The report ranks the happiest countries in the world – but does not, in that ranking, rank anyone’s actual happiness. They measure a handful of metrics, weight them, throw them into the Stat-O-Meter, and out pops a single number for each country.

From: Happiness of the younger, the older, and those in between | The World Happiness Report, Figure 2.1

These are the ranking factors – none of which measure actual happiness:

All of the top countries rank almost identically – even the United States – except for “the perception of corruption” and “dystopia + residual”.

Technical Box 2, in the link, explains each of the variables – except they provide no explanation of “dystopia + residuals”. “Happiness” is not an actual measure – they measure a set of items or survey questions, merge them via weighting, and pretend this is a proxy for happiness. The overall effect is that they define happiness as “lives in a northern European country, typically a Scandinavian country”, therefore, the top picks rotate among Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, etc. It’s a circular definition.

I have a lot more detail on the bogus happiness report here –> Denmark Fairy Tales: Is Denmark the happiest country because of this? No. – Social Panic

Every year, the media piles on, and every year, the top country ends up with tons of promotional material about how they are the happiest country in the world, often followed by fake news reports purportedly explaining why they are the happiest, siting a lot of things that have nothing to do with the bogus happiness index calculation, and then local YouTubers telling us why their country is the happiest – but there reason have nothing to do with what the metric measured. It’s a gigantic pile of click-bait.

Technical Box 2: Detailed information about each of the predictors in Table 2.1

1. GDP per capita is in terms of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) adjusted to constant 2017 international dollars, taken from the World Development Indicators (WDI) by the World Bank (version 23, metadata last updated on September 27, 2023). See Statistical Appendix for more details. GDP data for 2023 are not yet available, so we extend the GDP time series from 2022 to 2023 using country-specific forecasts of real GDP growth from the OECD Economic Outlook No. 113 (June 2023) or, if missing, from the World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects (last updated: June 6, 2023), after adjustment for population growth. The equation uses the natural log of GDP per capita, as this form fits the data significantly better than GDP per capita.
2. The time series for healthy life expectancy at birth are constructed based on data from the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Health Observatory data repository, with data available for 2005, 2010, 2015, 2016, and 2019. To match this report’s sample period (2005-2023), interpolation and extrapolation are used. See Statistical Appendix for more details.
3. Social support is the national average of the binary responses (0=no, 1=yes) to the Gallup World Poll (GWP) question “If you were in trouble, do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them, or not?”
4. Freedom to make life choices is the national average of binary responses to the GWP question “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?”
5. Generosity is the residual of regressing the national average of GWP responses to the donation question “Have you donated money to a charity in the past month?” on log GDP per capita.
6. Perceptions of corruption are the average of binary answers to two GWP questions: “Is corruption widespread throughout the government or not?” and “Is corruption widespread within businesses or not?” Where data for government corruption are missing, the perception of business corruption is used as the overall corruption-perception measure.
7. Positive affect is defined as the average of previous-day affect measures for laughter, enjoyment, and doing interesting things. The inclusion of doing interesting things (first added for World Happiness Report 2022), gives us three components in each of positive and negative affect, and slightly improves the equation fit in column 4. The general form for the affect questions is: Did you experience the following feelings during a lot of the day yesterday? See Statistical Appendix 1 for more details.
8. Negative affect is defined as the average of previous-day affect measures for worry, sadness, and anger.