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 Swedish culture that dominated the areas around the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic sea was based on based on exploratory thinking (viking era), and later, the renaissance, science revolution, and enlightenment thinking, with typical markers: humanism, science, and reason (Pinker, 2018). The uralic-finnish socio-culture, which was instigated by Russia (1810/1863) is based on mythology and folk poetry, that is a national-romantic or etno-nationalist. Official data demonstrate that Swedish-speaking Finns (47%) have better physical and mental health compared to their uralic-finnish fellow Finns (87%). But Finland is also the most depressive country in the EU, and women's relational aggressiveness/psychological violence is prevalent. Therefore, the claims made by the authors of the The word happiness report should be rejected. 10 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 year in a row, 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, I was recruited to write my doctorate; I chose to develop a model for leadership that influence generative learning and social creativity for problem solving within organizations (Österberg, 2012).

I became a psychological scientist (Paleo anthropological social neuropsychology).

In 2018, I was recruited to the University of Helsingfors to investigate the Future for agriculture 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 & 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 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”.

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.

Second, the people who performed the assessment 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 doesn't assess happiness but life-satisfaction (Cantril, 1965).

Third, 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 - you current outlook - and latent construct.

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)”.

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 late Nordic iron age, a power center emerged in Tiundaland (Aros, current day Uppsala), in Svitjod (from 1384, Sweden, Harrison, 2018). Sea levels at that time were 5-6 meters higher reaching all the way to Tiundaland.

The waters were rich in cod, a source of protein and fish liver oil, food that is crucial to develop physical and mental health.

A unique socio-culture based on trading and exploration emerged. That included traveling across the southern quark eastwards. Findings south of Tavastehus show sings of settlements that dates to 600 AD. Slowly, the southeast coastal areas to the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic sea started to integrate with Tiundaland/Svitjod. With the advent of the viking era (~750 ~1050) this integration accelerated, including king Erik Jedvardssons (1125 - 1160) supposed crusade, likely to the area south of Tavastehus.

For about 700 years, until 1808, a very successful Swedish socio-culture was established around the Gulf of Bothina and the Baltic sea:

• 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.

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 a language that didn't resonate with the trading language around the gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic sea.

During the 1550s, a Swedish priest by the name Mikael [Agrikola] Olofsson (1510 – 1557) originally from Pärnåbygd situated 82 km east of Helsingfors, aimed to convert these pagans to Christianity. For that very purpose he made the first translation of the bible to this remote language.

But the Uralic language was supported by Fennophiles (Fennoman movement). One of the most prominent supporters was Swedish Henrik Gabriel Porthan (1739 - 1804), a professor of philosophy, rector at Royal Academy of Åbo, and the father of Finnish history. Dr. Porthan's view of history was marked by mythology and folk poetry, that is a national-romantic or etno-nationalist.

1808, Russia invaded Sveaborg, and vice-admiral Cronstedt capitulated. That saved thousands of lives. 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 Fennoman movement (1810).

But Swedish remained the main language in Finland:

• 1835. Elias Lönnrot published a mythology called Kalevala, implying that Finnish People originated from the east.
  
  
• 1870. 75% of the Finns spoke Swedish.
  
  
• 1910 - 1930. >50 % of the Finns spoke Swedish.
  
  
• 2022. 47% of the Finns spoke Swedish.

In parallel:

• 1860. The Finnish party was founded to promote Dr Porthans view of Finland.
  
  
• 1863. Kreml demanded that Finland formally abandon the trading language around the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic sea.
  
  
• 2022. 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 a huge issue (Helsingfors police department, April, 2022).
  
  
• Important update of information that was released in late 2022 and 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).
  
  
• 20% of Finnish kids and young 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).
  
  
• 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).

Note. Relational aggressiveness/psychological violence is typically a female phenomena (Crick and Grotpeter, 1995; Hyde, 2005).

Why?

When interviewing people about this, some claim that Finns have special genes (Note. 16% of the Finns originate from the east; 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 mentioned two examples where tribalism is prevalent: Papua New Guinea, and Finland! And the marker for tribalism i the famous Nöteborg border (1323):

“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 mentions a marker for tribalism -  moral shaming. Such cultures don't change much - they conform - they rely on the local myths.

A third factor is malnutrition. Because of North Karelia Project, when saturated fats and salt was attributed to cardiovascular disease, 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 Swedish culture that dominated the areas around the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic sea was based on based on exploratory thinking (viking era), and later, the renaissance, science revolution, and enlightenment thinking, with typical markers: humanism, science, and reason (Pinker, 2018). The uralic-finnish socio-culture, which was instigated by Russia (1810/1863) is based on mythology and folk poetry, that is a national-romantic or etno-nationalist. Official data demonstrate that Swedish-speaking Finns (47%) have better physical and mental health compared to their uralic-finnish fellow Finns (87%). But Finland is also the most depressive country in the EU, and womens relational aggressiveness/psychological violence is prevalent. Therefore, the claims made by the authors of the The word happiness report should be rejected.

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