March 25, 2024 • 37 mins
There are certain nations which always top the rankings in the World Happiness Report. What are they doing right, that other countries are getting wrong? And what can you do to make your home country happier?
John Helliwell of the World Happiness Report explains how things like wealth, freedom and friendship combine to make a happy society - and how tiny changes in your home, neighborhood or workplace can have a huge national impact.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. I hope you enjoyed our special episode celebrating the
International Day of Happiness and the release of the World
Happiness Report on March twentieth. In case you missed it,
I asked several of my fellow Pushkin podcast hosts to
pretend that they were an author on this year's World
(00:37):
Happiness Report. I asked each of them, what chapter would
you write? Okay, well, this one's really easy for me.
Mental chatter.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Oh yeah, I was objecting to the phrase it's the journey,
not the destination.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
The journey and the destination. It's the journey and the destination.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yes, I'll buy that.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Well. The World Happiness Report twenty twenty four is now
finally out, so over the next few episodes, I'll be
talking to the report's real authors about the issues they
think are most pressing for the planet's well being. Unfortunately,
many people never get a chance to learn about the
full contents of the annual report because the headlines often
focus on just one attention grabbing part, the annual country
(01:16):
rankings of happiness around the world, which does kind of
make sense. I mean, we all want to know how's
my country doing. So in this episode, I'll start by
diving into those rankings to find out what they do
and don't tell us about how to live happier lives.
And I have the perfect guide.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Hi am John Halliwell at the University of British Columbia
and the Vancouver School of Economics.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
John knows all there is to know about the infamous
country rankings because he was there at the founding of
the first World Happiness Report.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
I've been in there right from the.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Beginning, starting more than a decade ago. The International Day
of Happiness and its accompanying report. We're an attempt by
the United Nations to get governments to take the happiness
of people around the world more seriously and to enact
policies that would improve our wellbeing. And the United Nations
quickly realized that ranking country level well being was a
big thing. But how does it work well? The rankings
(02:09):
are compiled from data gathered by the polling company Gallop,
which asks people around the world the same set of
questions in a huge survey known as the Gallup World Pole,
which is given to around one thousand people in each country.
The happiness ratings come from people's responses to a metric
known as life evaluation, or the chantral ladder. People are
asked to rate their current life as a whole, using
(02:31):
the metaphor of a ladder, in which the best possible
life would be a ten all the way at the
top of the ladder, and the worst possible life would
be a zero down at the bottom. Everyone's ratings are
then average together into country level happiness scores, and to
make sure small fluctuations don't sway their rankings, the scientists
use a three year average for each country. But the
report doesn't just measure people's life evaluations. People in each
(02:54):
country are also asked about their emotions. They report on
the positive feelings they've experienced specifically laughter, enjoyment, and interest,
as well as the not so positive ones worry, sadness,
and anger. And the gallup world pole doesn't stop there.
It also includes a set of other questions that help
researchers explain why countries differ in their overall well being,
(03:16):
and this year, researchers have discovered that six of those
other questions seem to matter a lot. What's factor number one?
It's a country's wealth as measured by their GDP that
is the total value of goods and services produced in
one year, divided by the total population. What's factor number two,
it's a citizen's average life expectancy. This one takes into
(03:37):
account how the nation's health plays into its happiness. The
third and fourth variables involve people's ability to act freely
without government intervention or corruption. Those questions are are you
satisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with
your life? And is corruption widespread throughout the government or businesses.
The fifth and six factors have to do with people's
(03:57):
social connection and generosity. People are asked if you were
in trouble, do you have friends or relatives you could
count on to help you? And also things like have
you donated money to a charity in the past month.
These days, the World Happiness Reports country rankings are a
big annual event, But when the report first started, Jonatus
Co authors had no idea it would have such a
(04:18):
huge impact.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
We were surprised that the first report got as much
public attention as it did to us. It spoke to
a need for a broadly available set of data reflecting
the quality of lives all over the world. There was
nothing like that regularly available to the media and to
people in general, and so we kept on producing the report.
(04:43):
The interest was broad and it got broader, so that
in each report we had a bigger take up, and
it was initially people, but I think that then translated
into a broader interest that then encouraged governments to actually
focus on well being, all of which, of course then
(05:05):
requires that you build a public service that's trained in
well being science and knows how to analyze policies to
deliver what's best for better lives.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
My understanding is the rankings have been in there since
the original twenty eleven report.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Correct, there was some disagreement among our three founding editors.
I didn't want to have rankings at all. I said,
that's not the way in which happiness is not a
zero sum game. It's for everybody to improve their happiness.
It doesn't matter whether they're happier or not than their neighbors.
So we didn't even put in numbers, but I had
(05:41):
to go down with my finger and count out because
people wanted to know what number they were in the list.
So in the next one we put in the numbers,
and the numbers have been there ever since. We use
the rankings as a way because quite clearly it's a
primary point attention for people. They want to know how
their country does and how that does in comparison with
(06:03):
other countries whom they think of as their peers. The
rankings may be what brings the area clicks, but our
purpose is not to stop there, not even to emphasize those,
but to dig deeper into what makes for better lives
so that people can do more about their own lives
and the lives of those around them and help move
(06:25):
the arrow.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
This is why I'm so excited that you've taken the
time to talk to us today, because I feel like
sometimes when I see the news coverage of the World
Happiness Report, it's just like, this is the country that's
number one, and then it ends there. But I think
as we dig deeper and try to understand where those
rankings come from and what we can do differently, that's
the part that's going to matter so much more.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
I agree.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
And so before we kind of jump into the rankings
this year, I wanted to talk about what goes into
the measurements that make up the World Happiness Report. So
where do these data come from, and when we're talking
about happier countries, what are the specific measurements that are
going into that.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
It's an important question to talk about because we keep
emphasizing to people this is not our opinions that they're hearing,
it's their own opinions, because what we report are the
average value of the answers to a single question how
people evaluate their lives on a scale of zero to ten.
(07:22):
And those rankings don't tell you anything, of course, they
just tell you the state of play within a country.
And then the next interesting question, which we started answering
in more detail, was why are these countries different? And
some people treat our explanations as the primary measure, and
we keep trying to remind them that what we're presenting
(07:43):
as not our expertise, but simply telling them what people
in their countries have said.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
What are the questions that people are answering in these surveys.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Well, when I entered this field more than twenty five
years ago, I thought of myself as Aristotle's research assistant,
because he had said millennia ago that if you want
to find out what makes for a good life, you
ask people in a reflective moment to think about their
life as a whole. Then he listed a lot of
factors that ought to underlie that, including living a good
(08:15):
and virtuous life, and he said Aristotle that positive emotions,
laughter and fun were a part of that. So the
emotions are important. Nobody thinks not did you feel anger, stress,
worry yesterday? And did you feel positive emotions yesterday? Yes
(08:36):
or no. But some people think, because the World Happiness
Support is called the World Happiness Report, that it's all
about affective measures or emotional measures or short term measures
of people's well being, and or answer to the people
who say this is all about short term moods and
it isn't a serious business, it's all fluff, by reminding
(08:58):
people that are two ways of using the word happiness.
One is as an emotion, how happy were you yesterday?
And the other is how happy are you about something?
That could be the baggage retrieval system they have at Heathrow,
or it could be anything. But the point is it
doesn't require the emotion of happiness. It's saying how satisfied
(09:19):
are you with that? And so the judgmental use of
the word happiness is our main focus in the report.
We also include, of course, the affect of measure and
people sometimes and rightly so, get confused about these two
different uses of the word, because we use the word
both ways ourselves. But for us, it's these overall life
(09:41):
evaluations that are of fundamental importance.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
And so now that we've gotten the history of the
report out of the way, let's get to the thing
that I think is on everybody's mind, which is, you know,
who's the highest right country this year? Who are you
seeing coming out in the newest data as the highest
on the list?
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Because the rankings are based on a three year average,
and Finland was pretty well ahead of the average last year,
it's no surprise that Finland is in number one again.
What's interesting to see is how this plays out in Finland.
Frequently the Finns say we're not the happiest country in
the world, and what they're thinking of, in part is
(10:18):
the other version of happiness that they don't see, all
the laughter in the streets that they're used to thinking
of as happiness. But then you ask them, how is
life in Finland? Tell us about it? Where are the
things you enjoy and what do you value about it?
It turns out they end up seeing the importance of trust,
of warm social relations, of caring about each other. They're
(10:40):
not surprised to hear that when wallets were experimentally dropped,
the highest proportion anywhere ten out of ten, was in Helsinki.
And so they see that, they appreciate it, they understand
that it's maybe not that way elsewhere. They don't boast
about it. That's another feature of the Finns. Some of
(11:01):
the Finnish researchers say that above the other Nordic countries,
even though the other Nordic countries are richer and more
outfront than some other ways, is that they don't take
themselves so seriously. They don't rank themselves with each other
as much. They're less materialistic and more concerned with each other,
and that's quietly okay with them. I would have to
(11:23):
say that a country that boasted about its high position
is probably not likely to sustain it long because that's
not the point. And when Denmark was highest, they didn't
boast about it, but they set about trying to learn
the lessons from the science of happiness and spread them
not just in Denmark but in other countries. And that's
(11:43):
a classic Nordic way, and it's one of the reasons
why the five Nordic countries are always in the top ten,
that they are also among the world leaders in untied
foreign aid, in the receipt of refugees, of leading the
international movements to spread well being around the world. Those
all hang together and they make a consistent package.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
So that's thing number one about the report that's kind
of not very surprising. Finland's at the top yet again,
and they're up there with all these other Scandinavian countries.
Something else that's occurred in other happiness reports in the
past is that there's big gaps between the top of
the list and the bottom. Is that something that you
also saw in the most recent report.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
The gap, if anything, has become a little wider, And
that's I guess because Afghanistan is dropping further and further
still having been last for several years, it's now further
behind the rest.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
One of the surprises that I saw in the report
was that there are a few countries that kind of
you jumped up much higher than they'd been historically, and
a few other countries that had fallen down. And so
let's talk about some of the countries that jumped up.
Any big kind of like surprises in terms of who
got much higher in terms of their happiness it.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Was nice to see Costa Rica back in the top twenty.
They were in the position twelve in twenty thirteen. Here
they are back because they're a very good example. They're
always the happiest country in Latin America and they touch
bases on all of the six factors we talked about.
Another thing that we highlight this year because we're talking
(13:14):
especially about happiness at different ages, is that we're seeing
a continuation of the gap between Central and Eastern Europe
and Western Europe, which was very big before the Wall
came down. It's been gradually narrowing over that whole period,
and we find this year, especially for the young, so low.
(13:35):
The gap for the old between Central and Eastern Europe
and Western Europe is still about a full point on
the ten point scale. For the young, the gap is gone.
So the young in Central and Eastern Europe are essentially
the same appreciation of their lives as in Western Europe,
and so there's a transition. To see. The overall transition
(13:57):
isn't complete yet, but for the young it is. It's
quite notable the young have become less happy in other
parts of the world, especially in North America.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
So Costa Rica seems to be going up in the rankings,
but you also identified a few countries that seemed to
be going down. Which were those the.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Drops that we know because they were going out of
the top twenty was Germany in the United States United
States just above Germany last year, just above Germany this year.
But what was fifteen and sixteen is now twenty three
and twenty four in both cases, especially the United States,
(14:33):
due to drops in all age groups, but especially in
the young.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
So this is sort of pretty bad for me being
from the United States, thinking that my country is now
no longer in the top twenty. I mean, was this
something that shocked the researchers or is this something that
you all expected to find?
Speaker 2 (14:47):
The underlying trends have been there for a while. It
was not COVID related, So these things essentially are trends
that started before COVID. It's more or less carried on
the same way with only modest changes in balanced during COVID.
But a bit of a surprise because that's quite a
big drop, and it's similar in Canada. They draw among
(15:09):
the young is so substantial. So if you actually look
at the changes between twenty six to twenty ten, first
years of the poll and the most recent three years,
Canada and the United States have been among the biggest
drops over that whole period. It's not just one year,
it's over accumulating over that period, because Canada was fourth
(15:31):
and is fifteenth now and the US was eleven and
it's now twenty third. So you can see those are
quite big drops.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
So what's behind the rise and fall of these nations
and the happiness rankings? What are some countries getting right
and others getting wrong? The Happiness Lab will be right back.
One thing that makes the World Happiness Reports so important
(16:00):
is that it doesn't just measure the differences in happiness
of people around the world. It also tries to determine
the factors that lead to those differences in well being,
and John says that this year six factors have emerged
as being important for the differences he and his team
have observed. Those predictive factors are country GDP, life expectancy,
freedom of choice, freedom from corruption, social connection, and how
(16:23):
generous people are. I wanted John to help us better
understand these factors, starting with country wealth. There's an old
saying that money can't buy you happiness. But if that's true,
why does GDP matter so much for a country's happiness ranking.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Aristotle was quite explicit about it. You have to have
the basic stuff to live on, or it's hard to
actually get a chance to enjoy and spread out. If
you add on to that list of questions, not just
the average level of income, but did you have enough
to eat or not have enough to eat at some
time in the last two weeks, the basic survival part
(17:00):
of GDP is very important. So to move people out
of a situation where they can only think about the
ways to get their next meal is extraordinarily important. There's
been a lot of discussion about whether at some stage
the income effect starts to peter out. You get less
bang for the buck as you get richer. Same with education.
(17:22):
Education matters for well being, but if you put in
the other things that support well being, education itself drops out.
In other words, it's a way of allowing people to
provide a good life, and so education without good purpose
doesn't do any good for people. Same with income, But income,
like good health, is kind of fundamental as a building
(17:44):
block for good lives, and everybody knew that before there
was a World Happiness Report, So that if you ask
the development agencies, there anybody else say what are you
after or after GDP per capita healthy life expectancy. But
when we get these data from people, we find out, well,
that's maybe half the story. But the other half of
(18:05):
the story is what is the social context in which
people are living? Is there a high enough level of
trust around them? We use a measure of corruption. There's
a sense of personal freedom. How free are you to
make your key life decisions? Do you have someone to
count on in times of trouble. That's a very limited
measure of the warmth of your social connections, but it
(18:26):
turns out to be very important. And finally, and less
emphasized by Aristotle is a benevolence to what extent and
we use donations net of the effective income, but it's
very apparent that doing things ideally with others for others
is very important. One measure that we have only one
(18:51):
year of so it hasn't got into the basic modeling,
but we find out to be very important is whether
people think their wallet would be returned if they lost.
An actual experiment show that people answer that question. They
understand the relative likelihood of a wallet return looking across
countries and a wallet return is nice because it's not
(19:12):
just honesty, it's also benevolence, because you could be perfectly
trustworthy but still not take the time out of your
life to pick up a wallet and make sure it
got back to the owner. But that's what people do
in these high trust countries and the high ranking countries.
The wallet return is very high in the Nordic countries,
and it's very important. There was a survey we had
(19:34):
that measured what people's risk was of mental health problems,
being a victim of violent crime, or being unemployed, and
the positive effect coming from thinking your wallet would be
returned if found by either a stranger or police, or
especially both was way more important than the negative on
(19:55):
people's life evaluations from those other factors, which are very important.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
One of the things that really seems to matter is
having somebody to count on that particular metric. And interestingly,
if I understand the report right, that seems to be
more important than reporting that you're not lonely. It seems
to be the positive effect of social connection rather than
the negative. One walk through why that's so important for me.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
That's a good point. And there's a new survey that
was done in twenty twenty two the Meta Gallop World
Connection Survey, where they measured on the same scale to
what extent are you connected with other people? To what
extent are you supported by others you're socially supported? And
then to what extent do you feel lonely? On that
(20:39):
same scale, right across the world, feelings of positive social
support were twice as frequent as loneliness. Despite the fact
loneliness and the Surgeon General's report and you name it
is being treated as a major crisis. At least I personally,
and I think most of our analysts would agree, it's
(20:59):
much more important to emphasize the positives than the negatives, because,
in a sense, a supportive social environment not only is
twice as important is the absence of loneliness, it cuts
loneliness because of course, the best cure for loneliness is
a vaccine, and the best vaccine is a friend. And
so it's these positive things that should get the emphasis.
(21:23):
And that's the way to, as it were, cure loneliness
is not to wait till it happens, but to have
a social environment that is supportive.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
And this seems to mirror something else that you've seen
time again in the report as I understand it, which
is that sometimes these positive behaviors or even the positive
emotions seem to be winning out in terms of these
life evaluation measures over the negative behaviors and the negative emotions.
What are some other examples of this, Well.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
It turns up in lots of different domains that people
do value the chance to do things for other people
and with other people. There were surveys in one report
about how people were happier in green environments and in
less noisy environments than elsewhere, and we had the authors
(22:10):
go back to show who people were with and who
you were with at the time you were doing something
was much more important than what you were doing. So
people were happier commuting with a friend than they were
walking alone in a beautiful environment. Of course, the best
was to be in the green environment with a friend,
but that shows you the dominance of the social context
(22:34):
over other aspects. One issue that came up in Issuear's
report is that the gallop world pole has now been
going on long enough that we have the potential for
splitting out generational effects from age effects. You know, there
is a sort of midlife low that appears in a
lot of the data on an age basis, and so
(22:56):
we have dug into that, but also trying to separate
it from when people were born, and so we split
the population into those born before nineteen sixty five boomers
and their predecessors, those born after nineteen eighty, who were
then the Millennials and Gen Z, and then the intervening
(23:17):
group of Gen X. And then what we did this
is continuing with the benevolence theme. There was a huge
increase in benevolence during the pandemic years compared to twenty
seventeen to twenty nineteen. That boost is still going on now,
right through twenty twenty three. And we asked ourselves, because
(23:40):
this is a big item of discussion, especially in the
United States, whether the Millennials and their successors are the
ME generation, the Wei generation, or just like other generations.
So we were able to look at this boost in
benevolent behavior and then has this boost been the same
for the millennials as it has for the earlier generations.
(24:02):
And first of all, we found that that boost is
everywhere across all generations. In terms of the ME versus
WE generation. We find out that the millennials jumped up
even more than their predecessors to help others when help
was required during those COVID years. So that's a very
(24:23):
encouraging piece of evidence to offset some of the pessimism
that people seem to have about the world falling apart
behind them.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Oh I love that. I love that statistic. One of
the other things I was so interested in in this
report is that you're actually looking at these differences across
age and whether the rankings hold not just for everyone,
but whether they hold as well for young individuals versus
older individuals and so on. And so, you know what,
did you see the rankings pretty consistent across Asia? Do
we see some big differences.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
Huge differences. Canada and the United States, the rankings for
the old are fifty or more ranks higher than for
the young. There are many other countries where the rankings
for the old are forty or more lower than for
the young. So they're huge differences in these rankings across countries,
(25:13):
and in some cases where the young are doing very
well and the old not so well. It's because every
country is different in generational effects and so on. You
look at the older people in countries that are part
of the former Yugoslavia, where they were at each other's
throats literally in the nineteen nineties. The people who were
(25:34):
alive and seeing that as at Ultserce or older children
at that time, are now very unhappy. Still they're bearing
the scars of that. So trauma leaves its scars, and
so that's one of the reasons why the old have
not so quickly followed the young in some of those
countries in their higher well being. However, the young can
(25:57):
rise relative to the old in a newer refashioned world.
Is grounds for some optimism. Although it may not be
completely easy to pull people out and to expunge those
awful memories of the past, it's possible to create new
generations who are less burdened by that and help them
(26:19):
to form their positive connections with their neighbors and with
the world.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
So as we walk through these six factors, you know,
again being from the US, my kind of US centric
version of this report, I'm curious which of those you
think were really going down in the case of the US,
Like over the last few years, what of those six
factors have changed in the US to kind of make
us drop so significantly in the rankings.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Well, my guess is that the social environment within which
people operate. I mean there have been drops in trust.
That's evident. It's not clear whether there have been drops
in social connections or not. There have probably been drops
in the warmth and trustworthiness of those social connections. We
(27:00):
have had chapters on the corrosive effects of the social
media use of certain types on young people. We have
a special chapter in this year's report on young people
per se finding that they're getting less happy once they
get into middle school and carry on right through into
(27:21):
their working careers. And some of that may be just
learning about life, and some of it may be that
the social media on average have not been so productive
of good relations that we know from other research lower
happiness levels. And there's an underlying negativity bias that humans have.
(27:45):
They react more sharply and quickly to negative news. If
you then combine that negativity bias with a huge increase
in the range of information sources that people have, then
they may well be deluged in negative information that drives
them a long way from reality. And we know that
(28:07):
from the wallet data exacs, because we know that it's
expected wallet return that makes you happy. But we also
know that people underestimate the likelihood of their wallet being returned,
which means that negative bias is very costly. So we're
needlessly unhappy because we don't understand that the people around
(28:28):
us are kinder and better than we think they are.
Because to walk down a street, as they do in
Helsinki and see someone on the street not as a danger,
not as a stranger, but a friend they haven't met yet,
and that's very important for your happiness to think you're
in that kind of environment. It's possible that what's going
(28:49):
on in the United States, and this is true in
Canadas too, and also it's got its echoes in Australia
and New Zealand, is that not only are more negative
news there, but the young people are in some sense
feeling guilty about it, whether it's the past treatments of minorities,
of pre colonial populations, treatment of the environment, any range
(29:14):
of issues. They're feeling that they're either the victims of
what others have done before them, or are carrying collectively
as a group, the guilt for producing these things. And
I suspect that's because those drops in the young people's
happiness are not global. They're fixed to the societies in
which the social media have been more dominant, which the
(29:38):
distribution of negative stories about the past and lack of
positive stories about the potential future have been more prevalent.
But my instinct is that those two things belong in
the same bag that in fact, it is this confluence
of based negative reporting and biased in the sense of
(29:58):
not reflecting the reality in which people are living, coupled
with people feeling that things are going badly in ways
that they don't see any easy way of fixing. We
know that natural disasters, although they're terrible, they offer immediately
for most people the chance to do something to help.
(30:19):
They rush in and help. People do want to help others,
But for some of these things that people are worrying
about now, they don't see any easy way of jumping
in and making a difference. And it's part of the
research that we report on in the world. Happiness support
is to help expose to people that the quality of
(30:40):
their own local social environment, which is so important, is
affected by their own behavior. So they should be going
out with a smile and a greeting and to help
other people and not presume the worst about them, but
in fact connect with them. For mutual advantage. Sometimes it
takes a little bit of a push to get people
to think in those positive terms, but there's a big payoff.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
And so as I think about kind of some of
these factors kind of playing in together, if you were
going to create the sort of ideal country, right, you know,
kind of cherry picking bits that one country is doing
and kind of adding it to another country, what would
that kind of like ideal country look like like? What
would it really build into boost happiness as highly as possible.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
That's a good one. One of the things we found
is that of those six factors we do measure, the
top countries all do well in all of them. You
can't do it on one thing. You can only do
it by having a full tapestry. I think the way
it could play out, you see, you don't want to
have an idea that there's a recipe for being a
really happy country. There are many recipes, but what has
(31:45):
to be true about a really happy country is that
people really do care about each other. They're characterized by equality,
and the equality that's really important is the equality of opportunity,
the equality of regard, the equality of acceptance, the equality
of access to basic services, We talked earlier about the
(32:07):
importance of income, but as important as the kind of
things you can buy with your own income, it's the
kind of things we provide for each other by way
of education, access, education, quality, healthcare, access, peace and freedom,
and a trustworthy local social environment. And some of that
(32:28):
can be fixed up by the neighbors and improved by
the neighbors. Some of it requires an add on of
national level institutions that permit people to connect rather than
be unconnected. If you wanted me to focus on something
that could be fixed in almost every country to make
(32:49):
it a better country is that over the last twenty years,
there's been a move driven by complaints of something going wrong,
somebody being molested, somebody being shot, and those things that
go wrong are what are reported in the news. So
then almost every organization now has a risk committee, and
(33:11):
the risk committee is designed to stop things going wrong.
And so they shut the kids off in schools with
locked doors, they shut people in elder care facilities behind
locked doors, and in the process, and this is true
of almost all experiments that are trying to make lives better,
that it's increasingly hard even to do the experiments we've
(33:34):
been running experiments mixing young children running a year of
their grade six education in the middle of a care
facility in Saskatoon, which breaks all the rules. You see,
the modern risk aversion culture doesn't make that possible. So
it takes a great deal of innovation and work even
to start an experiment like that. Well, once you see
(33:56):
those experiments in action, as we've done, even through COVID,
they've enriched the lives of the children, and clearly for
the elders who have a chance to pass on their
wisdom as well as echo the laughs of the children.
It gives them a reason for living, not what otherwise
might be on what they would see on their screens,
reasons for dying. So to open doors for connection rather
(34:20):
than closed doors for presumed safety is absolutely fundamental, and
I'm afraid in most institutions, in most countries, even the
top countries, it's going in the wrong direction. So the
risk prevention culture has to be entirely rethought because what
the world needs is more open doors, not more closed doors.
(34:44):
And so we have to permit people to meet un
till they meet and till they greet, until they learn
to trust. They won't learn common cause they won't turn
the me versus you into the bigger we and the US,
and that's what's critical in any successful society. So that's
something I think that is an agenda item for countries,
(35:06):
even if they're pretty well now in the rankings, that
they could be doing a better job at making sure
these connection doors are open and cherished.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
I love this. It fits so much with some of
the work that we've talked about on the show with
Robert Putnam and others about the kind of importance of
building these opportunities for building more of the social capital too.
So I think sometimes when people see these rankings, especially
if you're from a country that's pretty low on the list,
it can feel, you know, kind of like a hit.
You know, it can feel a little depressing. Are there
things that countries that are lower on the list can
(35:37):
do to maybe boost their rankings? You know? Should you
feel so pessimistic?
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Absolutely, some people say because they immigrants in Finland are
the happiest immigrants in the world, then everybody should move
to Helsinki. That's absolutely what it's not about in a way,
and sort of forget your ranking, but learn from the
report what makes for a good life, and so much
of it is so local, starting with your family, your friends,
(36:02):
your colleagues at work and school. You can change your
life in important ways, but the really important thing is
to change other people's lives. So if you reach out
to help others, that'll help you as well. But the
ripples of that, this spillover effects of positive actions, of
positive connections are very strong. If anything, they're stronger than
(36:24):
the negative ones. That's to be cherished. What that means
is everybody's got the option, both collectively as a country
and a government, but also individually, and so for people
who are pessimistic, they can't immediately turn around their main
government policies, but they can turn around their neighborhoods. They
can turn around what's going on in their workplace. They
(36:48):
can turn around what's going on in their school by thinking,
not complaining, not by making making angry demonstrations about something,
but by building common costs to find better ways of
doing things. So it's not about fighting, it's not about
demanding your rights. It's about working together with the others
you're living with in order to ver something better. And
(37:10):
that's always an option. We see it after natural disasters.
Why can't we see it after other less damaging but
perhaps more corrosive things.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
What a great message of hope to end on. No
matter where your country is on the World Happiness Report rankings,
you can still do something in your home, or on
your street, or in your workplace to help move your
fellow citizens up the happiness chart. John and I have
already talked about the generational splits his team has observed
in country level rankings, but this year's report devotes a
lot of time to age differences in happiness. In fact,
(37:43):
there are whole chapters on well being trends in the
young and the old this year, and so those are
the two challenges we'll be tackling next in this special
season about the World Happiness Report on the Happiness Lab
with me Doctor Lauriy Santos
Pushkin. I hope you enjoyed our special episode celebrating the
International Day of Happiness and the release of the World
Happiness Report on March twentieth. In case you missed it,
I asked several of my fellow Pushkin podcast hosts to
pretend that they were an author on this year's World
(00:37):
Happiness Report. I asked each of them, what chapter would
you write? Okay, well, this one's really easy for me.
Mental chatter.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Oh yeah, I was objecting to the phrase it's the journey,
not the destination.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
The journey and the destination. It's the journey and the destination.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yes, I'll buy that.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Well. The World Happiness Report twenty twenty four is now
finally out, so over the next few episodes, I'll be
talking to the report's real authors about the issues they
think are most pressing for the planet's well being. Unfortunately,
many people never get a chance to learn about the
full contents of the annual report because the headlines often
focus on just one attention grabbing part, the annual country
(01:16):
rankings of happiness around the world, which does kind of
make sense. I mean, we all want to know how's
my country doing. So in this episode, I'll start by
diving into those rankings to find out what they do
and don't tell us about how to live happier lives.
And I have the perfect guide.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Hi am John Halliwell at the University of British Columbia
and the Vancouver School of Economics.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
John knows all there is to know about the infamous
country rankings because he was there at the founding of
the first World Happiness Report.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
I've been in there right from the.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Beginning, starting more than a decade ago. The International Day
of Happiness and its accompanying report. We're an attempt by
the United Nations to get governments to take the happiness
of people around the world more seriously and to enact
policies that would improve our wellbeing. And the United Nations
quickly realized that ranking country level well being was a
big thing. But how does it work well? The rankings
(02:09):
are compiled from data gathered by the polling company Gallop,
which asks people around the world the same set of
questions in a huge survey known as the Gallup World Pole,
which is given to around one thousand people in each country.
The happiness ratings come from people's responses to a metric
known as life evaluation, or the chantral ladder. People are
asked to rate their current life as a whole, using
(02:31):
the metaphor of a ladder, in which the best possible
life would be a ten all the way at the
top of the ladder, and the worst possible life would
be a zero down at the bottom. Everyone's ratings are
then average together into country level happiness scores, and to
make sure small fluctuations don't sway their rankings, the scientists
use a three year average for each country. But the
report doesn't just measure people's life evaluations. People in each
(02:54):
country are also asked about their emotions. They report on
the positive feelings they've experienced specifically laughter, enjoyment, and interest,
as well as the not so positive ones worry, sadness,
and anger. And the gallup world pole doesn't stop there.
It also includes a set of other questions that help
researchers explain why countries differ in their overall well being,
(03:16):
and this year, researchers have discovered that six of those
other questions seem to matter a lot. What's factor number one?
It's a country's wealth as measured by their GDP that
is the total value of goods and services produced in
one year, divided by the total population. What's factor number two,
it's a citizen's average life expectancy. This one takes into
(03:37):
account how the nation's health plays into its happiness. The
third and fourth variables involve people's ability to act freely
without government intervention or corruption. Those questions are are you
satisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with
your life? And is corruption widespread throughout the government or businesses.
The fifth and six factors have to do with people's
(03:57):
social connection and generosity. People are asked if you were
in trouble, do you have friends or relatives you could
count on to help you? And also things like have
you donated money to a charity in the past month.
These days, the World Happiness Reports country rankings are a
big annual event, But when the report first started, Jonatus
Co authors had no idea it would have such a
(04:18):
huge impact.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
We were surprised that the first report got as much
public attention as it did to us. It spoke to
a need for a broadly available set of data reflecting
the quality of lives all over the world. There was
nothing like that regularly available to the media and to
people in general, and so we kept on producing the report.
(04:43):
The interest was broad and it got broader, so that
in each report we had a bigger take up, and
it was initially people, but I think that then translated
into a broader interest that then encouraged governments to actually
focus on well being, all of which, of course then
(05:05):
requires that you build a public service that's trained in
well being science and knows how to analyze policies to
deliver what's best for better lives.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
My understanding is the rankings have been in there since
the original twenty eleven report.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Correct, there was some disagreement among our three founding editors.
I didn't want to have rankings at all. I said,
that's not the way in which happiness is not a
zero sum game. It's for everybody to improve their happiness.
It doesn't matter whether they're happier or not than their neighbors.
So we didn't even put in numbers, but I had
(05:41):
to go down with my finger and count out because
people wanted to know what number they were in the list.
So in the next one we put in the numbers,
and the numbers have been there ever since. We use
the rankings as a way because quite clearly it's a
primary point attention for people. They want to know how
their country does and how that does in comparison with
(06:03):
other countries whom they think of as their peers. The
rankings may be what brings the area clicks, but our
purpose is not to stop there, not even to emphasize those,
but to dig deeper into what makes for better lives
so that people can do more about their own lives
and the lives of those around them and help move
(06:25):
the arrow.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
This is why I'm so excited that you've taken the
time to talk to us today, because I feel like
sometimes when I see the news coverage of the World
Happiness Report, it's just like, this is the country that's
number one, and then it ends there. But I think
as we dig deeper and try to understand where those
rankings come from and what we can do differently, that's
the part that's going to matter so much more.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
I agree.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
And so before we kind of jump into the rankings
this year, I wanted to talk about what goes into
the measurements that make up the World Happiness Report. So
where do these data come from, and when we're talking
about happier countries, what are the specific measurements that are
going into that.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
It's an important question to talk about because we keep
emphasizing to people this is not our opinions that they're hearing,
it's their own opinions, because what we report are the
average value of the answers to a single question how
people evaluate their lives on a scale of zero to ten.
(07:22):
And those rankings don't tell you anything, of course, they
just tell you the state of play within a country.
And then the next interesting question, which we started answering
in more detail, was why are these countries different? And
some people treat our explanations as the primary measure, and
we keep trying to remind them that what we're presenting
(07:43):
as not our expertise, but simply telling them what people
in their countries have said.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
What are the questions that people are answering in these surveys.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
Well, when I entered this field more than twenty five
years ago, I thought of myself as Aristotle's research assistant,
because he had said millennia ago that if you want
to find out what makes for a good life, you
ask people in a reflective moment to think about their
life as a whole. Then he listed a lot of
factors that ought to underlie that, including living a good
(08:15):
and virtuous life, and he said Aristotle that positive emotions,
laughter and fun were a part of that. So the
emotions are important. Nobody thinks not did you feel anger, stress,
worry yesterday? And did you feel positive emotions yesterday? Yes
(08:36):
or no. But some people think, because the World Happiness
Support is called the World Happiness Report, that it's all
about affective measures or emotional measures or short term measures
of people's well being, and or answer to the people
who say this is all about short term moods and
it isn't a serious business, it's all fluff, by reminding
(08:58):
people that are two ways of using the word happiness.
One is as an emotion, how happy were you yesterday?
And the other is how happy are you about something?
That could be the baggage retrieval system they have at Heathrow,
or it could be anything. But the point is it
doesn't require the emotion of happiness. It's saying how satisfied
(09:19):
are you with that? And so the judgmental use of
the word happiness is our main focus in the report.
We also include, of course, the affect of measure and
people sometimes and rightly so, get confused about these two
different uses of the word, because we use the word
both ways ourselves. But for us, it's these overall life
(09:41):
evaluations that are of fundamental importance.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
And so now that we've gotten the history of the
report out of the way, let's get to the thing
that I think is on everybody's mind, which is, you know,
who's the highest right country this year? Who are you
seeing coming out in the newest data as the highest
on the list?
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Because the rankings are based on a three year average,
and Finland was pretty well ahead of the average last year,
it's no surprise that Finland is in number one again.
What's interesting to see is how this plays out in Finland.
Frequently the Finns say we're not the happiest country in
the world, and what they're thinking of, in part is
(10:18):
the other version of happiness that they don't see, all
the laughter in the streets that they're used to thinking
of as happiness. But then you ask them, how is
life in Finland? Tell us about it? Where are the
things you enjoy and what do you value about it?
It turns out they end up seeing the importance of trust,
of warm social relations, of caring about each other. They're
(10:40):
not surprised to hear that when wallets were experimentally dropped,
the highest proportion anywhere ten out of ten, was in Helsinki.
And so they see that, they appreciate it, they understand
that it's maybe not that way elsewhere. They don't boast
about it. That's another feature of the Finns. Some of
(11:01):
the Finnish researchers say that above the other Nordic countries,
even though the other Nordic countries are richer and more
outfront than some other ways, is that they don't take
themselves so seriously. They don't rank themselves with each other
as much. They're less materialistic and more concerned with each other,
and that's quietly okay with them. I would have to
(11:23):
say that a country that boasted about its high position
is probably not likely to sustain it long because that's
not the point. And when Denmark was highest, they didn't
boast about it, but they set about trying to learn
the lessons from the science of happiness and spread them
not just in Denmark but in other countries. And that's
(11:43):
a classic Nordic way, and it's one of the reasons
why the five Nordic countries are always in the top ten,
that they are also among the world leaders in untied
foreign aid, in the receipt of refugees, of leading the
international movements to spread well being around the world. Those
all hang together and they make a consistent package.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
So that's thing number one about the report that's kind
of not very surprising. Finland's at the top yet again,
and they're up there with all these other Scandinavian countries.
Something else that's occurred in other happiness reports in the
past is that there's big gaps between the top of
the list and the bottom. Is that something that you
also saw in the most recent report.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
The gap, if anything, has become a little wider, And
that's I guess because Afghanistan is dropping further and further
still having been last for several years, it's now further
behind the rest.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
One of the surprises that I saw in the report
was that there are a few countries that kind of
you jumped up much higher than they'd been historically, and
a few other countries that had fallen down. And so
let's talk about some of the countries that jumped up.
Any big kind of like surprises in terms of who
got much higher in terms of their happiness it.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Was nice to see Costa Rica back in the top twenty.
They were in the position twelve in twenty thirteen. Here
they are back because they're a very good example. They're
always the happiest country in Latin America and they touch
bases on all of the six factors we talked about.
Another thing that we highlight this year because we're talking
(13:14):
especially about happiness at different ages, is that we're seeing
a continuation of the gap between Central and Eastern Europe
and Western Europe, which was very big before the Wall
came down. It's been gradually narrowing over that whole period,
and we find this year, especially for the young, so low.
(13:35):
The gap for the old between Central and Eastern Europe
and Western Europe is still about a full point on
the ten point scale. For the young, the gap is gone.
So the young in Central and Eastern Europe are essentially
the same appreciation of their lives as in Western Europe,
and so there's a transition. To see. The overall transition
(13:57):
isn't complete yet, but for the young it is. It's
quite notable the young have become less happy in other
parts of the world, especially in North America.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
So Costa Rica seems to be going up in the rankings,
but you also identified a few countries that seemed to
be going down. Which were those the.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Drops that we know because they were going out of
the top twenty was Germany in the United States United
States just above Germany last year, just above Germany this year.
But what was fifteen and sixteen is now twenty three
and twenty four in both cases, especially the United States,
(14:33):
due to drops in all age groups, but especially in
the young.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
So this is sort of pretty bad for me being
from the United States, thinking that my country is now
no longer in the top twenty. I mean, was this
something that shocked the researchers or is this something that
you all expected to find?
Speaker 2 (14:47):
The underlying trends have been there for a while. It
was not COVID related, So these things essentially are trends
that started before COVID. It's more or less carried on
the same way with only modest changes in balanced during COVID.
But a bit of a surprise because that's quite a
big drop, and it's similar in Canada. They draw among
(15:09):
the young is so substantial. So if you actually look
at the changes between twenty six to twenty ten, first
years of the poll and the most recent three years,
Canada and the United States have been among the biggest
drops over that whole period. It's not just one year,
it's over accumulating over that period, because Canada was fourth
(15:31):
and is fifteenth now and the US was eleven and
it's now twenty third. So you can see those are
quite big drops.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
So what's behind the rise and fall of these nations
and the happiness rankings? What are some countries getting right
and others getting wrong? The Happiness Lab will be right back.
One thing that makes the World Happiness Reports so important
(16:00):
is that it doesn't just measure the differences in happiness
of people around the world. It also tries to determine
the factors that lead to those differences in well being,
and John says that this year six factors have emerged
as being important for the differences he and his team
have observed. Those predictive factors are country GDP, life expectancy,
freedom of choice, freedom from corruption, social connection, and how
(16:23):
generous people are. I wanted John to help us better
understand these factors, starting with country wealth. There's an old
saying that money can't buy you happiness. But if that's true,
why does GDP matter so much for a country's happiness ranking.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Aristotle was quite explicit about it. You have to have
the basic stuff to live on, or it's hard to
actually get a chance to enjoy and spread out. If
you add on to that list of questions, not just
the average level of income, but did you have enough
to eat or not have enough to eat at some
time in the last two weeks, the basic survival part
(17:00):
of GDP is very important. So to move people out
of a situation where they can only think about the
ways to get their next meal is extraordinarily important. There's
been a lot of discussion about whether at some stage
the income effect starts to peter out. You get less
bang for the buck as you get richer. Same with education.
(17:22):
Education matters for well being, but if you put in
the other things that support well being, education itself drops out.
In other words, it's a way of allowing people to
provide a good life, and so education without good purpose
doesn't do any good for people. Same with income, But income,
like good health, is kind of fundamental as a building
(17:44):
block for good lives, and everybody knew that before there
was a World Happiness Report, So that if you ask
the development agencies, there anybody else say what are you
after or after GDP per capita healthy life expectancy. But
when we get these data from people, we find out, well,
that's maybe half the story. But the other half of
(18:05):
the story is what is the social context in which
people are living? Is there a high enough level of
trust around them? We use a measure of corruption. There's
a sense of personal freedom. How free are you to
make your key life decisions? Do you have someone to
count on in times of trouble. That's a very limited
measure of the warmth of your social connections, but it
(18:26):
turns out to be very important. And finally, and less
emphasized by Aristotle is a benevolence to what extent and
we use donations net of the effective income, but it's
very apparent that doing things ideally with others for others
is very important. One measure that we have only one
(18:51):
year of so it hasn't got into the basic modeling,
but we find out to be very important is whether
people think their wallet would be returned if they lost.
An actual experiment show that people answer that question. They
understand the relative likelihood of a wallet return looking across
countries and a wallet return is nice because it's not
(19:12):
just honesty, it's also benevolence, because you could be perfectly
trustworthy but still not take the time out of your
life to pick up a wallet and make sure it
got back to the owner. But that's what people do
in these high trust countries and the high ranking countries.
The wallet return is very high in the Nordic countries,
and it's very important. There was a survey we had
(19:34):
that measured what people's risk was of mental health problems,
being a victim of violent crime, or being unemployed, and
the positive effect coming from thinking your wallet would be
returned if found by either a stranger or police, or
especially both was way more important than the negative on
(19:55):
people's life evaluations from those other factors, which are very important.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
One of the things that really seems to matter is
having somebody to count on that particular metric. And interestingly,
if I understand the report right, that seems to be
more important than reporting that you're not lonely. It seems
to be the positive effect of social connection rather than
the negative. One walk through why that's so important for me.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
That's a good point. And there's a new survey that
was done in twenty twenty two the Meta Gallop World
Connection Survey, where they measured on the same scale to
what extent are you connected with other people? To what
extent are you supported by others you're socially supported? And
then to what extent do you feel lonely? On that
(20:39):
same scale, right across the world, feelings of positive social
support were twice as frequent as loneliness. Despite the fact
loneliness and the Surgeon General's report and you name it
is being treated as a major crisis. At least I personally,
and I think most of our analysts would agree, it's
(20:59):
much more important to emphasize the positives than the negatives, because,
in a sense, a supportive social environment not only is
twice as important is the absence of loneliness, it cuts
loneliness because of course, the best cure for loneliness is
a vaccine, and the best vaccine is a friend. And
so it's these positive things that should get the emphasis.
(21:23):
And that's the way to, as it were, cure loneliness
is not to wait till it happens, but to have
a social environment that is supportive.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
And this seems to mirror something else that you've seen
time again in the report as I understand it, which
is that sometimes these positive behaviors or even the positive
emotions seem to be winning out in terms of these
life evaluation measures over the negative behaviors and the negative emotions.
What are some other examples of this, Well.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
It turns up in lots of different domains that people
do value the chance to do things for other people
and with other people. There were surveys in one report
about how people were happier in green environments and in
less noisy environments than elsewhere, and we had the authors
(22:10):
go back to show who people were with and who
you were with at the time you were doing something
was much more important than what you were doing. So
people were happier commuting with a friend than they were
walking alone in a beautiful environment. Of course, the best
was to be in the green environment with a friend,
but that shows you the dominance of the social context
(22:34):
over other aspects. One issue that came up in Issuear's
report is that the gallop world pole has now been
going on long enough that we have the potential for
splitting out generational effects from age effects. You know, there
is a sort of midlife low that appears in a
lot of the data on an age basis, and so
(22:56):
we have dug into that, but also trying to separate
it from when people were born, and so we split
the population into those born before nineteen sixty five boomers
and their predecessors, those born after nineteen eighty, who were
then the Millennials and Gen Z, and then the intervening
(23:17):
group of Gen X. And then what we did this
is continuing with the benevolence theme. There was a huge
increase in benevolence during the pandemic years compared to twenty
seventeen to twenty nineteen. That boost is still going on now,
right through twenty twenty three. And we asked ourselves, because
(23:40):
this is a big item of discussion, especially in the
United States, whether the Millennials and their successors are the
ME generation, the Wei generation, or just like other generations.
So we were able to look at this boost in
benevolent behavior and then has this boost been the same
for the millennials as it has for the earlier generations.
(24:02):
And first of all, we found that that boost is
everywhere across all generations. In terms of the ME versus
WE generation. We find out that the millennials jumped up
even more than their predecessors to help others when help
was required during those COVID years. So that's a very
(24:23):
encouraging piece of evidence to offset some of the pessimism
that people seem to have about the world falling apart
behind them.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Oh I love that. I love that statistic. One of
the other things I was so interested in in this
report is that you're actually looking at these differences across
age and whether the rankings hold not just for everyone,
but whether they hold as well for young individuals versus
older individuals and so on. And so, you know what,
did you see the rankings pretty consistent across Asia? Do
we see some big differences.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
Huge differences. Canada and the United States, the rankings for
the old are fifty or more ranks higher than for
the young. There are many other countries where the rankings
for the old are forty or more lower than for
the young. So they're huge differences in these rankings across countries,
(25:13):
and in some cases where the young are doing very
well and the old not so well. It's because every
country is different in generational effects and so on. You
look at the older people in countries that are part
of the former Yugoslavia, where they were at each other's
throats literally in the nineteen nineties. The people who were
(25:34):
alive and seeing that as at Ultserce or older children
at that time, are now very unhappy. Still they're bearing
the scars of that. So trauma leaves its scars, and
so that's one of the reasons why the old have
not so quickly followed the young in some of those
countries in their higher well being. However, the young can
(25:57):
rise relative to the old in a newer refashioned world.
Is grounds for some optimism. Although it may not be
completely easy to pull people out and to expunge those
awful memories of the past, it's possible to create new
generations who are less burdened by that and help them
(26:19):
to form their positive connections with their neighbors and with
the world.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
So as we walk through these six factors, you know,
again being from the US, my kind of US centric
version of this report, I'm curious which of those you
think were really going down in the case of the US,
Like over the last few years, what of those six
factors have changed in the US to kind of make
us drop so significantly in the rankings.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Well, my guess is that the social environment within which
people operate. I mean there have been drops in trust.
That's evident. It's not clear whether there have been drops
in social connections or not. There have probably been drops
in the warmth and trustworthiness of those social connections. We
(27:00):
have had chapters on the corrosive effects of the social
media use of certain types on young people. We have
a special chapter in this year's report on young people
per se finding that they're getting less happy once they
get into middle school and carry on right through into
(27:21):
their working careers. And some of that may be just
learning about life, and some of it may be that
the social media on average have not been so productive
of good relations that we know from other research lower
happiness levels. And there's an underlying negativity bias that humans have.
(27:45):
They react more sharply and quickly to negative news. If
you then combine that negativity bias with a huge increase
in the range of information sources that people have, then
they may well be deluged in negative information that drives
them a long way from reality. And we know that
(28:07):
from the wallet data exacs, because we know that it's
expected wallet return that makes you happy. But we also
know that people underestimate the likelihood of their wallet being returned,
which means that negative bias is very costly. So we're
needlessly unhappy because we don't understand that the people around
(28:28):
us are kinder and better than we think they are.
Because to walk down a street, as they do in
Helsinki and see someone on the street not as a danger,
not as a stranger, but a friend they haven't met yet,
and that's very important for your happiness to think you're
in that kind of environment. It's possible that what's going
(28:49):
on in the United States, and this is true in
Canadas too, and also it's got its echoes in Australia
and New Zealand, is that not only are more negative
news there, but the young people are in some sense
feeling guilty about it, whether it's the past treatments of minorities,
of pre colonial populations, treatment of the environment, any range
(29:14):
of issues. They're feeling that they're either the victims of
what others have done before them, or are carrying collectively
as a group, the guilt for producing these things. And
I suspect that's because those drops in the young people's
happiness are not global. They're fixed to the societies in
which the social media have been more dominant, which the
(29:38):
distribution of negative stories about the past and lack of
positive stories about the potential future have been more prevalent.
But my instinct is that those two things belong in
the same bag that in fact, it is this confluence
of based negative reporting and biased in the sense of
(29:58):
not reflecting the reality in which people are living, coupled
with people feeling that things are going badly in ways
that they don't see any easy way of fixing. We
know that natural disasters, although they're terrible, they offer immediately
for most people the chance to do something to help.
(30:19):
They rush in and help. People do want to help others,
But for some of these things that people are worrying
about now, they don't see any easy way of jumping
in and making a difference. And it's part of the
research that we report on in the world. Happiness support
is to help expose to people that the quality of
(30:40):
their own local social environment, which is so important, is
affected by their own behavior. So they should be going
out with a smile and a greeting and to help
other people and not presume the worst about them, but
in fact connect with them. For mutual advantage. Sometimes it
takes a little bit of a push to get people
to think in those positive terms, but there's a big payoff.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
And so as I think about kind of some of
these factors kind of playing in together, if you were
going to create the sort of ideal country, right, you know,
kind of cherry picking bits that one country is doing
and kind of adding it to another country, what would
that kind of like ideal country look like like? What
would it really build into boost happiness as highly as possible.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
That's a good one. One of the things we found
is that of those six factors we do measure, the
top countries all do well in all of them. You
can't do it on one thing. You can only do
it by having a full tapestry. I think the way
it could play out, you see, you don't want to
have an idea that there's a recipe for being a
really happy country. There are many recipes, but what has
(31:45):
to be true about a really happy country is that
people really do care about each other. They're characterized by equality,
and the equality that's really important is the equality of opportunity,
the equality of regard, the equality of acceptance, the equality
of access to basic services, We talked earlier about the
(32:07):
importance of income, but as important as the kind of
things you can buy with your own income, it's the
kind of things we provide for each other by way
of education, access, education, quality, healthcare, access, peace and freedom,
and a trustworthy local social environment. And some of that
(32:28):
can be fixed up by the neighbors and improved by
the neighbors. Some of it requires an add on of
national level institutions that permit people to connect rather than
be unconnected. If you wanted me to focus on something
that could be fixed in almost every country to make
(32:49):
it a better country is that over the last twenty years,
there's been a move driven by complaints of something going wrong,
somebody being molested, somebody being shot, and those things that
go wrong are what are reported in the news. So
then almost every organization now has a risk committee, and
(33:11):
the risk committee is designed to stop things going wrong.
And so they shut the kids off in schools with
locked doors, they shut people in elder care facilities behind
locked doors, and in the process, and this is true
of almost all experiments that are trying to make lives better,
that it's increasingly hard even to do the experiments we've
(33:34):
been running experiments mixing young children running a year of
their grade six education in the middle of a care
facility in Saskatoon, which breaks all the rules. You see,
the modern risk aversion culture doesn't make that possible. So
it takes a great deal of innovation and work even
to start an experiment like that. Well, once you see
(33:56):
those experiments in action, as we've done, even through COVID,
they've enriched the lives of the children, and clearly for
the elders who have a chance to pass on their
wisdom as well as echo the laughs of the children.
It gives them a reason for living, not what otherwise
might be on what they would see on their screens,
reasons for dying. So to open doors for connection rather
(34:20):
than closed doors for presumed safety is absolutely fundamental, and
I'm afraid in most institutions, in most countries, even the
top countries, it's going in the wrong direction. So the
risk prevention culture has to be entirely rethought because what
the world needs is more open doors, not more closed doors.
(34:44):
And so we have to permit people to meet un
till they meet and till they greet, until they learn
to trust. They won't learn common cause they won't turn
the me versus you into the bigger we and the US,
and that's what's critical in any successful society. So that's
something I think that is an agenda item for countries,
(35:06):
even if they're pretty well now in the rankings, that
they could be doing a better job at making sure
these connection doors are open and cherished.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
I love this. It fits so much with some of
the work that we've talked about on the show with
Robert Putnam and others about the kind of importance of
building these opportunities for building more of the social capital too.
So I think sometimes when people see these rankings, especially
if you're from a country that's pretty low on the list,
it can feel, you know, kind of like a hit.
You know, it can feel a little depressing. Are there
things that countries that are lower on the list can
(35:37):
do to maybe boost their rankings? You know? Should you
feel so pessimistic?
Speaker 2 (35:41):
Absolutely, some people say because they immigrants in Finland are
the happiest immigrants in the world, then everybody should move
to Helsinki. That's absolutely what it's not about in a way,
and sort of forget your ranking, but learn from the
report what makes for a good life, and so much
of it is so local, starting with your family, your friends,
(36:02):
your colleagues at work and school. You can change your
life in important ways, but the really important thing is
to change other people's lives. So if you reach out
to help others, that'll help you as well. But the
ripples of that, this spillover effects of positive actions, of
positive connections are very strong. If anything, they're stronger than
(36:24):
the negative ones. That's to be cherished. What that means
is everybody's got the option, both collectively as a country
and a government, but also individually, and so for people
who are pessimistic, they can't immediately turn around their main
government policies, but they can turn around their neighborhoods. They
can turn around what's going on in their workplace. They
(36:48):
can turn around what's going on in their school by thinking,
not complaining, not by making making angry demonstrations about something,
but by building common costs to find better ways of
doing things. So it's not about fighting, it's not about
demanding your rights. It's about working together with the others
you're living with in order to ver something better. And
(37:10):
that's always an option. We see it after natural disasters.
Why can't we see it after other less damaging but
perhaps more corrosive things.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
What a great message of hope to end on. No
matter where your country is on the World Happiness Report rankings,
you can still do something in your home, or on
your street, or in your workplace to help move your
fellow citizens up the happiness chart. John and I have
already talked about the generational splits his team has observed
in country level rankings, but this year's report devotes a
lot of time to age differences in happiness. In fact,
(37:43):
there are whole chapters on well being trends in the
young and the old this year, and so those are
the two challenges we'll be tackling next in this special
season about the World Happiness Report on the Happiness Lab
with me Doctor Lauriy Santos
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