RE: Corruption, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway are literally four of the five countries in terms of "least corrupt". Their government might be dysfunctional, but corruption, they lack (by that metric). And as I understand it the national-general-contentment-rate (I'm not sure what the actual term is, but some sociological survey was conducted with as much rigor as the soft sciences can produce) those countries have similar ratings for happiness as well.

Though, even if you include the former soviet states, Latvia, Hungary, Poland, etc basically everyone except Ukraine is in the top third of the least corrupt, which is not that darn bad considering.

So is the US, France, Spain, Austria, Portugal, Greece, Italy and Eastern Europe are more corrupt than the US.

As for the Nordic states I haven't argued that they are not, I would say that they are potentially corrupt in other means as nepotism plays more than money but again it doesn't matter.

The US is still one of the least corrupt nations on the planet.