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Comment by nobodywillobsrv | Hacker News Reader

Norway has problems too. Don't mention Sweden

As a Brit living in Sweden for 10 years (and, who now has naturalised).

It’s incomparable and the parent is definitely right to ponder. Life here is better, even if it has it’s problems.

There is no “working poor” here, serial unemployment is significantly lower. And Sweden is the “worst” nordic country right now for crime and poverty rates. Britain is far-far behind, and getting worse yearly.

I live in Sweden and was wondering how bad things are recently given the daily explosions around the country related to gang criminality.

Apparently, even the worst parts of Stockholm have crime rates comparable to the best areas of the USA, which surprised me TBH (and I think that's a lot better than the UK).

It's not a fair comparison, because everything in West compares better to post-Johnson Britain :)

Britain has been in decline since Thatcher, but is not willing to accept it.

Blair, for all his war crimes, managed the decline fairly well, but it’s been clear to anyone with an outside view that Britain is a mid-power, cosplaying as a world power.

Similar to that geezer who always has the flash car and no money to pay for it, keeping up with joneses and going into perpetual debt for it, until nobody will lend any money any more.

> serial unemployment is significantly lower

"Serial unemployment" sounds like a description of going from being unemployed to being unemployed, repeatedly. But that makes no sense. What does it mean?

year after year of being unemployed, or dropping in and out of work very temporarily. (not being able to hold a job)

in britain there is a concept of “the underclass” which are perpetually out of work people.

In the same way that year after year of remaining married to the same person constitutes "serial monogamy"?

Or... how stabbing the same corpse several times makes you a "serial killer"?

Serial unemployment is an actual definition in sociology[0][1]

HN seems to have a lot of people these days who don’t follow the guidelines.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.[2]

[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242537188_Charles_M...

[1]: https://senseofmisplaced.blogspot.com/2011/03/serial-unemplo...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You will always have problems in any country. Norway ranks at 7 in happiness, Sweden at 4. The top four places are Nordic countries. UK ranks 20.

Having lived in Finland and UK, I definitely don't want to live in UK.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...

How can these happiness scores be meaningful? It's all just surveys, and self reporting. It's subjective and sensitive to cultural differences.

Happiness being subjective to cultural differences is a feature, not a bug.

If a culture is breeding widespread unhappiness (perhaps in exchange for maximization of economic growth over all) then it's something that should be observed.

Do you think people are lying about their happiness or that happiness isn't subjective?

Self-reported happiness (or life satisfaction) is only a part of the ranking. The objective measures correlate strongly with the subjective ones (with some outliers like Israel). But as any metric, it's of course not perfect.

"Happiness is measured using six categories including GDP per capita, social support, and healthy life expectancy, among others."

That measurement of 'happiness' is inappropriate. Instead of simply polling people about e.g. life satisfaction it's based on a bunch of random metrics that have, at best, a mixed relationship with 'happiness.'

So for instance it turns out the 'happiest' countries in the world also have some of the highest rates of depression in the world.

Now obviously that's not literally impossible but ffs just poll people - it's not hard. Yes it will be extremely subjective, exactly like 'happiness' is!

Such polling is done extensively. Norway ranks 6th, with 94.1% very happy or quite happy.

Happiness vs life satisfaction correlates surprisingly little.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-people-who-say-t...

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