Finland is the world's happiest country as US rank drops

The News

Young people in the United States and Western Europe are becoming less satisfied with their lives, according to Gallup’s World Happiness Report 2024.

Happiness levels among 15-24-year olds in the U.S. have fallen steeply since the mid-2000s, Gallup found. Young people in Western Europe saw a more gradual decline in happiness over the same period.

Nordic countries continued to dominate the top ranks, with Finland ranked as the happiest in the world, followed by Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Australia.

The U.S. ranked 23rd on the overall list of 143 countries polled, but 62nd for people under the age of 30.

By contrast, countries in Central and Eastern Europe — particularly the former Soviet bloc — saw their levels of happiness increase the most since the last survey in 2023, notably among young people.

Gallup’s report — conducted over a three-year period — surveyed more than 100,000 people in 143 countries, asking them to rate their lives on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best possible life.

Watch Semafor, in partnership with Gallup, present data and key insights from the World Happiness Report 2024 that will change the ways global leaders across business, tech, politics, and beyond perceive “happiness.”

The View From the United States

Loneliness among young Americans has long been a concern for academics and policymakers, and Gallup’s latest data supports the idea of a loneliness epidemic plaguing millennials. Although loneliness is not “unduly high” on a global scale, the report stated, it was almost twice as high among millennials compared to those born before 1965. Elderly people across all regions reported the highest levels of feeling socially supported, the report found, despite typically having fewer social interactions.

While there is no single factor causing more unhappiness in younger people, the trend underscores the importance of “having someone to count on in times of need…as one of the top predictors of life satisfaction,” Lara Aknin, a social psychologist and one of the report’s editors, told Semafor. Parallel research suggests that young people in the U.S. are also increasingly worried about the high cost of living and feel dissatisfied with the government, Aknin said.

Dr. Anand Parekh, Chief Medical Adviser at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Semafor Wednesday that the U.S.’s low ranking in happiness for young people correlates with the ongoing, post-pandemic mental health crisis that has seen youth suicides and drug overdoses rise in the last few years. He said policymakers need to focus on combatting the root causes of the mental health crisis, chiefly social media.”We need to get a handle on social media,” Parekh said.

The View From Capitol Hill

“Unregulated and unchecked” social media can “drive Americans mad,” said Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy.

A large part of that unhappiness stems from the “powerlessness” that young people perceive as working for social media’s profits, not social media working for their own needs.

”They are playing by the rules... but feel success is further and further away,” Murphy said.

He pointed to China as a country where more thoughtful and protective of its young people” when it comes to social media, by regulating what content they can access and the amount of time they are allowed to spend on the platforms.

Murphy said he is “open” to the House’s TikTok divestment bill that would force Chinese parent company Bytedance to sell TikTok or face a ban on American app stores, though he would prefer broader social media regulation that addresses privacy and safety concerns across all platforms.

The View From Finland

Finland’s former Prime Minister Sanna Marin acknowledged that while Finns weren’t “the most cheerful,” despite the country being named the world’s happiest for the seventh year in a row, she said that Gallup’s World Happiness Report 2024 measures a “deeper kind of happiness than cheerfulness.”

“We are not perhaps the most cheerful people in the globe,” she told Semafor in a recorded interview. “But of course, we have a good nation and we have a good society.” Marin said Nordic countries always rank higher in the report because of their welfare society model, which “enables everyone to have a good life.”

Mikko Hautala, Finnish Ambassador to the U.S., told Semfor Wednesday that Finns would be “mostly surprised” by thinking of themselves as the happiest people on the earth. “But after winning seven years of this survey… we must be doing something right,” he said.

Most Finns feel their system is democratic and while they enjoy freedom, they always have a system that supports and protects them, according to Hautala. “Most Finns, on average, are relatively stress free and don’t have the big concerns that people in many countries have.”

The View From Eastern Europe

Young people in Central and Eastern Europe, meanwhile, are generally happier than older people, Gallup’s report found.

Those regions were also the exception to the global trend of people experiencing negative emotions more frequently between 2021 and 2023 compared to the mid-2000s.

Life satisfaction among children and young teenagers aged 10-15 was also highest in Central and Eastern Europe.

One exception was war-torn Ukraine, which ranked 105. While conflict “breeds a sense of brotherhood or community within a nation,” the anxiety of potential harm to oneself and one’s family understandably reduces life satisfaction, Aknin said.

The resilience of the Ukrainian people is “remarkable,” The Wilson Center’s Mark Green told Semafor’s Steve Clemons on Wednesday. But, he added, part of what is diminishing happiness in Ukraine is the worry of losing ground in the war against Russia as war fatigue overcomes key allies like the U.S. “They’re worried that America might not be with them for the long run,” Green said.

The View From Iceland

The key to happiness in Iceland — which ranked as the third happiest country in 2024 — is a well-functioning welfare system, a strong family unit, and the “smallness” of the country, Iceland’s ambassador to the U.S. Bergdís Ellertsdóttir told Semafor Wednesday.

“In Iceland, the family is very strong,” Ellertsdóttir said. “Here [in the United States] the mother is living in D.C., the daughter in Seattle — you don’t have your family in your immediate life.” In Iceland, grandparents play an instrumental role in helping working families, she added.

She also said that Iceland’s small size, compared to the U.S., allowed for more effective governance.

“It’s less difficult to, for example, to implement policies on parental leave or childcare in a small country like Iceland or even Finland than it is in the Untied States,” she said. “The bigness of the U.S. is a problem.”

The View From Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan African countries like Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo ranked very low on happiness levels for young people — ranking 139 and 140 of 143 countries respectively.

Older people may be happier than youth in the region because of the political instability that has plagued many of these countries in recent years, Dr. Adanna Chukwuma, the senior director of global impact measurement at Visa, told Semafor Wednesday.

Older people in Africa experienced independence movements and transitioned from military rule to civilian rule, but the opposite has happened during the lifetime of younger people, Chukwuma said.

“Life was inevitably going to get better, and slowly but surely, our leaders disappointed us,” she said.

Know More

One happier finding of the report was a surge in benevolence, which has grown since the COVID-19 pandemic. Across all generations, researchers found a notable increase in instances of people helping strangers and volunteering, and millennials and Gen-Z are “even more likely than their predecessors to help those in need,” Gallup found.