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Rising unhappiness among young people is causing the United States and some Western European powers to fall in the global happiness index, while Nordic countries remain at the top.
annual world happiness reportwas founded in 2012 to support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and is based on data from US market research firm Gallup, which is now analyzed by a global team led by the University of Oxford.
It asked people from 143 countries and territories to rate their lives on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 representing the best life. The rankings are created by averaging the results from the past three years.
Finland maintained its top spot with an average score of 7.7, closely followed by Denmark, Iceland and Sweden, while Afghanistan and Lebanon remained in the bottom two spots with scores of 1.7 and 2.7 respectively.
Broadly speaking, rankings are loosely correlated with a country’s prosperity, but other factors such as life expectancy, social ties, personal freedom, and corruption also appear to influence individuals’ ratings.
According to the report, the U.S. fell outside the top 20 for the first time, dropping from 15th place last year to 23rd place, due to a significant drop in happiness among Americans under 30.
The United States ranks 10th in the world for happiness among people over 60, but it ranks 62nd in the life evaluation of people under 30.
This finding contradicts much of the previous research on happiness. Happiness was highest in childhood and early teens, lowest in middle age, and increased around retirement.
“Today, young people, especially in North America, are experiencing a midlife crisis,” said Jean-Emmanuel de Neve, professor of economics at Oxford University and one of the report’s editors.
Millennials and younger age groups in North America were significantly more likely to report loneliness than older age groups. But De Neve believes that a variety of factors are affecting young people’s well-being, including increasing polarization around social issues, the downside of social media, and economic inequality that makes it harder for young people to afford their own homes. He said that there is a high possibility that the level of .
The phenomenon is most pronounced in the United States, but age differences in happiness are also large in Canada and Japan, and narrowing in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, which all fell in this year’s rankings.
In contrast, many of the countries where welfare has improved the most are former communist countries in central and eastern Europe.
Unlike rich countries, the quality of life of young people there is reported to be significantly better than that of older people, and in many cases comparable to or better than that in Western Europe.
“Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Lithuania are in the top 20, but that is entirely due to their youth,” de Neve said.
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