Happiness

Here's an interesting report, it's the "World Happiness Report" and charts various levels of "happiness" around the world with the aim of determining the happiest places, i.e. cities, countries etc. Of course "happiness" is quite a subjective thing so the report looks at social, economic and subjective factors (like generosity) via polls and firmographic data. So, the happiest country turns out to be Finland with Denmark coming a close second, it seems as though the Scandinavian and Northern European countries are doing particularly well, which is surprising given the weather up there most of the time. Anyway, the UK was 13th behind Canada (11) and New Zealand (8) with the USA making 18th. At the other end of the scale we have the usual suspects (i.e. the theocracies and war-torn lands) for example, Egypt (138), South Sudan (152) and Afghanistan (153).

On the city front the results were slanted toward the country results, i.e. Scandinavian cities did very well and typically the larger Northern European cities came out well. At the top spot was Helsinki followed by cities like Copenhagen (5), Oslo (7) and Aarhus (2) outside of Europe the best city was Wellington NZ (3). Our own capital London came in at number 36 behind places like Dublin (22) and Vienna (29) which is somewhat surprising, even Dallas was higher at 19! Having been to Texas many times, this result is slightly puzzling to me, never seen the attraction myself. Anyway, they say you can't buy happiness but if you believe the results of this report you might get a lot closer to it by booking a tour around Scandinavia after the pandemic is over.