I would hate to live here.

Wait, no, that's Canada.

Look at this cold, dark isolated country.

I would also hate to live here.

Oh, wait, this is apparently the happiest country on Earth: Finland.

This is the happiest.

Can you imagine how miserable the rest of the world must be?

And they're the happiest by a pretty wide margin.

Here's the rest of the list, and then bam, Finland jumps way ahead of Denmark to first place.

So what can we learn from Finland for us non Fins to be happy too?

Let's look for some clues so we can stop crying and maybe cheer up for once.

Are they happy from their climate?

Now, you might be thinking, "What are you talking about? Of course it's not their climate."

This country is full of blizzards, rain, permanent night time, at least long winter nights in the south and mosquitoes.

So many mosquitoes.

But out of the top 10 happiest countries on Earth, pretty much all of them are cold.

The happiest hot country is Australia and it's all the way down at 11th.

Maybe there's something to a cold breeze to make someone happy.

But our theory is not always true.

Hot Costa Rica is happier than lukewarm Britain, and boiling Saudi Arabia is happier than hot Italy.

So, even though the weather might not influence happiness that much, the environment might.

Finland is a wooded country.

It's got a lot of bush, a whole two-thirds of the country's forest that might have been relevant in the 1800s.

But it's the 2000s now.

Most don't live in the woods.

They live in cities, at least 85% of Finns do.

But hold up, look at these pictures of those cities.

Why are there trees? Why is there water?

Cities are supposed to look like this: road stores, skyscrapers, road, more road, smog, road.

It's not supposed to have nature, but the average Finnish city uses 30 to 40% of its space for what it calls green space, including Helsinki's 52 Nature Reserves, Campus's green shorelines, and Juve's Green Ring.

Finnish residents even say that their number one priority for their cities is transportation like literally everyone else on Earth but their number two priority is proximity to nature.

It also helps that Finnish cities are some of the least densely populated in Europe and none have a population over a million.

So nature is always near to them.

Nice.

That seems like a good way to be happy.

Could it be their culture?

At over 90% Finnish, 60% Lutheran, and a small percentage Sami in the North, Finland is quite homogeneous.

They have a culture of education and innovation with most people having a bachelor's degree and having a 100% literacy rate.

Not a single person can't read.

I don't know how much I believe that, considering their language looks like.

They also have an egalitarian culture that shows up particularly well in its work, you know, flat organization, autonomous decision making strong work benefits and the average work week only being 35 hours long, just don't show up late.

They'll beat the shit out of you if you do.

Showing up late would probably break their trust, and Finns have built their society very trusting, trusting, trusting.

Maybe the cold and six centuries of foreign rule force the Finns to rely on their neighbor can't do much alone when outside looks like this and can't go alone when your Swedish ruler drags you into another war.

Or maybe they're just trusting because of the low crime rates and economic security the Finns have.

So could it be security that makes the Finns so happy?

Usually worrying about fighting a war or having your house robbed when you're gone or stepping outside and getting immediately shot is not great for your mental health.

And Finland is a very safe and secure country, having their crime rate since the nineties, having a 0.2% poverty rate, 100% electricity access and a very long life expectancy.

Their biggest crime contributing to that tiny rate, it was traffic offenses.

Demographically, they're also fairly secure at 5.5 million people expected to fall to around 5 million by 2100.

That's not too big a drop.

Not like some of the drops in population other European nations are expected to face.

It'll be hard on the economy but relatively small to make a relatively happy time.

Geopolitically too. They're in a secure region.

They're tucked safely inside the European Union for a free market, coddled by NATO for free defense and all their neighbors are rich and stable.

Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, maybe Estonia and oh, right, Russia too.

Dealing with the Russians has always been high on the Finnish concerns list.

They've always had to balance between the West and Russia. After all, Russia would love a port in Helsinki and the Finns are tiny compared to the Russians.

They would get annihilated by them, right?

Well, exhibit one. No.

And exhibit two, also no.

The Russians probably wouldn't annihilate the Finns, but they've shown they might still try.

So in 2022, Finland applied to join NATO just for that extra layer of security.

And there's another aspect of security: economic security.

Does money really solve happiness?

Well, I have two things to say. One, Finland wasn't always rich.

They used to be a backwater, a sludge water, a stick in the mud nobody cared about for most of history.

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So there's literally no downside to signing up. Now that you're digitally secure, let's see how Finland got economically secure.

So back to the real economy. For most of history, Finland was poor. I'm talking trenches poor.

In a time when the standard of living was pretty much equal to how much your family could farm, this wintry landscape wasn't exactly the richest.

It wasn't the priest either being under Swedish rule until 1809 and then Russian rule until 1917 when they had that whole revolution, although they generally had a great amount of autonomy to focus on whatever they wanted.

So the law, money, banking and integrity have been stable for centuries, developing trust, trust, trust.

This is great news for developing the economy because the rest of it wasn't so great.

In terms of natural resources, Finland pretty much only had two: water and wood.

Can't easily export water, at least without exporting food through virtual water.

So wood was their money maker for most of history or I guess pulp, paper, peat, parchment print, you name it.

In fact, the whole reason they even started to industrialize in the 1800s was to build sawmills to meet new Russian lumber demand.

And by the time of the world wars, their wood phase wasn't over.

Wood products made up four-fifths of their exports, one-third of their industry and one-half of their jobs along with agriculture.

The wood trade only deepened the balancing act between Western Europe and Russia.

Do we industrialize like these fellows and become filthy rich or do we keep chopping trees for the Russians and become stinking rich?

Well, they had no time to think about that because the Russians invaded them in 1939.

The Winter War might have prevented a communist government, but it also meant they lost nearly 70,000 men, 10% of their territory and were forced to pay reparations. Bomber.

So during the Cold War, not wanting to repeat that whole mess again, the Finns officially stayed neutral, although definitely leaned more to the West than the East from this sour relationship.

They stayed out of NATO, stayed out of the EEC and stay out of the marshall plan to rebuild Europe.

Sure, they still sold timber to the west and slowly started the Soviet trade back up again too, getting much of their energy from them.

But they invested that money back to make machines, elevators, ships and paper machines.

They started manufacturing them and selling them to the Soviets.

So from their new wealth, they decided to try to fit in with the other Scandinavians and try out the Nordic welfare model, education for all, social care, health care, maternity leave, blah, blah.

And they continued the slow and gradual path to richness, emphasizing education and innovation above all to make a heavily research and development-based economy.

Yeah, all nice, until the Soviets collapsed in the 1990s.

So that means their trade with them just fell dramatically.

And I guess that means their currency just collapsed, which way that means their banks which were already deep in debt just collapsed.

And Finland was hit with the biggest depression it's ever had as everyone decided now was not a good time to invest in anything.

They were covered by the 2000s, but they pretty much gave up paper.

It was all innovation now.

You might have even heard of some Finnish tech creations:

Nokia, Linux (the first internet browser), SMS (basically texting), Angry Birds and Clash of Clane.

All this made with a tiny population.

The New Finland is booming economically secure and on the cutting edge of technology.

But if there's one thing you should take away from this, it's that there wasn't one moment Finland became rich, it was really a build up from stable institutions of the business over 150 years.

So, is it welfare that makes them so happy?

Perhaps the security it brings them makes them worry a lot less.

But how do they even afford it?

Well, Finland is not Norway. The Norwegian government gets nearly half of its revenue from oil money.

Finland doesn't have this luxury and the average Norwegian is almost twice as rich as the average Finn, so they've got a lot more revenue to tax.

Finland has to go to those industries that were slowly built over 150 years and tax them for its revenue.

Finland has one of the highest tax burdens on Earth.

Number two for personal income at almost 57% and top 10 in sales tax at nearly 25%.

But luckily for the Finns, their government also has a fairly competent accounting department.

Every electoral term the government is given pretty strict spending limits that they have to stick to.

It's not every year.

It's every government.

This means they've usually ended up with a 2% to 3% surplus.

And although they did get into some serious debt during their depression in the nineties, they ended up balancing it back out with their 2000s boom and then deficit again with 2008.

But as their population ages drinks and takes that tax money back through pensions, they've had to go back to this deficit spending which is threatening their Nordic welfare way of life and could scare investment.

Well, what are they getting for all this spending, though?

Pensions, free education, unemployment benefits, health care, family benefits, state subsidized housing, government loans on housing and of course, the training needed to deliver these services. Sounds pretty nice to me.

It also helps you could actually trust that your government will get these services to you.

In a lot of less developed nations, your tax bill will come, you'll wait for the new services you'll get and keep waiting and keep waiting and keep waiting, and they never seem to come.

Trusting that the government won't screw you when you give them 57% of your income is pretty important to feel secure.

So it's up to you personally to decide if you would take this deal.

But taking it doesn't seem to make them any sadder.

Ok.

That's way too much about this happy jolly jovial nation.

Let's talk about their problems.

First is obviously they're shrinking population threatening their whole welfare model, bringing rising debt and falling investment along with it.

Second, they have a housing crisis. House prices are climbing at a pretty scary rate.

But tell me which developed nation isn't facing a housing crisis. Am I right?

I wish I could afford a house.

Third, the whole Russia situation isn't getting any friendlier right now.

And it sucks, considering Russia was a huge supplier of energy to them.

When they got cut off from Russian gas, electricity prices rose almost 50% in one year.

They've had to get some coal plants back online to meet demand and it doesn't help that 30% of their electricity comes from wood still.

Jeez, wood? Someone helped Finland get out of the 1730s with their wood-burning plants, get them some oil, uranium at least a wind turbine.

Fourth, sure, Finland is happy on the aggregate but a lot of Finns are still sad.

Finland has 1.2 times the rate of mental illness than the EU and are 66% more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol than the European counterparts.

It could be from social exclusion, especially among lower classes, a stereotypically isolationist culture or simply just a bigger drinking culture in Finland, especially of hard liquor.

And fifth and finally, two of their main industries, paper and Nokia, Apple destroyed both of those, but they're still quite diversified and complex.

So to be happy, some keys are transparency, security, money, but most importantly, trust. Trust in your government, neighbors, businesses, schools, I don't know, trust in your dog.

Trust that in five years from now you'll also be in a comfortable position, and if anything happens to you, you can trust someone who will help you.

Trust, trust, trust, trust, trust, trust me.

It's what made Finland happy.