27
Aug
2025

The Happiest Place on Earth

cause and effect measurement

Slate

Shortly after I got home, I took a cramped and overpriced train up to Oxford, where the data scientists behind the World Happiness Report work. There, I met Jan-Emmanuel de Neve, a professor at Oxford University’s Harris Manchester College and expert in what makes life worth living. I felt I had got to the bottom of why Finnish people were happy, but now I wanted to, bluntly, know whether we were all doomed never to be as happy as our friends in the Nordics.