The 2026 UN World Happiness Report, released earlier this month, suggests pronounced declines, particularly in Anglosphere countries.
in Domestic Policy, Issues, Inside Policy, Latest News, Podcasts, Social Issues, Peter Copeland
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We often measure success by what’s easiest to count—GDP, income, output, and increasingly, self-reported happiness. Complex concepts, however, do not become simple just because that’s how we want to measure them. Those we employ are often incomplete, and actively misleading in that they suggest only a subset of happiness exhausts the richness of the phenomenon.
For MLI’s inside policy, Brendan Case of Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program and I unpack what the latest findings from the UN World Happiness Report say, and what they don’t. Despite their wealth, Anglosphere countries like Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. have seen significant declines, especially among younger people, and women.
Part of this is unsurprising, and properly captured by the survey. These are economies that have undergone decades of deindustrialization—driven in part by a deliberate trade philosophy built on the outsourcing of production—which has eroded stable, meaningful work and hollowed out many communities. Peer jurisdictions like Germany and other developed nations haven’t seen the same declines. What’s more, rising social media use, isolation, and shrinking community and family networks is higher in countries like these, where the philosophy of inward-looking individualism is most pronounced.
But many of the findings in the survey don’t paint an adequate picture of flourishing.
Happiness surveys are built, implicitly, on a desire-fulfilment model of well-being—closely tied to utilitarian thinking and the philosophy of the autonomous chooser that underpins expressive individualism. On this view, a good life is one in which individuals maximize preferences and expand choice.
The problem is that this model is both thin and increasingly out of step with reality. It struggles to explain why the societies where this philosophy is most dominant are not the ones where people are flourishing. And it’s limited methodologically. The surveys rely on static snapshots and subjective evaluations, rather than tracking how the deeper goods of life develop and interact over time.
The Global Flourishing Study offers a meaningful advance over these limitations.
Rather than reducing well-being to a single score, it tracks individuals over time across multiple domains: health, happiness, meaning, character, relationships, and material stability. It strongly suggests that countries with stronger family formation, denser social networks, deeper community life, and in many cases higher levels of religiosity report higher levels of flourishing, even when they have lower incomes, fewer choices, and lower “standard of living” scores.
In other words, the very goods often treated as secondary in mainstream frameworks – relationships, community, purpose—appear to be central.
These findings are backed up by robust psychological and epidemiological health studies that show family, community, marriage, religiosity, and living virtuously, through gratitude and volunteering for e.g., are what underpins robust well-being.
Contra the UN happiness model, flourishing is not simply the result of maximizing choice or satisfying preferences. It depends on the development of our capacities over time that allow us to foster relationships and bonds over time, and find meaning and purpose in life. Things that are in fact, relatively objective and generally applicable to the vast majority of people.
For policymakers, the UN Happiness and Global flourishing study findings should be a warning. Both that our societies are becoming increasingly isolated and lonely, and will only grow in the near term as family and relationship networks further shrink. And, that our measurement frameworks are inadequate, and often based on an incomplete, or mistaken account of the human person. This leads us, in turn, to pursue the wrong outcomes.
A better model of flourishing challenges the policy measurement framework, and the objectives we pursue in politics and policy.
Podcast Description:
As Canada continues its decade-long slide in the UN’s global happiness rankings, there’s growing questions about whether policymakers are even using the right metrics to measure the indicators of living a good life.
Across the developed world, there’s a similar, troubling pattern. The 2026 UN World Happiness Report, released earlier this month, suggests pronounced declines, particularly in Anglosphere countries. That includes Canada, which dropped to 25th spot in the rankings, while the United States sits at 23rd.
These findings come despite a general rise in material prosperity. While the UN survey moves beyond looking strictly at GDP, some organizations are calling for an even broader view.
To discuss this, Brendan Case, associate director for research at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, joins Inside Policy Talks. Case has been closely involved in shaping Harvard’s Global Flourish Study, a major international effort to better understand well-being across countries, cultures, and life stages. The study seeks to move beyond narrow economic measures of happiness.
On the podcast, he tells Peter Copeland, deputy director of domestic policy at MLI, that GDP is “an extremely coarse measure” even when it comes to looking at material wealth, and falls far short on capturing other kinds of well-being.
He says the UN survey also has its limits.
“I think that they have genuinely helped in moving the conversation beyond just a narrow fixation on ‘how can we generate more income?’” says Case. However, his team has been engaged in a “friendly debate” with the UN report’s editors on the best alternative mechanisms.
Case notes that the UN metrics ultimately come down to respondents giving a subjective assessment of how satisfied they are with their lives, while the Harvard study looks at a several concrete measures, like health, as determinants of respondents’ well-being.
Available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts
Peter Copeland 