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

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

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.

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...