Joe Bennett: Why Finland continues to top the international Happiness Index

Joe Bennett says in Finland speeding fines are determined by the "heft of your wallet". Photo / 123rf

OPINION

Some months ago, as you no doubt recall, the United Nations published its annual World Happiness Index and for the fifth time in a row, Finland came top, closely followed by the rest of Scandinavia. And I, too, was puzzled. What happened to Nordic noir?

Well, last night I gleaned a nugget of information that I think may explain it. I did the gleaning in that central sorting house of human knowledge, the place where all information comes to be weighed and aggregated and sifted until it beds down into a sort of intellectual compost out of which can sprout that beautiful bloom we know as the truth, with that place being, as you have already guessed, the pub. There is no finer institution on God's earth.

When aged not very much, I sat outside the Eight Bells in Jevington after my father had played cricket, the door would open from time to time to emit light and smoke and great gusts of adult laughter, and it seemed to me then that here was a place worth growing up for, and when I finally came to man's estate I found that I'd been right.

What you learn in pubs is the primacy of the present tense and the pleasure of company and the importance of disinhibition. For who has not woken after a night at the pub and cringed within seconds of waking at the memory of having said such and such to so and so? And what makes our innards shrivel with the horror of it, is that what we said was true.

Where else does that happen? It happens nowhere else. A good pub is a temple of honesty. Though I like the booze too.

Anyway, it was in the pub last night that I learned a possible explanation of Finnish merriment. It lies in the way they treat rich people.

Rich people are a problem that refuses to go away. Look at Putin's pals with their yachts the size of Panama. Look at Trump's pals with their teeth and hair and staggering ignorance. Look at the vile American billionaire - a Trumpist, naturally - who has bought New Zealand citizenship and now wants to pervert the landscape of Wanaka to suit his ego. Look at the unlamentedly dead Epstein. Vile creatures are the lot of them and a pleasure to loathe.

Worse, they stay rich. The world keeps generating wealth and they make sure more and more of it sticks to their hands. They don't need it. They just can't help themselves. It's the biggest problem of even democratic capitalism. It creates a plutocracy who are very keen to keep things the way they are and have the money needed to make it happen. They buy everything they can, from political parties to judges. And gradually, the gulch between the rich and poor within a single country grows so wide they can no longer even see or call to each other. It is not good.

A revolution is one solution, but every revolution soon reverts to the status quo with a new and more ruthless array of rich bastards. Is there another way? Well, it seems that the Finns may be on to something.

Now for two reasons I have not actually checked that the Finns have put this programme into practice. The first is that I heard it in the pub so it is true by definition. The second is that if by some chance it isn't true, it's only because the Finns haven't thought of it yet and as soon as this column finds its way there, as it so surely will, they'll instigate the programme on the spot. So if this isn't truth you're reading, it's prophecy. It has to do with speeding fines.

We all speed. Once every few hundred times we're caught and fined. Here the fine you pay is dictated by the gravity of your offending. In Finland, it's dictated by the heft of your wallet. The rich pay more than the poor in proportion to the difference in wealth between them, and thus the fine for each is equally punitive. It's called fairness.

The splendid consequence is that when Pauper the Finn challenges his Russian mate Olly Gark to a drag race down the main street of Helsinki late on a Saturday night, and the police, having been tipped off by conscientious citizens, swoop and arrest them both, P the F gets a fine of a few euro while the loaded Gark is required to fund the building of an entirely new road system. No wonder the Finns grin.