Job, Finland, and the Invention of the Good Life
Every year, apparently, somebody wins happiness. Recently it has often been Finland. The headlines arrive with the confidence of a football result: Finland is the happiest country in the world. One imagines the Finns receiving a small trophy, perhaps in a sauna.
The claim sounds empirical. It sounds as though something called happiness has been located, measured, aggregated, ranked and compared across national borders. There are, of course, surveys behind such rankings, and those surveys may be perfectly competent at measuring what they actually measure: reported life satisfaction, evaluations of present circumstances, perceived social support, security, income, institutional trust and related variables.
But that is already quite different from saying that Finns possess more happiness than everybody else.
Philosophics 