When Michael Birkjær first heard that he was one of the happiest people in the world, his initial response was one of scepticism. Like many of his fellow Danes, Birkjær doubted that a tiny country on the periphery of Europe – which spends its winters beset by darkness and near-freezing temperatures – could be an international exemplar of cheeriness
“How come Denmark can be the happiest country in the world when – first of all – it’s so cold, and we have a fair amount of people who are depressed?” says the researcher at the Danish Happiness Research Institute. But the UN-backed 2012 World Happiness Report, the most comprehensive assessment of global happiness ever conducted, begged to differ.
The report, which took into account GDP, life expectancy, generosity, social support, freedom and corruption, revealed that Denmark was just the joyous heart of a much larger enclave of happiness lurking in Northern Europe. When it comes to happiness, Scandinavia – a group of countries made up of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden – seriously outperforms its peers. In the last five editions of the World Happiness Report, no Scandinavian country has ever appeared outside the top ten. The last time a Scandinavian country didn’t make it into the top ten was the first report, in 2012, when Iceland came in at a comparatively miserable 20th happiest country in the world. (In the last two reports, it has comfortably idled in fourth place).
For many outside of Scandinavia, the World Happiness Report finally offered some solid data confirming our suspicion that Northern Europeans were just better at life than the rest of us. From the middle of the twentieth century the minimalist functionality of Scandinavian design – epitomised by IKEA – has come to dominate the aesthetic of our homes, which will fill with candles and coffee machines in an attempt to capture a little of the coziness and conviviality associated with hygge. In the US, progressive presidential hopefuls point to Scandinavia as example of egalitarian states that temper the worst ravages of capitalism with clear-headed, pragmatic social welfare policies.
But Scandinavia’s rise from obscure archipelago to the emblem of progressive statehood has its roots in nearly a century of chaos and despondency outside of the region. And now, having topped the happiness tables for nearly a decade, it looks like the Scandinavian model is coming undone, leaving the region scrabbling to rebrand itself as the idea of national happiness takes hold across the globe.
To trace the roots of our obsession with Scandinavia, you need to go back to before happiness reports, hygge and IKEA and to a book. Written in 1936 by the American journalist Marquis Childs, Sweden: A Middle Way, sketched a portrait of a country that had tempered rampant wealth inequality by maintaining strong worker cooperatives and keeping a close eye on industry. In the US – still in the midst of the Great Depression – Childs’ book seemed to open a window onto a new way of thinking about capitalism. President Roosevelt despatched commissions to investigate the organisation of worker cooperatives and explore how unemployment was managed in Scandinavia.
“It became a kind of symbolic starting point of talking about the Scandivan countries as being more significant, in terms of the ideas that one could derive from these societies than from their geopolitical role or their economic impact,” says Carl Marklund, a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History in Sweden’s Södertörn University. The Scandinavian countries had largely recovered from the Great Depression by the time Childs’ book was released, while the US was still in the grip of sky-high unemployment.
The economic policies that insulated Scandinavia from the Great Depression were rooted in pragmatism, not ideology, Marklund says. “These are very small, export-oriented economies, and it’s very important both for labour to retain jobs and for capital to export goods.” While the US could lean on high immigration rates and the UK on its empire for a supply of cheap labour, the Scandinavian countries were compelled to put in place policies that kept their economies functioning reliably.
It was during this era that our modern-day perception of Scandinavia was forged. While the UK struggled to keep hold of its dying empire, and the Nazis rose in Germany, Scandinavia was surprisingly stable. “In comparison to these societies, the Nordic societies stood out as being kind of quaint backwaters, where there was this sweet combination of modernity and tradition.”
When the world has confronted crises of capitalism, Scandinavia has stood in as a hopeful symbol of a less turbulent way of existence. It’s not so much that Scandinavia itself is so remarkable, but that it is our lodestar when things get rough elsewhere in the world. And we’re not fussy. Any Scandinavian country will do. In the 1990s, when the global financial crisis forced the Swedish government to bail out its banks, US media fretted that the so-call Swedish model was over. So, Marklund says, the world found a new Sweden: Denmark.
“The US media needed some Nordic countries to still be a beacon for progressivism. So all of a sudden Denmark kind of stood out as being the representative of precisely the same values that Sweden had already been hailed for.” When the world needed a Scandinavia, there it was, offering us a way out of whatever mess we were in. But it wasn’t until the turn of the century that Scandinavia’s success started being expressed in terms of happiness.
“I don’t think that anybody really thought in those terms,” says Anu Partanen, a journalist and author of The Nordic Theory of Everything who grew up during the 1990s financial crisis in Finland. “The short answer is that the Finns think it is ridiculous. Finns by national character are not happy people.”
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The world, on the other hand, insists on telling Scandinavians that they’re happy. In the most recent World Happiness Report in 2018, Finland topped the rankings, followed by Norway, Denmark and Iceland. The problem, however, is that happiness is a notoriously slippery term.
“It really boils down to a question of happiness, and how happiness is defined and how it’s distributed,” says the happiness researcher Michael Birkjær. The main rankings in the World Happiness Reports don't focus on how happy people feel at a specific point at time, instead they ask them to evaluate their life as a whole on a scale where zero indicates the worst possible life and ten indicates the best. What most of us think of as happiness – giddy carelessness that’s here one minute and gone the next – is called affective happiness by researchers. In 2012, when Denmark ranked top in the World Happiness Report, it was actually 100th in the world in terms of affective happiness. And as Birkjær’s own research has noted, there are rising levels of unhappiness in Denmark, particularly when it comes to young people.
What Scandinavia really excels at is minimising unhappiness. The Scandinavian systems of free education and healthcare and strong social welfare policies are powerful inoculations against misery, but they’re not exactly likely to send citizens light-headed with joy. The Happiness Research Institute, Birkjær notes, might more accurately called the Misery Research Institute. “I think it is the core interest of governments to really reduce the most extreme kinds of misery,” he says.
Richard Layard, who helped devise the World Happiness Report and has co-authored all six reports, agrees. “We have to give a weight to the absence of people with really low levels of happiness. I think that in terms of private behaviour and also public policy it’s more important to help the least happy than to help everyone else.” As well as being one of the most happy countries in the world, Danish people have a relatively small distribution of happiness. Universal half-smiles, it seems, are healthier than having a country divided between the despondent and the deliriously cheery.
For Layard, this points towards a shared mindset in the Scandinavian countries. “They’re fundamentally egalitarian in that young people are encouraged to grow up looking for the things that we have in common with other people. Whereas I think in this very individualistic Anglo-American culture, you're brought up to aim at showing how you differ from other people, and particularly how you are better than other people,” he says. The Scandinavian secret sauce, then, is not exactly untrammeled happiness but a set of policies that restrict inequality and stop too many people living lives of abject misery.
Yet happiness itself comes with its own burdens. In her research paper “The Happiest People on Earth? Scandinavian Narratives of Guilt and Discontent” Elisabeth Oxfeldt describes Scandinavian culture’s preoccupation with guilt. “There is this sense that we’re kind of on top of the world in terms of privilege, and in a sense, privilege is the kind of happiness we’re talking about. And when you’re confronted with the misery in the rest of the world, my sense is that a lot of people – not everybody – do feel guilty,” she says.
Oxfeldt, who conducts her research at the University of Oslo in Norway, has coined her own word to describe this phenomenon: ScanGuilt. Despite their relative geopolitical obscurity, Scandinavian countries shoulder a disportionate burden when it comes to correcting the world’s ills. Sweden puts a larger percentage of its GDP (1.41 per cent) towards foreign aid than any other country, with Norway, Denmark and Finland all appearing within the top ten. It is perhaps no surprise that the Skolstrejk för klimatet movement, led by Greta Thunberg, originated in Sweden.
But Scandinavia’s days at the top of the happiness rankings might already be numbered. Despite attracting the admiration of happiness advocates for the last century, Birkjær says that other countries are starting to take the lead when it comes to acting on happiness. “We are not the frontrunners when it comes to actually adopting [them] in policymaking,” he says. In New Zealand’s latest budget, unveiled in May 2019, prime minister Jacinda Arden promised to prioritise wellbeing instead of economic growth, putting billions of dollars behind plans to alleviate child poverty, address homelessness and boost mental health.
Layard agrees, pointing towards governments in Scotland, Iceland and Costa Rica that are experimenting with policies that directly target happiness. “So the measurement side went rather well, and rather rapidly, the thing which of course has to follow from that is what do we do to improve the situation? And are we getting policymakers to target their policies at the wellbeing outcome?” Some of the policy switches are relatively simple, he says. Most healthcare systems direct a disproportionate amount of their budget towards physical health, ignoring the disproportionate impact on happiness that mental health conditions have.
“A switch of resources from physical to mental health would produce a huge increase in happiness in every country,” he says. “I think that politicians have every reason to try and find out what does influence people’s happiness and to organise their policies around that.”
But where will they look to for examples? As the Scandinavian countries have moved closer to the EU (Sweden and Finland joined in 1995), the sense that they offer an alternative to unrestrained capitalism has lessened. In Sweden, inequality since the 1980s has increased faster than in any other OECD country, and Finland and Denmark also have inequality rising above the OECD average. “I think that the Nordic brand has become a kind of a regional and national identity marker, which has, to some extent, outpaced its own reference to the product on sale, namely, the Nordic countries themselves,” Marklund says.
Now Scandinavia is scrabbling to fix this. In 2016, the Nordic Council – an inter-governmental body that organises political cooperation throughout Scandinavia – pulled together a team of strategists and communications firms to help promote the Nordic brand internationally. “Our aim with this project […], is to put Nordic ideas and solutions on the world map” said the Nordic Council’s secretary general at the time, Dagfinn Høybråten.
Marklund says that it will become more and more difficult for Scandinavian countries to benefit from globalisation while also promoting themselves as an antidote to capitalism’s ills. In the latest World Happiness Report, New Zealand is in eighth place, sneaking up just behind Scandinavia. The next time the world edges towards financial crisis, there’s a good chance it’ll find itself looking to Christchurch, not Copenhagen, for the solution.
Updated July 31, 2019 15:30BST: The article has been updated to clarify how the World Happiness Report determines its country rankings
This article is part of our in-depth series investigating how technology is changing wellbeing, happiness and the spaces we inhabit.
From what drives the world's happiest countries to the apps we use on a daily basis, we're looking at how technologies and ideas are changing our wellbeing – for better or worse.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
