 000 suffered from CVD, that's a third of the cases in Karelia. 

The implication from that is that diet wasn't the explanation that three times as many people in north-east of Finland suffered from CVD. It must have been something else.

In his Gifford lecture on tribalism, Mark Pagel, professor of biological anthropology, addressed one very interesting thing, that there's an invisible border somewhere in the middle of Finland where people in the north don't intermarry with the people in the south:
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).
Dr. Pagel also remarks that people who are separated by language form tribes, and he mentions that the commonality in tribes are things like moral shaming. Such cultures don't change much - they conform. But there's a big difference between Swedish-Finnish and Ural-Finnish language and cultures.

The former is part of a European language family, meaning it connects to English, French, and German, to mention a few. And in Fennoscandia, people speak a variety of Swedish, for example Norwegian, Swedish-Swedish and Swedish-Finnish. That means, from the Atlantic coast to the western and southern part of Finland, speaking Swedish means you can easily connect with other cultures. 

Ural-Finnish, on the other hand, is a very local language with a syntax that doesn't relate to the European languages the way Swedish-Finns do.

Now also remember that language and culture doesn't necessarily mean the same thing. You can be part of a culture even though you don't speak the language. So in Finland, due to political interventions, Ural-Finnish language also dominates in the southern part of the country, but the jargon, is still very Swedish-oriented. This is very easy to observe. And if you say that you are Swedish-speaking, in most cases then their faces light up and they start to speak Swedish.

In conclusion. Because the word happiness is used in the label of the report, you expected to find an assessment about the emotion happiness. But the Cantril ladder assesses life-satisfaction. The report is mostly about economics, not psychological science. There's a similar case to that. During the 1970s psychological scientists Amos Tversky (1937-1996) and Daniel Kahneman published a number of papers about mental fallacies. That's when prospective thinking is skewed by a mix of memories and perception. Now remember that episodic memory is constructive.

The results from these studies show we intuitively tend to trust available information and the way a message is framed (Tversky and Kahneman, 1973, 19771981).

Now, all of these papers were published in psychological journals except one - Prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979). That paper was published in Econometrica. The implication was a change of the way economists' viewed what they call utility.

And in 2002 Dr. Kahneman received The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. But economists seem to be very tribal, because they don't admit that the study was based on psychological science (Dr Kahneman is a psychologist). They instead invented a new concept - behavior economics. 

And because the authors of the current report mention Finland as it was one cohort, similar to when researcher generalized the result from North Karelia Project on the whole population, you have to ask some questions about sampling. I did that. On March 18, I sent a mail to Dr. John Helliwell, professor of Economics at Vancouver School of Economics. Dr. Helliwell is mentioned at the top of the report, suggesting he is the lead author. Dr. Helliwell hasn't replied yet. So today I sent a reminder.

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