Denmark consistently ranks at or near the top of the U.N.’s annual happiness ranking. Is their secret generous social programs and high levels of social trust? (Photo: Mstyslav Chernov/Wikimedia Commons)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “How to Be Happy.” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

The U.N.’s World Happiness Report — created to curtail our unhealthy obsession with G.D.P. — is dominated every year by the Nordic countries. We head to Denmark to learn the secrets of this happiness epidemic (and to see if we should steal them).

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

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Until a few years ago, Helen Russell was leading a seemingly happy life in London, working as an editor for the fashion magazine Marie Claire. True, she did feel restless at times; also true: she and her husband had been struggling with fertility treatments. That said, she had no intention of leaving the U.K.

Helen RUSSELL: Until out of the blue, one wet Wednesday, my husband came home and told me he’d been offered his dream job working for Lego in Denmark. And we knew nothing about the country, as many people in other countries are fairly ignorant of Scandinavia. We couldn’t really have pinpointed it on a map.

They decided to go for it. But as soon as they arrived — in a small town in the rural hinterlands of Denmark, in the dead of winter— she had regrets.

RUSSELL: My husband left to go to work at 7:30 a.m. I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t speak the language. I was in this freezing cold, dark country all by myself. I did a lot of howling at the moon, thinking I’d made the biggest mistake ever. And I did a lot of eating danish pastries, because as a repressed Brit, I like to eat my emotions.

But Russell had heard — as you may have heard — that Denmark is routinely at or near the very top of the annual happiness ranking compiled by the United Nations. And the other Nordic countries — Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Finland — pretty much dominate the top 10. Russell naturally wondered: why? What are the causes, and consequences, of this alleged happiness epidemic? Was it for real? What are the downsides? She set out to answer these questions, in a book she called The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country. Along the way, she asked nearly every Dane she met how they would rank their happiness on a scale of 1 to 10. A funny thing happened during this process: Russell herself became quite a bit happier.

RUSSELL: I was maybe — I’d have said a 6 was a good day in London, and now I’m generally on that 8, and sometimes a 9, if I’m lucky.

DUBNER: You’re practically Danish.

RUSSELL: I’m practically Danish.

Today on Freakonomics Radio: what causes all this happiness?

Jeffrey SACHS: What it is, I think, is a kind of ethos of life.

What’s keeping less-happy countries from copying it?

Meik WIKING: The price tag.

And: an economist who thinks we should worry more about well-being and less about traditional measures like GDP:

SACHS: My God. Let’s get serious about the quality of our lives, and stop this nonsense of chasing such a poor indicator that is taking us actually farther away from our happiness.

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I recently spent a few days in Copenhagen. There was one person I was very excited to meet.

WIKING: So my name is Meik Wiking, and I’m the C.E.O. of the Happiness Research Institute here in Copenhagen.

DUBNER: And is “Viking” a common surname here?

WIKING: No. I think we’re a handful of people. My dad is called Wolf. I have a brother called Kenneth. I have a couple of nephews, one is called Max Wiking, so he needs to grow up big and tall.

DUBNER: Do you do Halloween here, where you dress up as costumes?

WIKING: I see where this is going.

DUBNER: I’m just curious, were you a Viking every year when you were a child?

WIKING: No. But there was one episode, yes.

Wiking has a background in political science, economics, and sociology — all of which figure in understanding what’s called happiness.

WIKING: One of the challenges we have with happiness is to define it and to measure it. And we should first and foremost acknowledge that it’s a wide umbrella term. So you have one understanding of what happiness is, and I have another one. So we need to break it down and look at different components. The first is an overall life satisfaction. And here you essentially ask your respondents to take a step back and evaluate their lives.

Happiness researchers also track people’s moods in the moment.

WIKING: “How happy are you right now? How happy were you yesterday?” And there we can see that weather, what day of the week it is, impacts our happiness levels. People are happier — no big surprise — on the weekend, than they are on Monday mornings.

They also measure people’s sense of meaning.

WIKING: That builds on what Aristotle thought the good life was. To him, the good life was the meaningful life. So here we try to understand, do people have a sense of purpose?

A sense of purpose. A self-evaluation of life satisfaction. You may think all this sounds a bit squishy — especially to an economist, yes?

SACHS: I’m going to answer anything you’re going to ask me.

Okay, we’ll ask some questions. First one’s easy: would you please introduce yourself?

SACHS: Jeff Sachs, a university professor at Columbia University. And I am special adviser to the United Nations Secretary General on the Sustainable Development Goals. One part of that is human well-being. And so I am a co-editor each year of the World Happiness Report.

The World Happiness Report — that’s where Denmark and the other Nordic countries always come out on top. Jeff Sachs, just so you know, isn’t some woo-woo feel-good witch doctor. You may have heard him on our program before, talking about his work as an interventional economist for governments in crisis:

SACHS: I worked in Poland and in Russia after the communist system collapsed.

Also in Bolivia, trying to tame its hyperinflation.

SACHS: And I worked in Latin America very extensively for several years after the work in Bolivia.

The calls kept coming.

SACHS: And then in 1995, another quite decisive turn for me was an invitation to go to Zambia and to see what this experience and these lessons might mean for Africa.

Over time, and because of those experiences, Sachs came to believe that his fellow economists had left something out of their worldview. Something, in fact, quite vital.

SACHS: The economics profession took a very bad turn roughly 150 years ago when it decided that since it wasn’t possible to measure happiness or to compare happiness across individuals, we would look basically at consumer preferences.

The inspiration to incorporate happiness into economic modeling came from a rather unlikely source.

SACHS: So back in 1971, the fourth king of Bhutan — who also brought democracy to the country — was an extremely, extremely wise leader, he raised the question already, why are we pursuing Gross National Product when we should be pursuing Gross National Happiness? You know it’s such a wonderful phrase. And GNH entered the vocabulary of a small niche of economists and a small niche of Buddhists, and others who are dreaming of this, already, decades ago.

But Bhutan went ahead as a very poor country and actually set up the mechanisms for detailed survey measurement of dimensions of Gross National Happiness. It set up a Gross National Happiness commission. It ordered that all legislation should be an evaluated happiness benefit-cost ratio.

Sachs began meeting with the king, and they brought more world leaders and economists into the happiness conversation. This ultimately led to the creation of the U.N.’s World Happiness Report. The concept was jarring to many of Sachs’s colleagues, particularly in the U.S.

SACHS: Well, in our country, we don’t talk about almost anything else in the public space. It’s all about growth, GDP, incomes. Of course, there is a massive industry of happiness studies, self-help manuals, helping people to overcome all sorts of unhappinesses, trying to help people find meaning in their lives, trying to help people make better decisions about their lives.

To Sachs, the booming self-help industry in rich countries like the U.S. reveals a disturbing paradox.

SACHS: We have the paradox that income per person rises in the United States, but happiness does not. And it’s not that that’s because humans are humans. It’s because the U.S. is falling behind other countries, because we are not pursuing dimensions of happiness that are extremely important: our physical health, the mental health in our community, the social support, the honesty in government. And this is weighing down American well-being.

Like the Danish happiness expert Meik Wiking, Sachs finds wisdom in the ancient Greek model.

SACHS: I go with Aristotle — he’s my guy, my favorite philosopher. And he pointed out in the Nicomachean Ethics, 2,300 years ago, that to be happy requires the good benefit of having material needs met. So don’t deny those, he said. But he also said, only aiming for wealth, single-mindedly pursuing a higher wealth, is certainly no way to happiness and after a certain point of income, work on other things — work on your friendship, work on your mental health, work your physical health. Work on good governance, work on your charitableness. Because in this kind of world, a good life is a balanced and a virtuous life. Not a single-minded pursuit of income.

Okay, if these are the factors that supposedly generate happiness — community, good mental and physical health, good governance — and since Denmark and the other Nordic countries top the happiness rankings, let’s take a look at how they address those