This blog has taken a hiatus during some medical treatment and a move to a new home outside Copenhagen. It seemed like an opportune time to migrate also from Blogger to my own online home. Before the break, the blog was serving mainly status reports on Covid-19 in Denmark and the measures undertaken to combat it. That topic is no longer so urgent as the world has moved on to a new crisis. The pandemic situation in Denmark is still noteworthy—it was one of the first countries to remove all restrictions—but there’s no need for detailed coverage.

Copenhagen, Denmark

The blog will continue under the same title as before, The Happiest People. It began in 2016, after Denmark had ranked at the top of the international happiness surveys for a few years and Bernie Sanders was urging America to emulate its “democratic socialism.” The original purpose was to explore the nature and meaning of this relative “happiness” or life satisfaction, particularly in ways that illuminated contrasts between Danish and American societies.

Denmark has since been overtaken in the annual rankings, most often by neighboring Finland, but that in itself doesn’t diminish the value of the inquiry. The Nordic countries have always dominated these surveys, and the differences in their scores often fall within the statistical margin of error. I have used Denmark as representative of northern European social democracy because that’s where I happen to live; it could just as well have been Norway or the Netherlands. There’s still plenty that America could learn from European society, culture, and politics, although it appears less and less likely to do so in the near future.

As I resume the blog now, in April 2022, I expect to continue to write mainly about Denmark and regional current affairs. But I also want to explore other topics of interest, not necessarily from the perspective of happiness. “The Happiest People” will thus become one category of posts among others. At present, everyone’s attention is fixated on Ukraine, and whatever the war’s outcome, it will have profound consequences for Europe altogether and also for Europe’s relation to the United States.