Sunday, February 13, 2011

They're Downright Giddy in Norway

Since AVI’s youngest Romanian son is headed to northern Norway for employment opportunities later this month, I thought I’d post this excerpt from a recent issue of Forbes about the world’s happiest countries that cited Norway as No. 1:

The world's highest per-capita GDP at $53,000 a year. Spending on health care is second-highest after the U.S. An unparalleled 74% of Norwegians say other people can be trusted, 94% are happy with the beauty of their environment, and a very high 93% believe hard work will help them get ahead in life. Having a lot of oil and gas reserves helps.

I love that last line in the excerpt. It’s like saying, “Anyone can have a real bad day once in a while, but if you’re filthy rich you’ll probably bounce back quickly.”

In fairness, the full article does put most of the headliner stats in perspective - and provides info about the other countries that were ranked.

1 comment:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Yet it does have a fairly high suicide rate. Not as high as the former Soviet Union (a country's suicide rate seems to bear some relation to how close they are to Russia), but middling high.