Caustic modern American politics has arisen in the new metaverse of communications technologies. Everyone has an opinion and shares it. This perhaps leads to pervasive unhappiness with any kind of governance. There’s always something to bitch about because real change is both hard and always has winners and losers of some sort. But what do the happiest countries in the world do differently than those of us in the second and lower tiers? Worth reading is the seventh chapter of the World Happiness Report titled “The Nordic Exceptionalism.” Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, and Norway are all at the top, along with Switzerland, New Zealand, and Austria. And what do these countries do right that makes them so exceptional in terms of happiness? Well, it’s not due to some of the suggested culprits like low immigrant rates and cultural uniformity or high rates of suicide culling out the unhappy. It’s also not clearly due to lower levels of income inequality compared with peer countries. The effect of inequality on happiness appears to correlate with GDP per capita and is reduced in impact by the presence of a generous welfare state; it contributes but is not central.
Instead, important factors include trust in social institutions and low rates of corruption. People in these countries also feel freer than in peer countries, including the United States. Their overall life satisfaction levels are very high and have much lower variation within the populace than countries like ours, as well. Part of the sense of freedom may arise from the generosity of the welfare states by reducing the risk of exploring life options, which is also a side-effect of wealth in these countries.
A dive into potential root causes reveals some surprises, like:
Another important underlying factor might have been mass education. Uslaner and Rothstein have shown that the mean number of years of schooling in a country in 1870 is surprisingly strongly correlated with the corruption level of the same country in 2010, explaining 70% of its variance
This educational background may have cross-fertilized with Protestant institutions that preached and practiced egalitarian values, though that is hard to establish due to the low number of comparable Protestant countries outside the Nordics. The recent research tying Catholic bans on cousin marriage to pro-social and pro-individual attitudes is worth considering alongside these more recent developments like mass education. Those bans survived in large measure in Protestantism. If you are focused on more than your own family or tribe for mating partners, wealth becomes more fluid and social attitudes build ways of forming trust bonds that are beyond family obligations.
But the centrality of universal education as a means of reducing corruption and creating an informed populace is well-established in the data, and that is where we can apply policy pressure for improving on our second-tier happiness levels. Increase education opportunities from universal early childcare through high school and then into both college and apprenticeship systems. In so doing, the values associated with informed decision making will increase and the expectations that accompany knowing how institutions can work will have a ripple effect on overall improvements in stability and happiness.
It’s admittedly a long-term project but is one that can also help reduce the caustic effects of celebrity and social media on our political and personal lives. With education and stable institutions we get, in turn, a rejection of radicalism for radicalism’s sake out of that pervasive unhappiness that wants to tear things down. Instead, we build up a more studious better.
Fixed repetition of Sweden