That’s illegal. Drinking often or depression is not. Apples and oranges.

Embarrassment? Reluctance to look/sound like you’re a lush?

Right, well being depressed and unhappy is just as bad if not worse. For me personally, I’d much rather admit that I drink a bit to often rather than telling people I’m depressed and unhappy.

It’s a little more than that: it’s political. Happiness is an important facet for a welfare state.

The Finnish term for welfare, hyvinvointi, is actually a direct translation of “well” and “fare”, but it also connotes “good feeling”, in other words, happiness. (This connotation is lost for Americans, whose understanding of the term “welfare” regularly conjures up social misery, intractable problems and high taxes).

If happiness did not exist in a welfare state, then such a state would lose its political justification. Thus, column-inches are devoted in newspapers on a regular basis to keep reminding people of how happy they are.

And there may well be a “patriotic” factor in the other studies, but I don’t buy into the idea that the Finns would be alone in having sussed it and exploited it to artificially bump up their ratings. It’s likely the inaccuracies in reporting would balance themselves out among different countries and cultures. As for the value of a “happiness” study, well, if it was on eBay I don’t think there’d be many takers. It’s touching and slightly pathetic that news agencies in little countries like Finland consider these things worthy of column-inches. And of course they cherry-pick as always: the actual questionnaire was a lot more extensive. It’s here (all 83 pages of it):
http://ess.nsd.uib.no/index.jsp?year=2005&country=&module=questionaires

“How happy are you?” is Q.C1/18 on p.15. Looks like there are HUNDREDS of questions.

The alcohol survey had to do with your drinking habits. That is something that is countable. “I had two beers yesterday.” The recent surveys, especially this happiness survey, doesn’t really measure anything concrete. It’s just “feelings” they’re measuring. So my guess would be that people are way more likley to, not “lie”, but not give the most accurate results. While on the otherhand, the number of drinks you had is concrete information, you’d be more likely to give accurate information.

But surely this is apples & oranges. The difference is that the booze survey was one in isolation, in which the (Finnish) respondents almost all lied through their teeth about how sober they were, while the other two examples are COMPARATIVE international studies that are admittedly flawed because of the “self-critical” component (though the WEF one is only partially subjective), in which everyone concerned - pipe-smoking Danes, ouzo-soaked Greeks, cheese-eating surrender-monkeys, Latvians with triple digit suicide rates, Brits with straight cucumbers to fret over, Swiss members of wacky religious cults bent on mass suicide pacts and flying to Sirius, and Finns - ALMOST ALL LIE THROUGH THEIR TEETH.

The fact that the Finns come out near the top of the heap means one of two things: 1. they are BIGGER liars than everyone else, or 2. assuming a lie-factor that is more or less constant across the continent, they really don’t feel that bad about their lives. I’m very reluctant to allow that Finns are bigger or better liars than the next man, since this observation would only result in yet-another-bloody-study and yet more headlines of the sort:

Finns win top ranking in Opaqueness International’s Terminological Inexactitude Survey

or as the Finnpundit Clarion and Bugle would put it.

Freeriders make free with truth; welfare state is “big lie”

This we don’t need.

Not necessarily. Just because we complain doesn’t mean we’re unhappy. i don’t find it at all hard to believe that Finns are not at all unsatisfied with their lives.

“I guess they don’t factor in suicides”

Suicides reduce number people who are depressed, right?

“and depression into their survey, heh.”

It is kinda funny that the most happiest people are studends, who happen to be at the same time the most depressed people.