Playing with this OECD data, I noticed it was difficult to find a weighting of national outcomes that didn’t consistently spit out the same six countries, especially if ‘life satisfaction’ was included:

• Finland (FI)
• Iceland (IS)
• Switzerland (CH)
• Norway (NO)
• Netherlands (NL)
• Denmark (DK)

My naive geographic and climatic mental model has these places in the “unreasonably cold” category. So I wondered what a more specific mapping to familiar places would look like, as this would better help me appreciate how strange the combination of smiling folks in shivery latitudes.

A few minutes with this tool yielded the following map:

Having lived nearly 10 years within an hour’s drive of several of these cities, this confirmed the suspicion that these climates are incompatible with my personal definition of well-being.

Of the six, the Netherlands appears unique in having a (confusing) relationship with territories in habitable parts of the planet:

So do the folks here have the best of both worlds? Or are snotsicles strictly necessary for population well-being? It turns out pulling comparable life satisfaction data for these territories was more work than I was willing to put in. But the single data point within easy reach seems promising: