According to a new survey from the Public Health Institute of Iceland,
Icelanders are just as happy now as they were before the financial
crisis.
The institute conducted the last three iterations of the survey in October 2008, January and June. The banks collapsed last fall, anti-government protests were at their peak last January, so one would expect a significant drop in happiness at these points.
However, the survey – which contacted 1,200 Icelanders aged 18 to 80, of whom 60% took part – showed quite different results.
Dóra Guðrún Guðmundsdóttir, director of the institute, told Morgunblaðið that “on a scale of 1 to 10, the average level of happiness among Icelanders from the previous three surveys is 7.8, and the overall average is 8, while the European average measured in 2003 is 7.2. We are not all beaten down, and still quite higher than the European average.”