To paraphrase the advice Horace Greeley gave America's youth in 1865, "Go to Iceland, young man, go to Iceland. . ."
Iceland? Why?
Because Iceland just might be the best place on earth to get happy. That's according to the World Happiness Report 2015. Switzerland is actually ranked number one, but I'll argue it has an unfair advantage and Iceland really is tops.
The first World Happiness Report was issued in 2012. It is not a document to be taken too literally; it does not claim to measure empirically the sum total of good moods in the world's sovereign states. The point of the project is to push the idea that measuring and comparing countries simply by the size their GDP's and armies misses the point of, well, life.
Three scholars, one from Canada, one from Britain and an American, the economist Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia University, edit the report.
Measuring well-being instead of return on investment may sound touchy-feely, but it actually is a return to how philosophers used to judge the virtues of a society. Aristotle, for one, said the state's purpose was to cultivate eudaimonia, the activity of living well by pursuing rational and virtuous activities.
So with no further ado, here are the Top 10 happiest countries based on data for 2012-2014:
(1) Switzerland; (2) Iceland; (3) Denmark; (4) Norway; (5) Canada; (6) Finland; (7) Netherlands; (8) Sweden; (9) New Zealand; (10) Australia.
So why do I rank Iceland ahead of Switzerland? Easy, Switzerland is a country born with a silver spoon while Iceland is a tough orphan. First, Switzerland is filthy rich because its supposed neutrality has enabled the Swiss to skim off the world's shady and tax avoiding transactions for ages and ages. Second, Iceland is partly in the Arctic Circle; it is cold and dark through an endless winter, isolated and rugged. Shangri-La it is not. (If you make it there, you can make it anywhere.) Third, and most important, Iceland is resilient. In the Great Recession, Iceland's banking system "suffered decimation of their banking systems as extreme as anywhere" but bounced back better than anywhere. They know something there the rest of us don't.
The report weighs six key variables: GDP per capita; healthy year of life expectancy; social support (number of people one says they can "count on"); trust in government and business institutions; perceived freedom to make life decisions; generosity (levels of volunteering or giving, for example).
The good news for those of us who face what millennials call "first world problems" is that the four key happiness variables are "plastic," that is, they can be willfully altered.
For the rest of the world, the authors hope to sway international policymakers at institutions such as the UN and the World Bank that the cost and benefits the bean counters measure aren't the most important beans.
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Dick Meyer is Chief Washington Correspondent for the Scripps Washington Bureau.
Editorial on 05/09/2015