Where do the happiest people live?

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by dixonmassey, Aug 27, 2004.

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  1. dixonmassey

    dixonmassey Valued Senior Member

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    Christian Bjornskov, KYKLOS, Vol. 56, 2003, "The happy few: Cross-Country evidence on Social Capital and Life Satisfaction" claims that top 7 the happiest countries are 5 Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Do you agree?
     
    dixonmassey, Aug 27, 2004
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  3. kSushi

    kSushi Registered Senior Member

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    It depends what they mean by happiness. If we leave alone war and poverty then what do we have to choose from? Where you could eat More, or buy a better house, get better education and job, meet more interesting people ...?
     
    kSushi, Aug 27, 2004
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  5. dixonmassey

    dixonmassey Valued Senior Member

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    Authors claims that those folks who posses more "social capital" (i.e. friend, family, community...ties) generally feel happier even though they make slightly less $ than folks with smaller "stash" of social capital. Of course, article implies that both happy and not so happy people have satisfied their minimum material/food needs. Stomach comes first, as everybody knows.
     
    dixonmassey, Aug 27, 2004
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  7. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Their suicide rates are among the world's highest. I can't imagine what scale is used to measure "happiness" that can ignore a phenomenon like that.

    Of course I know it's the arctic weather that's the cause of all that depression; our state of Alaska has the same problem. Otherwise Scandinavia is indeed rather nice. But that's a really, really, REALLY big "otherwise."

    I am very suspicious of a study that could reach this conclusion.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Aug 27, 2004
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  8. Dreamwalker

    Dreamwalker Whatever Valued Senior Member

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    Well, the depressive kill themself, those who survive are the happy folks.

    Seriously, most Scandinavians I met were not that happy, and in some scandinavian countries, the suicide rate is the second or third highest in the world.

    But hey, their lifes are not that bad, at least if they have a decent job and a family, if they are unemployed and single, sitting somewhere in a remote part of Finland biding their time during the long and dark winters, I suppose that can make you depressive.
     
    Dreamwalker, Aug 27, 2004
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  9. whitewolf

    whitewolf asleep under the juniper bush Registered Senior Member

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    After almost 20 years of searching for happiness, I have concluded that Happiness is the product of one's own efforts and perceptions.

    Depression can be genetic (well, also triggered, but yes, there is a sadness gene). Cold climate triggers depression? I've never heard of that. Can you give more detail?
     
    whitewolf, Aug 27, 2004
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  10. kSushi

    kSushi Registered Senior Member

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    then what country would give you more friends, family and social ties? The one you were born in...

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    kSushi, Aug 28, 2004
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  11. Kunax

    Kunax Sciforums:Reality not required Registered Senior Member

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    This was in one of the major Danish papers quite some time a go, it was a major survey with lots of different topics.

    The Scandinavians did come out in the lead in the happy poll and a few... others

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    , Fins won the happy poll and topped high in the suicide poll, if i remember correctly.
     
    Kunax, Aug 28, 2004
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  12. dixonmassey

    dixonmassey Valued Senior Member

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    At the same time, an average person born in some other country will have more ties than an average person in your motherland. And he/she will be statistically "happier" than your average countryman (according to the author). I think those social/family/etc. ties are crumbling gradually around the world (rich country or poor, or in the middle). If so (and if nothing will change), one can estimate the year when a curve of “the average happiness” will come in the proximity of zero.
     
    dixonmassey, Aug 28, 2004
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  13. Dreamwalker

    Dreamwalker Whatever Valued Senior Member

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    Well, perhaps killing yourself is fun? But hey, without the depressive Scandinavians I would be deprieved of good Black/Death Metal...

    But I do not think it is connected with the temperature, rather with the weather...lots of rain, snow and those long and dark winters followed by pretty short summers. (Ok, depends on how far north you live)
     
    Dreamwalker, Aug 28, 2004
    #10
  14. SkippingStones

    SkippingStones splunk! Registered Senior Member

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    In the state of denial...

    ....well maybe not the happiest, but a good many do.
     
    SkippingStones, Aug 28, 2004
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  15. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    It's just an empirical correlation, I've never seen any more detail than that. I expect that the posts subsequent to yours are right. It's not the cold, or at least not just the cold or perhaps not even primarily the cold. Even people in incontrovertibly subarctic locales like Montana and Minnesota get to feeling pretty bad in the winters because they get snowed in and they're never home during the daylight on workdays. In Alaska people can be isolated in the winter. That breeds depression, not to mention the weeks on end with virtually no daylight bracketing the solstice.

    As far as I know, the suicide rate among the Eskimo-Aleuts and their related ethnic groups across northern Siberia is not high. Apparently people have adapted to it successfully when they've had six or more millennia to do it. The Scandinavians are Indo-European people (the ancestors of all the Germanic tribes) who migrated up from nice balmy Anatolia or someplace nearby (except the Finns of course who are descended from Mongols), possibly less than 4,000 years ago. They probably haven't had enough time to adapt to the snow and darkness.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Aug 28, 2004
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  16. sargentlard

    sargentlard Save the whales motherfucker Valued Senior Member

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    Yes, it is called Seasonal affective disorder


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    sargentlard, Aug 28, 2004
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  17. kSushi

    kSushi Registered Senior Member

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    really?

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    Why would that be? Do they explain that? Do you have an explanation?
    I'd expect people who live in their own country to have more people who share their interestes and beliefs, speak the same language, and don't perceive them as foreigners but as equals.
     
    kSushi, Aug 28, 2004
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  18. whitewolf

    whitewolf asleep under the juniper bush Registered Senior Member

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    See, the reason I doubt that whole cold+depression thing is this. I come from Latvia, the fairly northern cold place. How cold? Picture this. You're on the school bus, which has heat in it. You are wearing boots with fur inside. Yet, you are still frozen for some reason! The river that goes through the city is inevitably hard-frozen each winter. The summers are rainy. I moved to NY and it's much, much hotter, to the point where it's unbearable. I'd say I miss my cold rainy Latvia very much. I see how depression creeps in if one is snowed in for a long time. But a milder cold climate is fun! You can play in the snow, you can love walks in the rain. BTW, I've never heard of schools in Latvia being closed due to snow; whatever the amount of snow and rain, we always managed fine.

    Also, clinical depression is very wide spread among Americans. Many of my peers in 9th grade were on prozac.
     
    whitewolf, Aug 28, 2004
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  19. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Prozac is now the most-prescribed medication in the US. A huge segment of the population suffers from depression because of the severe and rapid changes that are happening in our country and in other places that we regarded as safe havens.

    Terrorism and a war in Iraq that could bankrupt our economy; offshore outsourcing of jobs and the demise of many key industries such as software; the absence of integrity among our political, academic, business, and religious leaders; the resurgence of medieval ethnic and religious rivalries, Islam as a political power in European nations; the rise of China as an economic powerhouse.

    America emerged from the end of the Cold War as the World's Only Superpower. Yet a mere decade and a half later, we now see a total reversal -- a strong possibility that our country will soon become a Former World Power like Persia, Greece, and Turkey. But not as slowly as it happened to them, more like the speed of at which the Third Reich fell.

    The Paradigm Shift has us terrified.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Aug 29, 2004
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  20. whitewolf

    whitewolf asleep under the juniper bush Registered Senior Member

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    Yes, but my 9th grade was in year 1998 (I think), way before teens got to be aware of any terrorist threat. Depression was common and prozac was in fashion way before any threat was recognized by the general public.

    Also, if a country scores high in both depression and happiness, could it be that they're simply scoring high in the taking of the survey? Or that these people like extreme words like "depression" and "very happy"?
     
    whitewolf, Aug 29, 2004
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  21. Facial

    Facial Valued Senior Member

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    Mexico.
     
    Facial, Aug 30, 2004
    #18
  22. Xenu

    Xenu BBS Whore Registered Senior Member

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    It's not the cold that causes depression, but the lack of light. As Sarge said, seasonal affective disorder.

    By the way, good to see you guys again.
     
    Xenu, Aug 31, 2004
    #19
  23. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Let's see, that would make you about 20 now. By now I would have hoped that you should have come across the concept of "the unconscious" as Jung calls it, or "the subconscious" in the old Freudian model.

    Not being "aware" of something or not "recognizing" it sometimes means that it simply hasn't broken through into our conscious mind yet. It can still be bubbling underneath. Those are the worst kinds of fears. We can't talk about it with others, think about it rationally, or make decisions that mitigate the risk. Sure, a lot of Prozac and non-chemical therapy goes to people who can articulate their anxieties. But even more goes to people who don't know what's bothering them.

    Terrorism was a threat in 1998. U.S. military personnel and installations -- the most visible targets outside our borders -- had already been attacked by Islamic fundamentalists. Our country was already being called "The Great Satan." An attempt had already been made to blow up the World Trade Center. Two of our own people, not even under the influence of Islam, blew up a federal office building because they hated our government as much as Osama bin Laden does, but for different reasons.

    Many people, both Americans and foreigners, hate the unstoppable, unaccountable, hubris-laden monster that the U.S. government has become since WWII. This hatred was quite evident in 1998, and the ever-intrusive TV news shows made sure that even the young were shown all the gruesome details. You kids had a lot of dead weight to carry around during the time of your life when you needed all your energy to cope with a flood of new hormones.

    But there were plenty of other causes of depression. AIDS -- my generation fought and won the sexual revolution, our children's generation pushed the pendulum way too far in the other direction (as always happens in this country) and brought down a new plague upon us, and your generation has to be warned to fear sex. That ought to be good for a couple of years of Prozac, whether you're consciously aware of it or just have nightmares and/or the inexplicable epidemic of "performance anxiety" that made the inventor of Viagra rich. Inflation -- it doesn't take a degree in math or economics to understand that if housing prices keep rising like this, families will eventually be crammed into two-room flats like the Japanese. Even your unconscious can do that math. The environment -- global warming, the disappearance of the rain forest, pollution, all of these things had been big news for years. People who didn't talk or think about this stuff were pushing it down into what Jung calls their "shadow," where it festers into something dark and stinky and eventually bursts out through a crack like a geyser -- perhaps a Columbine.

    You had plenty to be depressed about in 1998. If you weren't consciously aware of it, that just makes it all the more depressing.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Sep 5, 2004
    #20
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