Pushkin. Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions. I'm Maria Kannakova.
And I'm Nate Silver.
Today on the show, we'll talk happiness. Why are people in Finland so fucking happy?
It's because fucking and Cleland both start with enough. You heard it here first, folks.
I am going We're gonna rely on a combination of actual survey data and mildly politically incorrect antecdata from Nate's travels around the world, but do some serious analysis of like can you really tell which countries are happier?
You know, there's just that a meaningful thing, and so what tends to predict it?
All right, let's let's do it. The World Happiness Report came out a few months ago. It's not, you know, not recent news, but the underlying issues are eternal, right, because happiness and what makes people happy and how how you can even have a happiness ranking? Those are things that you know, those are perennial questions in psychology from your standpoint, Nate, you know, statistics are very interesting here, like how the hell do you rank how happy people are?
But anyhow so, according to this report, Finland has been the happiest country in the world for a while now, from multiple years. And I've never been to Finland, but you are something of a Finland expert.
I bacently. You know.
Look, my partner and I have a joke about like European American man travels to Europe and is now expert on Europe, right, and with like, yeah, I guess the European I don't think i've any Nordic ancestry.
Yeah.
I went to Finland and to Norway back over Labor Day and had a great time. And those are both countries that are rated near the top, particularly Finland. And I guess the question is, like, when you're on the ground in Finland, do you notice outward signs of happiness?
I noticed a lot of drinking.
You go to the restaurant and you're offered a drink faster than anywhere I've ever been. I don't know where that fits into this, right. And notice the sauna I went, like the nice like tourists sauna seems kind of chilly.
Just chill out.
You can like actually basically grab more coals, get like a little shovel and grab more coals and put them in a burner and it makes a strong higher that seems very fun, Like that's gotta be worth like alone, like point two points of the on the ten point scale. I think good design and architecture. I notice good like accommodations for children and like disabled and elderly people more than you find elsewhere in the world. The food was
surprisingly good. We had excellent Georgian food. We had wow, excellent kind of Sicilian food that has like finished flourishes with the Sicilian food, and.
Like, oh, that's fascinating.
No, I mean, yeah, nice city, hell Sinky not actually as populous as it seems. And then Norway they just have the fucking like most beautiful landscapes.
Sure, yeah, but you know, I haven't been to Norway either, but I really want to go, like the I want to go to Finland as well, So I don't want the fence to take this amiss. But the Fjords in Norway, I mean, man, their reputation just precedes them, and I would really love to see that.
The first day we were there, my partner like kind of drove out to like some little little mini fjords, right, and we're like, this is like Maine, It's pretty fucking nice, right, And then we took a cruise to the real It's like, that's not nice. That's nice.
It's nice.
That's a lot.
That's not a field. That's a fuel. By the way, do you know do you know that the Hudson River Valley is a fjord?
I did not know that. Actually I think I did know that at some point in time, but I forgot from now I ree large it. Yeah, I think you've probably told me this in the past, but thank you for retelling me, because I've effectively forgotten.
So as a fjord expert, I have to tell you that these fucking fiords were like, you know, Macha Peach is pretty amazing and like Hawaii, like.
This is probably the top three. I guess that I've been too.
That's great. Well, this is this is all good. We've got some local color. Now let's step back a little bit and talk just a little bit about how this World Happiness Report, how the ranking is created. So they actually based the ranking on one single question called the Cantrell Ladder. And this is the question. So, Nate, you have to imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero
at the bottom to ten at the top. The top of the ladder is the best possible life for you, The bottom of the ladder is the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time? So that is the one question that they use.
Are you are you asking me?
Yeah?
Go ahead? What do you think?
Nine?
Nice?
I'm trying to be realistic, right, like best possible versus like do I think I got a pretty good draw for a lot of things?
Yeah?
Sure? And so the data for this are collected actually by the Gallop World Pole And so you know, insofar as you know you have any kind of thoughts about the quality of the data, that's that's where they're coming from.
So they're not doing a poll of their own. They're just taking that one question from Gallop, which has been conducted since two thousand and five, and every single year it's about a little bit over one hundred thousand people in one hundred and forty thousand countries and territories that participate in the poll, and so it's about a thousand people per country that are contacted either face to face
or by phone. And what this report does is they take the rankings from the last three years for each country, and they average them so that they get a higher size of respondents. So, for instance, their two thousand and five rankings are actually two thousand and two to two thousand four, so that they get at least three thousand people per country that they include. If countries have significantly
fewer than this, they exclude them from the rankings. So just first, like, in terms of statistics, how does this strike you in terms of sample size, In terms of how the Gallup pole does its sampling, Gallup tends to be one of the more reliable poles.
Right, Yeah, Look, I think there can always be sampling biases and who's surveyed and who's not right. You know, in general, people who are disadvantaged in various ways are harder to reach via pole. I think the bigger question is like how universal is this?
Yeah question right, Yeah, that is a huge question. And the reason they tried to do this ladder is because I think it's one of the more universal ways that you can ask it, right, that it doesn't have any sort of cultural baggage or any other things that might you know, in some countries, factor X might be something that you associate with happiness, whereas in others that might you know, that might tell you something totally different. So
they've tried to get this universal question. Now, I will caveat this by saying, in psychology research, like self report it's kind of like democracy, it's the best possible system of governess out of a lot of bad ones, right in the sense that it's not perfect, and there are lots and lots of issues with self report data, but it's kind of the best we have, right in the sense of, like, well, how else are you going to
ask something that's so internal. We're not asking about like something that we can measure as in like your exact income, quality of life, et cetera, et cetera. We're asking about how happy you personally are, and so the best thing we can do is just ask you directly. But we know that those sorts of data are problematic, right, that asking people is not always well, you know, it's the best we have. It's the best we have.
It's probably better than experts presuming oh yeah, tell me you're happy, Maria. But there's a whole debate about like whether conservatives or liberals are more happy or basically liberal self report lower happiness. There's a debate about like how literally that should be interpreted. We can circle back to
that maybe. I mean, you know, one other things it seems certainly about this latter formulation is it might encourage you to like look around at your neighborhood, at nearby examples approximate examples of people who are better off than you.
Right in the United States, in the Middle East, we have very prominent examples of extreme wealth and extreme excess and or excellence and or achievement and or privilege right in everything pretty much right, the US seems to be I've actually run some numbers on this stuff, relatively like pretty happy country, right, but like we're a little lower than you'd think given how rich we are overall. So you know, what do countries like Finland have in common?
Number one, they have relatively low wealth and incommun inequality relatively low. Where floor is high, the ceiling is also high ish, right, but like relatively low compared to US, China, Middle East.
Latin America.
And by the way, let me just caveat that with saying that a lot of the countries that are at the top of these polls tend to be smaller, and I think that goes hand in.
Hand, you know, I mean, it's not true for all small countries, right, like Finland. Also like Greece.
We had a very nice time in Athens a few years ago, and we thought we're going to go around Athle's going to be born. We just loved Athens so much we just stayed there. Right, But Greece has been through a lot in terms of economic distress and bailouts. Greece has a lot of history, a lot of baggage with that history. One of my good friends is Greek American and it's a little bit of an angstier kind of culture.
I think I get a lot you know Reeks.
In the Russians and the Jews that kind of very happy. They kind of have some similar stories, right.
You know Italy.
I went to Italy on a Booktoria, and like you know, the guy who transit book, he's like, yeah, all Italians were still living in the shadow of like our our history in Italy is a country it's like not super happy.
So like a country that's like content with its place in the world and or which teaches contentment, it seems like it's going to excel on this survey, which is not to say it's not a valid measure, but like that context I think is important, and the small thing is important to almost all the countries that rank highly
are are small. They are not necessarily someone. Thing I looked at is is there a correlation because we can be on PC on the show Maria, Sure, is there a correlation and either direction between the number of foreign born residents and happiness controlling for their factors.
That's a super important question, Like let's it doesn't matter whether we're PC or not. Like this is actually yeah important, is.
No, Actually, if anything, there's a positive correlation because countries that are more successful tend to attract more immigrants if they should let them in.
Right now, what do.
You think some people would say is that in these smaller countries that you're able to incorporate the other cultures more organically, right.
I don't if if that's true.
I mean, if you go to Finland, there is a you know, there are tons of ethnic quote unquote restaurants everywhere, and I'm sure that you know, the spice level is probably a little bit done down, but like but you know, but like it's a it's a pretty multicultural place. I think, you know, Norway, The impression I get is that Nori's little stricter about certain types of things, right, so it might very more from place to place, or you know, if.
You're too strict.
I mean, Italy and Japan are places where israelis have been, right, where it's thought to be a little bit harder to integrate potentially, right, you know, whereas South Korea is a little more open minded. But like, so there's lots of different factors happening here. I think also, you know, so South Korea is a country that like is both according to the survey and according to some measures, like mental
health measures. You know, I could argue that fertility rate might be an indicator of something, right, Like South Korea is kind of unhappy, but like it grew prodigiously from like being in the lower end of developing countries right forty years ago to higher per GDP per capitive in Japan and all but a handful of countries in the world now, right, And like, you know, I wonder if that growing up too fast show leads to some angst, the sense of like.
Yeah, some dislocation, yeah yeah. So when I think these are all really really important considerations, and the World Happiness Report team did try to kind of do some economic modeling to look at the variation as well, and they found that there are six variables that from two thousand and five onwards account for about three quarters of the
variation and happiness. And those variables are having somebody to count on, so kind of social support, which makes sense, right, and that dovetails with a lot of research on happiness. We can talk more about that community support, et cetera. Log GDP per capita, Nate, You'll have to break that down a little bit for people, because log GDP per capita is not like something that rolls off the tongue. Healthy life expectancy obviously important, freedom to make life choices, generosity,
and freedom from corruption. So those are the six factors that they found correlate most highly with that overall ranking. So log GDP per capita, can you just unpack that for a second and then we'll talk about everything else.
Uh, that just means that you're taking the natural logarithm, So it depends on which base you're using. But like you know, if you have, like what's the per capita income of Mexico is twenty thousand, night that might be wrong, eighteen thousand. I have no idea, right, whereas in like Norway, it's like one hundred thousand. Right, the day to day
life is not five times better in Norway than in Mexico. Right, kind of practical realized wealth, even if you use kind of purchasing powered, parody adjusted.
Versions of it. Right, So long as you just saying there's diminishing returns to.
Wealth, great and fourteen thousand Mexico is thirteen thousand, okay, yeah, but like four thousand dollars like sid really work huntry in Africa versus fourteen thousand is a bigger difference than four two hundred thousand are similar at least, right.
And like a large scale will at least at least compress that a little bit.
Yeah, So that actually makes a lot of sense because what we know about happiness from kind of the happiness research outside of this particular measure or anything like that, is that the old takeaway that, oh, you know, you can't buy happiness as bullshit, that's not true. Money does matter, and you do have to have a certain amount of money, and with more money you do get happier, but there are diminishing returns, right, So that's true up to a certain point. And that it kind of flattens out, so
there it's much more nuanced. But yes, after a certain rate, like those returns are so high at the beginning, and then once you're kind of comfortable and are able to like have some sort of certainty, right, some sort of stability, after that, the returns are still there, right, but they are lower than they were at the beginning when you had to do that. You know, as you say, like from four thousand to fourteen thousand, like that is huge, like that and kind of standard of living.
You've seen a lot of, I mean, you can argue that like Western Europe is taking a little bit of it off ramp from further growth in GDP.
Right, if you have, like if every.
Person has access to their own home, access to healthcare, access to purchase meals and necessities at least, and then to have some small little luxuries and to have like a workday that doesn't work require them to work in adverse conditions or excessive numbers of hours, right, like you know, and some family or friends support networks.
Right though that's done easy list of things. It's a small list of whatsoever.
Right, But like you know, maybe when you get to that, then people have rationally less incentive for further gains, and to the extent you do have gains, it might be from the financialization of different sectors, and or it might be from people who do what really want to take risks, right, people who are playing the game and like that. You know, America, China, Middle East, these more dynamic quote unquote places have more of that than than Europe, where you talk to Europeans like,
what are the front of your AI labs in Europe? Like, oh, I don't have any, you know, I mean literally, So that's that's interesting.
I suppose that's really interesting. And most of the top rated countries are in Europe, right for in terms of happiness, which is yeah.
They're most of them almost all. I think Canada is pretty well, right yeah, I mean there are culture you know, in general relative to.
Relative to GDP, the Americas are like, you know, Latin America is a happier region than Asia controlling for GDP and.
These other fastors. Right, yes, why is it true? I don't know.
It's easy to kind of backfit. You know, you go to Mexico or Peru and.
You're like, oh, people just kind of the culture is sunnier and people see, yeah, you.
Know, for sure, but there are I mean something that this kind of type of ranking doesn't measure that I think, you know, might partially explain what we're seeing with South America versus Asia, is that there are cultural differences in how people just kind of their baseline how they experience life. Right, it's the way that they kind of grew up, the language that they grew up using, kind of the things that have been socialized from early childhood in terms of
like what's your attitude? Right, are you an optimist? Are you a pessimist? Like this sounds kind of crazy, but there are some cultures that are actually like just inherently more optimistic cultures. There are some cultures that are just inherently more pessimistic cultures. And that kind of stuff matters, right, because those kinds of mindsets, those kinds of psychological shifts, can actually affect how you feel on a day to
day basis. And so there are these just like baseline factors that exist that you've just learned from, you know, from day one, right, that's just the way that you were raised. And none of these surveys capture that.
Stoicism is kind of another after view this is a big difference between men and women and conservatives and liberals.
Right.
So now working the story in right, if you look at data and if you ask people are you mentally healthy? Right, conservatives and men are considered the more likely to say yes, Liberals and women Right, If you ask people did you have a good day to day, the difference kind of evaporates. So the Libs will say, well, that proves that there's a stigma over mental health. And I might say there's
a liberal bit of men. Right, I might say, look, no, actually, men are more stoic and they're able to say it's okay sometimes to not have every day be the most exciting, or I not have everything go your way. Right. We don't have to be as expressive about it. And actually that's a sign of better mental health.
Right.
You don't have to you know, turn us all into therapy patients or whatever else.
Right.
And if I were to stereotype.
I would say that Mexico is a more expressive culture than Japan or Korea.
Right.
If the woke police want to beat me down for that, I mean, I think I think most people would agree with that, probably, right, And so that can get you know, whenever a human is acting of the human on a survey are connecting survey, you know that that becomes a little bit loaded, potentially.
Absolutely, And like we said at the beginning, you know, they really have tried with this ladder kind of question to cut through a lot of the cultural noise, but it doesn't in the sense that those mental frameworks that kind of those things that are acceptable not acceptable. Just the way that you perceive life in general is going to be influenced by by those things, and your answer to that ladder is going to differ based on those early life slash social kind of pressures no matter what.
And I also want to add a factor that so talking about you know, unpc things to say, like another big thing in happiness, like genetics is actually a factor here, like some levels of life satisfaction and kind of how you perceive life. There's a degree of heritability to that, right where like for whatever reason, right, whether it's kind of your overall mental health, how your brain processes information, whatever combination of genes you have that can affect how
you see the world to a certain extent. Right, it's not one hundred percent heritability or anything close to that,
but there is a heritability element to that. And then if we actually go even further out to like nations like Finland, places that have been more kind of smaller, more homogeneous, like there is that genetic factor actually is part of it, I think, and you start realizing that, oh, we have like a population that you know, might be genetically more predisposed to a certain way of experiencing the world,
a certain way of expressing themselves in the world. Like I said, small piece of it, but a piece of it all the same. And when we're talking about something as huge as happiness, all those small pieces matter. We'll be back right after this.
One that you do notice in like the Nordics is like.
There's a lot of reinvestment into like kind of public spaces and social services, right like they you know, they have time to have a little bit more refinement in everything from like museums to parks, to restaurants, airports, right things like that. Is that downstream from being having lower inequality or is it downstream from being more democratic? I think a lot of the research finds that like democracies are happier, right. I find that my own work too.
The US, by the way, as it has become on a spectrum less democratic has also become less happy for what it's worth, right, absolutely, But then you still of know what the cause and effect are, right, Maybe it's that Okay, this is kind of a liberal I think overly generous in some way interpretation of Trump.
But they say inequality triggered backlash, and backlash triggered Trump, and now Trump is dismantling democratic institutions, right, So like the root cause is actually inequality. Right. Those kind of things are very difficult to entangle or disentangle.
Yeah, oh, they absolutely are. And by the way, you know, since you mentioned the United States and kind of the fallen happiness with the lessening democratic norms, I think that actually dovetails with two of the other things that we see on the list, which is freedom to make life choices, right, so that's kind of part of democracy and freedom from corruption. And we know that actually the US has just plummeted on the corruption index, right, So I do think that's
really interesting. But yeah, we don't know, especially with things like generosity, like cause and effect. Man, that's really really hard, but generosity does kind of there is a reciprocal relationship there, and I don't know with something like happiness. How one even does a statistical analysis to try to disambiguate cause and effect, like in a data set like this, I don't know if you can.
Yeah. No, if you read.
Anecdotal like accounts of people who live, you know, expats living in countries like India where maybe the rule of law is relatively weak, it's like, well, every.
Single thing is a negotiation.
A contract is not necessarily a contract, right, And like, you know, if you look at kind of like what are the different pillars of like the Industrial Revolution in the European Enlightenment, one of the ones, it's like kind of less sexy, is like just contract law and like property rights and things like that, right, I mean, think about how many things you do, Maria that rely on high trust, you know what I mean?
Yeah?
Absolutely, By the way it happens in the poker world too, Oh you know, I forgot my wire?
Can you lend X to play in this tournament? Yep, I'm entering this high stakes betting pool.
I mean, there's just lots of stuff that like, and I'm much more comfort care about that than ninety percent of poker players. But like, just the things are a lot smoother if not, everything is like fucking scratching your nails on a chalkboard, trying to prove, trying to ensure that what's supposed to happen happens.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's like the underlying point there, which is a really important one, is that we don't want to constantly be expending all of these resources on whatever it is, whether it's pure survival, right that's like the money thing, or just like trying to go through life on a day to day basis. And we do have data that show that societies with higher levels of generalized trust tend to be much more successful, right, they
tend to I'm not talking about happiness right now. I'm talking about just like economically successful, because the fewer resources you have to expend on that, the more you can actually use to pay attention to things that are important to you in that matter to you, you know, your own well being, your family, your friends, things that you
want to be doing. And if everything is a struggle, right, then it's really really tough to get out from that cognitive load and to try to have the mental space that you need to think, to relax, to create, to actually be you know, be a successful human being and not just a human being who's surviving. By the way, if you think about your answers to different questions right such as like the more global how happy are you?
Versus like, how's your day going right? How are things going right now, you will end up getting very different answers quite often because people, and this actually goes back to what I was saying about genetics and about different societies, people do often have like a set happiness level, you know, after a certain point, and the data that shows that, you know, people after they win the law tend to like fall back to where they were before, or people
who become quadriplegic also tend to kind of level out to where they were before. I think that and those studies have held up, and those are very interesting data points that show that you have this day to day fluctuation and then you have these baseline set rates. And yet even with all of those things, you do have societies that tend to be overall happier versus other societies. So they're all of these different factors playing at the
same time. And that's I think one of the reasons why happiness research is so fascinating and why I try to be one of those people who tries to be happier, right, and tries to use the research that I know about those mental frameworks, those mental feedback loops to push myself to be happier because there is, you know, mind body connection. There's a research that shows that if you smile more, you're actually going to start feeling a little bit better.
Like if you can trick yourself, if you can trick your mind by kind of acting in a happier way.
Yeah, poker rewires your brain, or I guess for the matter of other gambling kind of rewires your brain in slightly weird ways. Who was this interview with?
Was it Stephen Schipwicker's I forget who it was, right, it was some player who was asked why he didn't appear happier when he's doing really well in a tournament, right, And it's like, well, anyone who's been in a tournament knows that until you actually finish the tournament, there's absolutely nothing guaranteed about it, Right, So you kind of train yourself like not to celebrate these like interrow successes and like and you pick, yeah, go ahead.
I have to say that I don't know about you, But I always like feel a perverse pleasure in watching those videos when someone celebrates too early, like when there's still one card to come and they're like doing this victory dance like yes I won and going absolutely crazy, and then they lose. I'm like, huh, serves you right, Like, do not celebrate too early. And one of the other things we were talking about is in terms of trust, Like I do think that that is something that is
very and we've talked about this before. It's something that's so funny in the poker world, right where you can, like you take things on trust and end up trusting people with vast amounts of money, where other people, people who aren't poker players, would be like, what in the world are you doing? Right, you just gave that person like ten grand or whatever it is, and you and
I have actually given each other money that way. But I'm very careful, like I will only actually do that with few people because I'm not a poker player, and at the end of the day, I'm someone who has studied con artists, breaches of trust, all of these things, and I know that, you know, you just never want to put yourself in a situation where you'll be out that money absolutely.
Yeah. Now, I like I I unless you're covered with gone, right, let's get yeah exactly.
Well that's the other thing, Yeah, unless you're absolutely comfortable with it being totally gone. And there's some very funny stories about that. In the poker world. Phil Ivy is known for giving very very generous tips. There's a funny massage story where someone didn't have cash and asked Phil Ivy to tip for him and I think Phil through like a five K tip or something to the missus. And yeah, that was with Nick Schulman. It's a very funny story that Nick Schulman tells, And yeah, that was.
That's not a death that you wanted to incur in the moment. I think Nick was probably waiting for like one hundred dollars tip or something something a little bit smaller.
And we'll be right back after this break.
One of the things that we haven't talked about too much, which I think we should at least a little bit, is the fact that the one factor that's been shown over and over to correlate with both life expectancy and happiness, and it's something that this Happiness Court has pointed out. They say having someone to count on. But the one factor that we see in all sorts of longitudinal studies are just community, right, social connection, having friends, being being
a part of something. And that doesn't need to mean religion, although that's one of the reasons that's a confounding variable why people who are religious often tend to be happier because they have that inbuilt community. But it doesn't have to be that. It could actually be absolutely anything. It could be poker night, it could be you know, your
community of poker friends. But it's having people that you actually see in real life, that you have a rapport with, that you spend time with, that you have kind of this support network. And yes, kind of having a spouse can be great too, although that is a double edged sword because if you're unhappy in your marriage, that detracts
from happiness. But in general, like that, social connection is absolutely huge, and that's something that we also haven't talked about in terms of you know, different countries and different ways of treating family. Right, does your extended family live with you? How do you kind of look at that? Do you have an inbuilt social connection and inbuilt community? And this is something that I think a lot of people either take for granted or don't even realize how
important it is. And I think it's something that will become increasingly more important as more and more of our lives are online, and we do see this social fragmentation with people not necessarily doing as many things outside the home with other people as I have in the past.
Yeah, the Nordics, I tend to associate with bigger, open, kind of outdoor spaces. It seem like the Fins of particular, you have like a tragnumber of big groups swroaming around. Whereas like something very interesting I found in South Korea, or in Seoul at least, was that like when you go to a restaurant that'sufficiently nice, they will put your group in like a private room, and that is seen
as like the highest prestige thing. As you go with a group of four friends, right, and you go to a private room or with your family, right, and it's kind of like, okay, well, what's the point of you know, I mean, I guess like the point of going on is that they can cook, of course very well better than you can, right, But like the other point of being no, we're out in the community and we're out in a communal space, right, is like, so, yeah.
That's fascinating.
I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, well.
That goes hand in hand with where we know they fall on the global happiness rank.
Now, yeah, I drop in those walls have some community.
Yeah.
Don't we love when anecdotal data actually supports the statistics.
It's like, I don't think it's like the common because it seems as a.
Places that are seen as like having a constraint on space, right, that having space is kind of like the luxury right if you lol, like like the luxury class and like Korean air. Right, it's not that nice, just a lot of space because space is rare in these extremely dense like Asian countries, right, And it might not be true so much in in in other parts of the world.
Yeah, yeah, no, that makes that makes a lot of sense. All right, So let's to wrap up night. If you were to nominate your own new happiest country based on no data whatsoever, what would what would you say? Or do you want to keep Finland?
People in Hudson, New York seem very happy?
It's all it's the country, the country of Hudson.
It could be a communist country practically, yeahs though, all right, cools, Yeah, what's the place you've seen that you'd say this place is happy?
I would nominate, Well, I'm going to do a country. I'm going to nominate Andra, because people there have a lot of money and it's gorgeous, right, you just have like just absolutely stunning vistas and they're and it's small, right, and there aren't that many people there, and it's a tax haven. So yeah, I would I would say that. I'm guessing. I don't actually know if Fandora. I'm not looking at the rankings anymore. They're not in front of me, so I don't know if Fandora is even part of
this or if it's too small. But yeah, Andra, Monaco, like, I would bet that people in countries like that are probably pretty.
They're a little apologies, who are five readers from listeners from Monaco are people?
They're a little soulless in the tax savings.
Yeah, No, that's why I said Andorra, not Monaco. But but I think that Monaco shares some of the things with Andorra. But Andorra, I'm guessing is a happier place because in general, like there are a lot of parts
so and or is its own country. But you know, we're we're talking about close proximity to Spain and the you know, the weather there is nice and there are by the way, even though we do know that like Nordic countries can be obviously the happiest in the world, but sunshine and sun exposure is correlated to happiness levels anyway, and Spain can be Spain can be a happier country if you go like region by region. But there are some very poor parts of Spain. There's a lot of
civil unrest in some parts of it. You know, you've got boss country and like the succession stuff, so there's a lot of stuff keeping Spain from the top. But Andorra has a lot of the good things that Spain has without a lot of that baggage. So that's that's why I nominate and Dora. I wonder if our and Dora listeners agree with us or not, but it is beautiful.
I encourage you to at least look at photographs. And on that note, date, let's uh yeah, let's wrap and uh go and be happy and and let's go and increase the happiness rating of risky business by encouraging more reviews that are positive. Let us know what you think of the show. Reach out to us at Risky Business at pushkin dot FM. Risky Business is hosted by me Maria Kanakova.
And by me Nate Silver. The show was a cool production of Pushing Industries and iHeartMedia. This episode was produced by Isaac Carter. Our associate producer is Sonya gerwit Lydia, Jean Kott and Daphne Chen are our editors, and our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. Mixing by Sarah Bruger.
If you like the show, please rate and review us so other people can find us too, but once again, only if you like us. We don't want put those bad reviews out there. Thanks for tuning in.