For the 8th successive year, Finland ranks no.1 on the annual World Happiness Report. The report, published on the UN’s International Day of Happiness, is based on analysis of how the residents of over 140 countries rate their quality of life. With 10 meaning someone is currently living the best possible life they can imagine, Finns came in first with an average score of 7.74.
“They’re wealthy, they’re healthy, have social connections, social support, [and] a connection with nature,” Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, professor of economics at the University of Oxford, leader of the Wellbeing Research Center and editor of The World Happiness Report, tells Fortune. “They’re not happy, joyful, dancing in the streets type people, but they’re very content with their lives.”
Finland was followed by Denmark (no.2), Iceland (no.3), Sweden (no.4), and the Netherlands (no.5). While Mexico (no.10) and Costa Rica (no.6) joined the top 10 for the first time in the list’s history, the U.S. dropped to its lowest ranking at no. 24. Last year, the U.S. dropped out of the top 20 for the first time since the 2012 inaugural list.
The Nordic countries, historically at the top, are getting happier while the U.S. is getting less happy. While GDP per capita is relatively similar across the Nordic countries, the U.S., Australia, and the UK, the distribution of wealth sets them apart.
“In these Nordic Scandinavian countries, a rising tide lifts all boats, so the levels of economic inequality are much less, and that reflects in well-being as well,” De Neve says. “In Finland, most people will rate themselves as seven or an eight, whereas if you look at the distribution of well-being in the States, there’s a lot of 10s out there, but there’s a lot of ones as well.”
While the rankings factored in a country’s GDP per capita, wealth distribution, and life expectancy, they found social trust and connection help determine happiness more than people may think.
This year, the researchers found a strong correlation between someone believing in the kindness of others and their own perceived happiness. Across the board, too often, people underestimate the kindness of others, like, say, if someone will return a lost wallet. It affects well-being. Wallets are returned to their owner at almost twice the rate people assume. However, compared to the U.S., more people in Nordic countries believe a lost wallet will be returned (and more people are likely to return it).
Maintaining a strong sense of community with acts such as regularly dining with others, for example, improves social trust and happiness, the report found. “The more you believe in the kindness of others, or in other words, are socially trusting, the higher your individual well-being and the higher collective well-being,” De Neve says. “The Nordic countries, the Scandinavian countries, do better, both in the belief in others’ kindness and in the actual wallet drop.”
As for Mexico and Costa Rica joining the top 10 for the first in the list’s history, De Neve points to the strength of the countries’ social fabrics. Latin American countries reported the highest number of shared meals and ranked high on social connectedness and trust. It helps explain why their rankings dipped more dramatically in the COVID-19 isolation years (De Neve says that 13 out of 14 meals shared across seven days correlated to the highest well-being measure).
“It is not because of high GDP and the highest life expectancy,” De Neve says about these two countries. “They do spend time dining and lunching with others, having friends, and it’s not all cannibalized by social media, and so we picked this up in the data.”
The report is published yearly by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, alongside partners, including Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and an editorial board that analyzes the findings pro bono.
As De Neve dug into why Finland kept its reign, something else came to light that helped them stand out even from their Nordic counterparts.
“They’re content with less,” he says. “They had less, and they’re more content with less. So they’re happier with what they’ve got.”
Here are the world’s 25 happiest countries
Finland
Denmark
Iceland
Sweden
Netherlands
Costa Rica
Norway
Israel
Luxembourg
Mexico
For more on happiness:
Researchers have followed over 700 people since 1938 to find the keys to happiness. Here’s what they discovered
About 500 staffers at the Securities & Exchange Commission have agreed to leave the agency in response to its $50,000 buyout and deferred-resignation offers, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
The divisions of enforcement, exams and the office of the general counsel will experience some of the more significant departures, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing non-public information. The number may climb even higher as additional people accept the buyout ahead of Friday’s deadline for the $50,000 incentive. Some of the departures may not take place until later this year.
The total represents about 10% of the roughly 5,000 employees at the agency. Some former staff have expressed concern that the agency will be unable to handle a financial crisis, should one arise, given the talent drain.
To qualify for the buyout offer, employees must have been on the agency’s payroll before Jan. 24. They must voluntarily leave through resignation, transfer to another agency or immediate retirement. If they accept a voluntary separation agreement and return to the SEC within five years, they must pay back the incentive in full.
An SEC spokeswoman declined to comment on the departures.
More cost cuts are on the agency’s agenda. The SEC plans to eliminate the leases for its Los Angeles and Philadelphia offices. The General Services Administration has also explored ending the Chicago office’s lease, though that could come with a significant financial penalty, Bloomberg has reported.
Regional offices oversee a hefty portion of exams and enforcement work. The most-senior positions at regional offices have also been cut, though the individuals in those roles aren’t being forced out.
The SEC cuts have been criticized as inconsistent with the administration’s mission to reduce federal-government costs.
“The Trump administration may claim that all agencies should be reduced in size by a roughly similar margin, in effect sharing proportionate reductions,” Columbia Law School professors John Coates, John Coffee Jr., James Cox, Merritt Fox and Joel Seligman wrote in a blog post last week. “But this ignores one extraordinary fact about the SEC: It consistently has generated more in fees than in operating expenses.”
Reuters reported earlier Friday that hundreds would leave.
NASA is rolling out a “weekly accomplishments app” for agency workers to track their productivity, a step toward complying with one of Elon Musk’s government-efficiency demands.
“Today, we will debut a new tool for the “Five Things” request,” Acting NASA Administrator Janet Petro told employees in an email Friday seen by Bloomberg News. “This secure, internal tool makes it easier for you to track and share the incredible work you do each week.”
Musk, who is leading the Department of Government Efficiency under President Donald Trump, surprised agency heads last month when his team sent emails to more than two million federal employees requiring them to submit their weekly achievements over email, or face losing their jobs.
The order was part of the billionaire’s brash approach to overhauling the government — an initiative that has sown uncertainty at NASA and beyond.
The move was widely rebuked across the government with some cabinet secretaries telling their employees to ignore the email, raising concerns that the emails could compromise national security or classified information. The White House also clarified that workers wouldn’t be fired if they didn’t respond and directed them to follow the instructions of their agency heads.
Federal workers have continued to receive weekly prompts to submit their five bullet points and instructions for how, or if, to respond have varied widely across agencies.
The weekly accomplishments app, as Petro described it, will streamline reporting and give workers a “running record” of their contributions over time.
The email comes days after NASA shuttered two offices and eliminated jobs to comply with Trump’s executive orders. The layoffs come at a time of uncertainty for NASA as it awaits the confirmation of Trump’s nominee for administrator, Jared Isaacman, who spent an undisclosed sum of his own money on two SpaceX missions and whose company, Shift4 Payments, has provided Musk’s space company with $27.5 million in funding.
In her note to the agency’s civil servants, Petro added that she will continue to submit weekly accomplishments and activities of all agency employees to the US Office of Personnel Management.
“This tool will provide a straightforward way to share your work as part of that process,” Petro said.
Prophecies that the U.S. dollar will lose its status as the world’s dominant currency have echoed for decades—and are increasing in volume. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts claim that Bitcoin or other blockchain-based monetary units will replace the dollar. Foreign policy hawks warn that China’s renminbi poses a lethal threat to the greenback. And sound money zealots predict that mounting U.S. debt and inflation will surely erode the dollar’s value to the point of irrelevancy.
But contra the doomsayers, Paul Blusteinargues that the dollar’s standing atop the world’s currency pyramid is impregnable—barring a catastrophic misstep by the U.S. government. In his book King Dollar: The Past and Future of the World’s Dominant Currency, he notes the dollar’s supremacy stems from several factors—mainly, the unrivaled depth, breadth, and liquidity of U.S. financial markets, as well as America’s legal and regulatory infrastructure.
Although other currencies have similar features and are used internationally to some extent, none can match the dollar. All alternatives have drawbacks that limit their global role. What follows is the story of one such major currency—the Japanese yen—and why it failed to take the dollar’s throne.
Kaiseki dinners featuring multiple courses of delicacies, exquisitely presented on hand-crafted ceramics and lacquerware, served by kimono-clad waitresses, washed down with free-flowing sake and other alcoholic beverages, followed by karaoke sessions with geishas simpering over the singing performances—that was the sort of hospitality accorded U.S. Treasury officials who traveled to Tokyo in the 1980s for “yen-dollar talks.” Their hosts held senior positions in the powerful Ministry of Finance, which gave them entree to the capital’s most exclusive dining establishments and nightspots, all costs covered by Japanese government expense accounts.
For all the delights of their evening entertainment, however, the Americans generally found these visits frustrating. Their goal was to persuade Japan to internationalize the yen by removing heavy regulations over the nation’s financial system and allowing money to move freely in and out of the country. This point bears repeating to ensure that it sinks in: The U.S. government wanted to make the yen more like the dollar; Treasury officials were not only willing to countenance another currency playing a global role similar to that of the greenback, they were insisting on it.
But progress was glacial. Their Japanese counterparts were skilled at parrying U.S. proposals with painstaking explanations of why Tokyo couldn’t take the measures Washington wanted or why, if implementation were to proceed, it would have to go “step by step” over a number of years. It didn’t help that the negotiations were typically conducted in a stilted atmosphere, with each side sitting opposite the other at long tables while dozens of junior Finance Ministry officials hovered along the walls and in nearby rooms to provide their superiors with logistical support.
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U.S. impatience with Tokyo’s “step by step” approach was manifest at one session when Treasury Undersecretary Beryl Sprinkel, an ardent free marketeer with a stentorian voice, rejected the argument offered by the lead Japanese negotiator, Vice Minister Tomomitsu Oba. “I grew up in Missouri on a dirt farm,” boomed Sprinkel, who recalled that when piglets were born, “we had to cut their tails off. When we cut them off we didn’t cut them off one inch at a time! That would just hurt them more. We just hacked them off once up at the top and that was the end of it.” The translation, which took a few seconds to transmit, evoked shocked silence at first on the Japanese side of the table, until Oba laughed, which led to peals of laughter among his subordinates as well. The next day, Oba declared that he had understood Sprinkel’s story and henceforth Japan’s approach would change from “step by step” to “stride by stride.”
As the story suggests, U.S. officials, who were actively encouraging a competitor currency to assume some of the dollar’s international status, were up against a government that had no interest in mounting such a challenge. Japanese officials saw a low-profile yen as a crucial element in their nation’s postwar economic miracle, and they were loath to mess with success.
That miracle was then in full swing. Toyota, Nissan, and Honda had invaded the U.S. auto market in the 1970s and found it ripe for plucking; similar conquests had been achieved in consumer electronics by Sony and Matsushita Electric, in computers and integrated circuits by Fujitsu and NEC, in power generation and heavy machinery by Toshiba and Hitachi, and by other ultra-competitive Japanese firms in a host of sectors ranging from steel to construction equipment to machine tools. Books with titles such as Japan is Number One and Trading Places: How We Allowed Japan to Take the Lead explained to Americans how this resource-poor island nation, having rocketed to second place in the world’s GDP rankings and accumulated the world’s biggest stash of foreign exchange reserves, was on course to challenge the United States as the dominant economic power.
To attain such supercharged growth, Japanese policy makers had adopted a development model based on what economists call “financial repression,” the idea being to use the financial system for the benefit of the nation’s manufacturers and exporters. In the first quarter century after the war, these policies were draconian, with dollars and other foreign currencies carefully husbanded for allocation by bureaucrats to obtain machinery, technology, and other inputs from abroad needed to build industrial strength. So tight were restrictions on cross-border money movements during this period that as late as 1970, almost no Japanese trade was invoiced in yen. These regulations were loosened somewhat in subsequent years, but even in the 1980s, Japanese banks and savers were strictly limited in the amounts of money they could send abroad; government planners wanted a big pool of capital kept at home so that industrial firms could obtain the maximum amount of funding at the lowest possible interest rates. Another facet of this policy involved discouraging foreigners from buying yen in unlimited quantities lest that cause the exchange rate to rise, which would render Japanese goods less competitive on world markets.
Washington’s tolerance for these policies was at an end by the 1980s. U.S. manufacturers were in a lather about the handicap they faced as a result of the dollar’s strength vis-a-vis the yen. Moreover, American banks, securities firms, and money managers were clamoring for access to Japan’s protected financial markets. Under heavy U.S. pressure to shift away from its mercantilist practices, Tokyo agreed to a yen-dollar pact in 1984 that liberalized its financial system somewhat, and during the 1980s the percentage of Japanese exports denominated in yen rose from less than 30% at the beginning of the decade to nearly 40% by 1991. The yen-dollar deal was followed in 1985 by the Plaza Accord, which explicitly called for the yen to rise against the greenback
Although those agreements helped address U.S. grievances, Japan’s economic muscularity only grew more formidable than before. To counter the effects of endaka (yen appreciation) on exports, the Bank of Japan cut interest rates to historically low levels, which drove prices on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and property in major Japanese cities to stratospheric heights. Japanese multinationals adroitly coped with soaring costs at home by shifting much of their labor-intensive manufacturing overseas—to North America and Europe, where their customers were; and to East and Southeast Asia, where they could export their premium-branded goods from low-cost production bases. This process firmly entrenched Japan as the top trading partner and foreign investor for most of its Asian neighbors, giving Tokyo a degree of influence that Japanophobes found disconcerting. One oft-cited piece of evidence was how the 17,000 workers at Matsushita’s Malaysian plants donned Matsushita uniforms and started their days with the company song and calisthenics, just as employees did at Matsushita’s Osaka headquarters. “Japan has established a presence in the region so rapidly that talk of a ‘coprosperity sphere’ is already a cliché,” reported Newsweek in an August 1991 cover story which was titled “Sayonara, America” and lamented that U.S. companies were falling far behind amid an unprecedented burst of dynamism. “This year, for the first time since the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development began keeping statistics, the Asian nations of Japan’s yen bloc will generate more real economic growth than either the European Community or the combined economies of North America.”
That phrase—”yen bloc”—was widely bandied about, referring sometimes to a trade zone that Tokyo would presumably control but also to the prospect that the Japanese currency, liberated from the shackles of financial repression, would dominate Asia to America’s detriment. The yen’s share of reserves in East Asia topped 17% by 1990, and the borrowing of yen surpassed the borrowing of dollars by those in Asia seeking foreign credit during this period. In 1995, in her Foreign Affairs article “The Fall of the Dollar Order,” Yale diplomatic historian Diane Kunz foresaw grave consequences: “As the yen area solidifies and the yen becomes the common Pacific currency, Americans will need to sell dollars for yen to conduct business with any Asian nation,” she wrote. “The death of the dollar order will drastically increase the price of the American dream while simultaneously shattering American global influence.” Later that year in another Foreign Affairs article, titled “Dominance through Technology: Is Japan Creating a Yen Bloc in Southeast Asia?,” Price Waterhouse consultant Mark Taylor warned that “U.S. firms may soon find themselves excluded from a Japan-centered regional economic bloc.”
This ballyhoo about the yen was poorly timed. By the mid-1990s the Japanese economy was mired in deflation following the bursting of its stock and property bubble. Among the authorities’ many desperate efforts to revitalize the economy was a “Big Bang” reform package in 1996 ending all remaining capital controls and including other steps aimed at turning Tokyo into a financial hub, much as London had done a decade earlier. But Japan could not overcome its legacy of financial repression. The nation’s banks, accustomed to being cosseted by the Finance Ministry, were saddled with bubble-era loans that neither they nor their powerful regulators wanted to recognize as unpayable. Seeing the banking industry struggling to stay afloat, foreign financial firms downsized their Tokyo operations and headed for other, more vibrant centers of Asian finance such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai.
Even after further liberalization policies were adopted in 1999, the yen remained a distant also-ran as an international currency. It accounted for 5.5% of foreign exchange reserves in 2001, declining by 2016 to around 3%, and played a modest part even in Japan’s own trade, where it was used in only about 37% of Japanese exports and 26% of imports. Although Japan enjoys enviable wealth, its growth has remained anemic, stunted by a rapidly aging society and dwindling population, so its gravitational pull has never again come close to that which it exuded during the 1980s. The Bank of Japan has bought such vast quantities of the government’s bonds in its effort to stave off deflation that there has been very little trading in those bonds in recent years—yet another reason for the yen’s relatively low ranking in the currency league tables.
Perhaps if Finance Ministry officials had taken the moral of Beryl Sprinkel’s piglet story to heart and dismantled their controls much earlier, dollar users would have had strong motivation to shift to yen. But the opportunity was missed.
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