**** 3/19/26 - Economist - The Anglosphere is increasingly miserable - The World Happiness Report shows it diverging from the rest of the world............

[Buzz Sawyer]

(1) from article: 

(2)  the World Happiness report is at link below:

https://www.worldhappiness.report/

the executive summary of the report is at link below:

https://www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2026/executive-summary-happiness-and-social-media/

country ranking info is at link below:

https://data.worldhappiness.report/table?_gl=1*11wz4vq*_gcl_au*MTgwMzI5MjA2LjE3NzYwNDM3NDk.

the table of contents is below:

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2026/03/19/the-anglosphere-is-increasingly-miserable

The Anglosphere is increasingly miserable

The World Happiness Report shows it diverging from the rest of the world

Mar 19th 2026

AFINNISH PROVERB says that talking is silver but silence is golden. A country that prizes solitude might seem an unlikely home for the world’s happiest people. Yet on March 19th Finland topped the World Happiness Report, an annual UN-backed study—its ninth consecutive win. Other usual suspects cluster near the top; the bigger upset is down the ranking.

The report draws on surveys by Gallup, a pollster, asking people to rate their lives out of ten. By that measure, nearly twice as many countries have grown happier over the past two decades as have become less so. The English-speaking world is a clear exception: for the second year running, no country in the Anglosphere made the top ten.

Why so glum? The divergence is starkest among the young. In most other parts of the world young people are at least as satisfied with their lives as they were a decade ago, if not more so. But among under-25s in America, Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand, scores have fallen—placing all six among the biggest declines for this age group.

Many researchers blame social media: young people’s satisfaction began to slide in the early 2010s, as smartphones and social platforms spread. But the relationship is not straightforward. Social media are widespread everywhere. Countries in Latin America, for example, combine heavy social-media use with surprisingly high levels of cheeriness. Surveys from the region show that platforms built for communication, such as WhatsApp, are associated with higher life satisfaction than algorithm-driven feeds, such as TikTok and X. But teenagers in the Anglosphere use a similar mix of platforms and still fare worse overall. Many parents would happily ban social media for their children. It is less clear that it would make their children less grumpy.