Do you want to know what 6 factors contribute most to an individuals and country's happiness?
John Helliwell is the co- editor of The World Happiness Report, a landmark survey of the state of global happiness that ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be that has been running for the last decade! He is also the Professor emeritus of Economics at University of British Columbia and a distinguished senior fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is one of the first economist to begin to research happiness and its effect on individuals, countries, and even GDP.
In this episode we talk about the 6 factors that consistently show the highest correlation to a nation's happiness along with how to measure dystopia, dropping wallets with money around cities, and the effects of COVID on world happiness and mental health!
I wanted to rerun this episode because today (March 20th) is World Happiness Day which was founded in part due to the efforts of John Helliwell among others.
I interviewed not one, but three of the editors (John Helliwell, Dr. Lara Aknin, Lord Richard Layard) of the World Happiness Report who will all give different perspectives on happiness based on their areas of expertise in the next three episodes.
I would highly recommend that you check out the World Happiness Report here!
It is an astounding amount of research over a decade with new additions into genetics and even social media as a indicator of the happiness of various regions. Fascinating!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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John Helliwell (00:00):
/What was striking the likelihood of your
(00:03):
wallet being returned was muchmore important to people's life
evaluations than whether theywere safe in the streets or
whether they thought they wereat risk of mental health.
Or being unemployed or being inill health.
It's quite extraordinary.
Not that these other thingsdon't count, they account a lot,
but the idea of living in asociety where people watch your
(00:24):
back makes it much easier foryou to deal with the bad things
that happen, right?
Michael Bauman (01:11):
Hello everybody.
Welcome back to SuccessEngineering.
I'm your host, Michael Bauman.
So it's been a couple of weekssince I last population episode.
I apologize for that.
I've been launching mymastermind for entrepreneurs and
as some of you guys know,launching, uh, mastermind can be
a little bit crazy.
So that's, The reason for that,but I wanted to come out with a
bang.
(01:31):
So the next three episodes, Ireally wanted to focus on
happiness and wellbeing and whatthe research actually shows
about what factors contribute toour happiness.
And so to do that, I invitedthree.
so not one, but three of theco-editors of the World
Happiness Report onto my show.
And so the World HappinessReport, it's a landmark survey
(01:53):
of the state of globalhappiness.
It's actually been running for adecade now.
So this was its 10th yearanniversary.
It ranks 156 countries by howhappy their citizens perceive
themselves to be.
Landmark, massive amounts ofstatistical data around what
actually makes us happiness.
And then they've shown in thisreport that six factors
(02:15):
contribute to about 75% of thevariability between countries.
And so we'll get into that.
So the first episode, I'mactually gonna rerun.
One that I had done, before withJohn Helliwell.
He's the editor of,the WorldHappiness Report.
Like I mentioned, professorEmeritus of Economics at
University of British Columbia,distinguished Senior Fellow at
the Canadian Institute forAdvanced Research.
(02:36):
He's one of the first.
Economists to actually begin toresearch happiness and how that
affects economics and even GDPsof countries.
He's one of the first people todo that.
So I wanna re-release thisepisode because we talk a lot
about the structure of it, thedifferent factors that affect
happiness, how the data iscollected.
Um, so it gives you a reallygood idea of what the World
(02:58):
Happiness Report is.
And then in the next twoepisodes, we will, we will dive
into some of the otherco-editors of the World
Happiness Report.
,Dr.
Lara Aknin and Lord RichardLayard to expand on different
aspects of happiness, wellbeing,mental health, all around the
world.
So Dr.
Lara Aikman is distinguishedprofessor of Psychology, Simon
Fraser, former fellow withCanadian Institute for Advanced
(03:20):
Research, she holds a PhD socialpsychology chair of the Mental
Health and Wellbeing Task Forceof Lance at COVID 19 commission,
which we'll talk about in ourepisode as well for next week.
Um, and her research really.
Around happiness and generosityand how those two things are
linked together.
She's been published in a ton ofjournals, science, nature, human
(03:42):
Behavior, Lance at PublicJournal, journal Personality,
and then a lot of theinternational media outlets such
as cbc, cnn, New York Times,wall Street, that kind of thing.
And then the one after that willrelease Lord Richard Layard so
he has worked for most of hislife to understand how he can
reduce unemployment, reduceinequality.
Um, he's one of the firsteconomists to work on happiness.
(04:04):
And then he is the founder forthe Center for Economic
Performance at London School ofEconomics.
He's written multiple books onhappiness from happiness,
lessons from a new science tothrive, how we can secure a
better deal for mental health.
And again, we'll talk aboutthat.
And then, um, the latest book,can we be Happier?
He started Action for Happiness,which is incredible.
It's an international movementto promote a happier way of
(04:27):
living.
And then, like I mentioned,co-editor of the World Happiness
Report.
So the list just goes on and onand on.
So this is like I said, the 10thyear for the World Happiness
Report.
In 2012, the United NationsGeneral Assembly proclaimed
March 20th so Monday today asthe International Day of
Happiness.
So there's no better day thantoday to release, start to
(04:47):
release these episodes.
So I know you're gonna get a tonout of this.
Um, and it's so fascinating tounderstand what the research
actually says about what arethese top six factors that
contribute to our happyhappiness.
Um, and you'll learn all that.
You're not gonna be disappointedand then I would highly
recommend actually just goingand checking out the report.
It's, it's amazing.
(05:07):
Full of just tons of superfascinating, super, interesting
information.
You can dothat@worldhappiness.report and
there's tons of stuff.
In there.
It'll show you the differencesbetween countries and why some
rank higher and lower and whatvariables are contributed to
that.
And then also this year they'vealso started to include work on
genetics and how that affectshappiness.
(05:29):
Looking at social media and thelike, words that we use on
social media and can that beused to as a general proxy for
the happiness of that, thatregion, that area, that country.
Super fascinating stuff.
So definitely go and check that.
Um, again, worldhappiness.report.
Amazing.
So let's dive into this episode.
(05:49):
Like I said, it's a rerun frombefore, but I'll talk with John
Helliwell we will get into thebackground, the origin story,
the World Happiness Report.
You guys are gonna love it.
So here we go.
I have the incredible honor ofhaving John Helliwell.
He's a professor emeritus ofeconomics at the University of
British Columbia.
A distinguished senior fellow atthe Canadian Institute for
(06:10):
Advanced Research.
I could literally spend thewhole podcast episode talking
about his accomplishments andawards and incredible things
he's done, but he's the editorfor the World Happiness Report.
So this is a landmark survey, ofthe state of global happiness
that ranks 156 countries by howhappy their citizens perceive
themselves to be.
That's actually been running,this is the 10th year
(06:32):
anniversary for it.
A lot of times we talk abouthappiness and we think that
different things make adifference in terms of moving
the needle on it, but he knows,right.
He's studied it for longer thaneven those 10 years.
It's incredible.
So this is the science aboutwhat makes people happy across
internationally, globally.
So really excited to have you onthis show here.
Welcome to the show, John
John Helliwell (06:52):
Pleasure to be here.
Michael Bauman (06:54):
Absolutely.
So I wanna start and just kindof dip our toes into a little
bit of your background.
So, I mean, you did a ton ineconomics, you were studying
economics for quite a while.
You got your doctor's ofphilosophy in economics, you
know, your thesis was on theinvestment process at Oxford,
but I'm curious, you know, youhad all this background in
economics.
What happened to shift you fromstudying economics to the
(07:18):
integration of economics andhappiness, and then what you're
doing currently?
John Helliwell (07:23):
It was like a lot of these things,
happenstance.
During the years I was in thevisiting chair of Canadian
studies at Harvard, we had aregular seminar and one of the
members of that internationalrelations group was Robert
Putnam.
And he was presenting in thatseminar his Italian book in the
(07:44):
early nineties.
And then working later towardsBowling Alone, his famous social
capital.
Well, he and I started workingon social capital together in
the early nineties spurred bywhat I found very interesting
about his Italian work.
And we worked together on Italyand also then trying to get
social capital being measured inthe United States and the UK and
(08:07):
Canada.
Michael Bauman (08:07):
Can you, can you really quick just define for our
listeners what social capital,because you know, like you
mentioned tremendous researcharound that, that was really
groundbreaking at the time.
John Helliwell (08:17):
The core variables that we ended up
studying and most people do aresome mixture of trust as a
lubricant and a consequence ofgood social connections and
social connections themselves.
So that most of the empiricalwork on social capital uses
either measures of trust ormeasures the extent to which
people connect with each other.
(08:39):
And Putnam was putting togetherUS surveys.
And at one stage he, he said, ashe was preparing the final
manuscript for Bowling Alonethat people were happier in
states that had higher levels ofsocial capital.
And I said, what do you meanthey're happier?
And he said, well, in thissurvey, we use that they've got
measures of how happy people arewith their lives.
(09:01):
And I said, they do And I said,well, that's what we've been
doing without, for two or threecenturies in economics, because
in the absence of such measures,we inferred what we called
utility, which is what will makepeople happy, but we just
guessed what it was.
We didn't have any way ofmeasuring it.
(09:22):
And so I said, as I had doneearlier with the borders work,
this is really important becausewe were trying to value social
capital.
Well, you could imagine that'spretty hard to do unless you got
some way of convert.
Its value into terms that peoplecan relate to.
So think what you can do.
(09:43):
If you've got measures of howmuch people value their lives,
how much they rate their lives.
And it's a scale of zero to 10,typically, how satisfied are you
with your life or where's yourlife on a ladder?
And you can then take these dataand then look at people who have
different measures of socialcapital, different types of
(10:07):
social capital in theirenvironment and see how much it
matters to them in their lifesatisfaction.
And we know about their income,how much does that matter to
them?
And we know about whetherthey're employed or unemployed,
married, or single many thingswe know about the respondents
and we can work out how muchchanging each one of those would
do to their level ofsatisfaction.
(10:29):
So right away, we were then ableto value social capital and find
out how much it matters topeople to be in a high trust
environment.
And we found of course, amongother things, when we dug into
the global data that the kindsof social connections people
have in their neighborhoods, intheir communities, in their
(10:51):
families and on the job areextraordinarily important to
their lives.
And previously people eitherdidn't know that, or if they
thought it was true, didn'trealize how important it was.
So it's changed the way in whicha lot of people in employers,
workers people running variouskinds of organizations, how they
(11:12):
see their jobs.
Michael Bauman (11:14):
And I mean, it's just tremendous what you're
talking about.
Cuz a lot of this stuff is, youknow, quote unquote common
knowledge at this point, but itwasn't at that point and you and
Putnam and you know, ed diner,people like that, you're the
people that were doing the workthat was actually showing the
tangible evidence, looking athow important this is.
And especially, you know, when Iwork with entrepreneurs it's
(11:34):
interesting because we, youknow, a lot of times they spend
all their life going this is mydefinition of wealth or this is
my definition of success like Iget this amount of money, but
once you start realizing there'sother ways to, if you want to
classify it as be wealthy inlife or rich in life, and that's
the term like even socialcapital, you know, you have
regular monetary capital and youalso have social capital.
(11:56):
What if you optimized for that?
And we'll get into, you know,the World Happiness Report and
how like four out of those sixmeasures are actually on the
social side.
And how they make more of adifference.
But, I wanna dive into that andkind of get an idea around the
origin of the World HappinessReport and how Bhutan actually
played a role in that as well.
And you can share about thecountry of Bhutan and why it's
(12:18):
important in terms of happinessresearch.
John Helliwell (12:20):
Well, the whole the World Happiness Report has
its roots in several places.
One is one we've already talkedabout the availability of data
about how happy people arearound the world that was made
possible by the Galluporganizations starting in 2005.
The Gallup world pole and EdDeiner and Danny Kahnmann and I
(12:45):
were all involved in helpingthem get that started.
And, I'd spent a lot of timeworking with the data during
that period over that sameperiod of years Bhutan had been
running a series of grossnational happiness conferences
based on the Kings earlier viewthat, and it was a bit of a joke
(13:05):
in a way in way of putting itthat way that were after gross
national happiness instead ofgross national product.
Well, of course what do you meanby gross?
Et cetera.
But the point was to change themetrics that you think of when
you're looking at the quality oflife.
And so I'd been going to severalof their conferences who drew
together, people who were tryingto change lives for the better.
(13:30):
People running there was abarefoot college in India.
I remember one of theseconferences where they have
essentially empowering people inthese far away villages to
create their own water systems,but more important, linking them
up through solar power to theworld.
And he had a very broad agenda.
(13:52):
He said, when he was doing this,he was gonna say, change the
social structure as well as thetechnical structure.
And he went into the villagesand said, who are the people who
are least status in this?
And I'm going to make them moststatus by making them the people
who are.
Trained to deliver and operatethese solar systems.
(14:14):
So it was always a woman andoften somebody who'd come from
an unfavor background and hethen brought them along and
changed the structure of thevillages at the same time he was
changing their access to theworld.
Well, you could imagine the thegross national happiness
movement and conferences werefilled with projects and people
(14:35):
like that.
And the other strand of this,we've got the data, we then have
a Bhutan clearly taking thisseriously and onto the world
stage.
Then the third was the bringingthat forward as a United Nations
resolution in 2011 jointly byprime minister, Thinley of
(14:56):
Bhutan.
And he made this resolution andit was facilitated very much by
Jeffrey Sachs, who was anadvisor to the secretary general
and helped smooth thatresolution with enthusiasm.
And then in the follow up tothat meeting was held in Thimpu
in July of 2011, in order toplan for a high level meeting at
(15:20):
the United nations in April of2012 at that meeting where they
had a number of experts in bothin gross national happiness side
of things and in the study ofhappiness, more generally in
other countries and in otherways and I was there both as a
user and understanding of thedata and also as being involved
(15:42):
with the Bhutan and the previousperiod.
During the course of thatmeeting it was decided, and I
think it was Jeffrey Sach'ssuggestion with the prime
minister's strong approval thatpart of this meeting, which had
a mixture of environmentalobjectives and happiness
objectives.
So it was a double agenda forthis high level meeting.
But on the happiness side thatwe would prepare a report
(16:05):
setting the scientificbackground, because if you're
gonna, if you're gonna tellcountries as the motion did,
they should take wellbeingseriously, then they have to
know what it is they're takingseriously, and something about
how to do so.
And so the science then becomecentral in order to convert,
talk into action.
So we did the first report forthat drew together.
(16:28):
This, the science had lots ofthings, that data that we
reported and it was a very big,well covered meeting at the
United nations.
And these copies of the reportjust flew off the stacks and the
reception was much more then wemight have expected.
I mean, we hoped it would beimportant because as you'll
(16:51):
remember prior to that, therewas this movement beyond GDP.
The question is what do you dobeyond?
Oh yeah.
so you have to have something toreplace it or to augment it.
And so to have some core data,well understood, well presented
around the world then givespeople something that is much
(17:11):
broader.
Then the economic variablesincludes them in a sense that
economic factors remain veryimportant, but it then gives you
an umbrella measure of wellbeingin which everything can fit.
And to then make those dataavailable, turned out to fill a
gap and a need.
That was became later.
(17:31):
It became obvious as the reportacquired currency and interest
over the years that it wasclearly filling a need.
Michael Bauman (17:39):
Absolutely.
So can you kind of lay out, youknow what, I'm sure the
listeners are really curious oflike how this data, you know,
you talked about the Gallupworld pole, so talk about how
that data is collected and howit can get a representative
sampling of data from thecountries, and then also break
down the six differentcategories that are measured and
(18:01):
how that data is typicallycollected.
So people can get an idea ofwhat we're looking
John Helliwell (18:04):
at.
Yes.
I'm delighted you ask thequestion in that way, because it
allows me to correct amisunderstanding not your part,
but in the part of manyreporters and at many websites.
And so people think the rankingwe do across countries is based
somehow on the six factors thatwe use to explain wellbeing.
(18:27):
Well, it isn't initially andalways.
Our rankings of countries arebased on the average values of
people's answer to a question.
And then we average'em overthree years to get a sample size
of roughly 3000 per country.
To that doesn't jump around forsample size reasons too much
from year.
A question asking people tothink about their lives as a
(18:48):
whole, with the best possiblelife as a 10, and the worst is a
zero.
How would they rate their lifetoday?
And of course we found quitequickly on.
That these averages differhugely around the world from
averages up close to eight insome countries and down below
three in some other countries.
And they go up and downaccording to how life really is
(19:10):
in different countries.
So, the first year we presentedthese data and a lot of other
data and quite it naturallypeople spend a lot of time
looking at the rankings, whereis our country and how do we
relate to our neighbors?
And so how do we fit in amongthe countries, in our part of
the world these days, et cetera,et cetera.
But then naturally people said,well, what is it that makes for
(19:32):
a happier country?
So we.
When dug more deeply researchhad already been built up in
using these data and other data.
So we weren't starting fromzero, but we were bringing into
the report itself starting in2013 which was the second
report, an explanation.
(19:53):
So we took the data and thentook other variables from
outside the Gallup World Polland other variables within it's
not a perfect or completeexplanation cuz we don't have
all the data you might want andyou're having to Simplified
complicated lives.
But we have found, and this isnow going back almost 10 years
that we've been doing thisastonishing level of continued
(20:15):
support in every year's data foran explanation that is
essentially based on sixfactors.
And because that's become somuch a part of what the report
says and what it's talked about,people then talk about it being
a happiness index based on thosesix factors, but it's not Yeah.
(20:35):
It's important distinction.
It's actually what people sayabout their lives.
It has nothing to do.
And we wanted to do that.
We wanted it not to be a productof experts.
We wanted to represent ademocratic collection.
The sampling comes in Gallupget, gets population
representative samples in everycountry, and then does interview
(20:55):
process, which is face to facein most countries and in the
richer countries, mainlytelephone and sometimes mixed
and asks what are more than ahundred questions of all these
people.
Wow.
And we have a choice ofvariables we use and the ones
that continue to have broadsupport year after year that two
(21:17):
first are obvious of income percapita and healthy life
expectancy, because they've beenthe poles.
for Assessing the quality ofdevelopment efforts for decades
or longer the variables that youmentioned earlier is having a
social connection contain avariety of channels.
But between them, they cover alot of the important aspects of
(21:38):
life.
The first and most important isyou have someone to count on in
times of trouble.
It's not the only way ofmeasuring your personal support
networks, but it's a good way.
And I would like it if it was along scale, it's only a yes, no.
So across country, it's just thefrequency of people who have
somebody to count on.
What's not a very good measurethen, right?
(22:00):
A lot of countries in the worldare all above 95%.
And so that you can'tdiscriminate very much about
some of the differences thatrelationship quality we like to
look at, but nonetheless itremains a very powerful
variable.
Another one is the extent towhich people think corruption is
a problem in government andindustry separate questions.
We take the average of the twoin their country.
(22:22):
Yes or no.
And then.
We ask people, to what extent doyou have a sense of freedom to
make your key life decisionsthat was discovered in this
strand of earlier research andturned out to be very powerful
and continues to be verypowerful.
And of course it's at itshighest levels in countries, not
that necessarily say freedom istheir primary objective, but
(22:46):
where everybody has enoughaccess to opportunities, which
usually then means everybodygets access to good education,
good healthcare and employmentopportunities and living
opportunities.
They tend to be open societieswhere everybody is treated
pretty equally.
You then get a big share of thepopulation that feel they're
(23:06):
free to make their key lifedecisions.
And then we have benevolence andthe measure that's used in the
report, or have you given tocharity in the last month, the
variety of other measures thatdo roughly as well.
And people are happier living insocieties where everyone is
generous.
(23:27):
They're not only happier beinggenerous themselves, but they're
happy when other people, whenthey're living in that kind of
environment.
Michael Bauman (23:33):
And then talk about how the positive affect or
positive emotions are measured,the negative affect, and then
the concept of the dystopia as abaseline as well.
John Helliwell (23:43):
Okay.
You're digging really deep.
Michael Bauman (23:45):
Yeah.
We are really getting in there!
John Helliwell (23:48):
Okay.
In the first report we said,look, there are three ways of
looking at wellbeing that havebeen established.
And a lot of it is Ed deiner'sprimary work in this field
separating life evaluations ofwhich about which we've just
spoken.
How satisfied are you with yourlife as a whole?
And there are measures ofpositive affect joy contentment
(24:09):
of a range, did you laugh a lotyesterday and so on and then
measures of negative emotions,sadness, anger misery.
Worry.
And so, we have several measuresof positive and negative
emotions.
Some people use those as primarymeasures of wellbeing.
We think they are primarymeasures, but they're not the
(24:29):
central measures.
And so as we've evolved ourexplanatory framework, we treat
these emotions, which are morevolatile than life evaluations.
So you get weekend effects withemotions.
You don't get them with lifeevaluations and so on.
But they feed in just asAristotle said, they would the
emotions feed in to determinehow happy people are with their
(24:50):
lives.
And that's we find, but we findat the national level the
average levels of positiveemotions come through more
strongly than the negative onesat the individual level.
It's more balance.
So that's the way we see thosethree measures fitting together.
The emotions are very important,but they're essentially building
blocks in which support betterlives.
(25:12):
You've asked about dystopiawell, you could imagine dystopia
is the adverse of utopia andutopia would be where everything
was for the best dystopia iswhere everything is for the
worst.
And why did we even think aboutthat in a World Happiness
Report?
It's because we wanted a waywhen we're showing that key
(25:34):
chart, which gives the overallscore for each country, and then
how much is contributed by eachof the six variables.
Well, to do that in order foreach contribution to be
positive, it has to be positiveto some zero baseline.
Well, what we use as the zerobaseline for each of those
(25:57):
variables is the country in thesample that has the lowest
value.
So one country's lowest forfreedom and other's lowest for
GDPper capita,, and other islowest for health.
We define dystopia as thecountry that has the lowest.
It isn't a real country.
Of course, that would have thelo world's lowest values of all
(26:17):
those six variables.
Now it's not the ultimatedystopia because this is only
based on the lowest actual inthe world today.
But you could imagine going backseveral centuries things
dystopia, would've been a lotworse.
So then we calculate from theseequations.
We have what the happiness levelof dystopia would be, you know?
(26:38):
What would be the level for acountry that had the world's
lowest values of each of thosesix variables.
And that's a number jumps up ordown, according to how bad
things are going.
And these situations, you know,when you get the complete
falling apart of GDP inVenezuela, that's drops dystopia
down on, on that front and soon.
And then every other country hasa level that's higher than that
(27:01):
because at least one variablethey're above the dystopia.
And so it allows us to decomposehow happy a country is relative
to a baseline.
So it was just in order to makeour results more understandable
and more, more easily presentedthat we had to get this notion
(27:22):
of a baseline.
And we called it dystopia forthe obvious reason that it's the
country that in which everythingis going is.
Badly as it has done anywhere inthe world.
Michael Bauman (27:33):
yeah.
And even in this conversation,you can get a tiny little piece
of the scope of this report.
And I would highly recommendeverybody check it out the World
Happiness Report, cuz you cansee as as he's mentioning, you
can see that on this graph,basically you'll see a chart and
you'll see the overall lifeevaluations and you can kind of
see how much of that iscontributed by these different
(27:54):
six areas.
And correct me if I'm wrong, butthose factors, those six areas
you guys have shown explainabout 85% of the difference in
national the life evaluations.
Is that
John Helliwell (28:04):
correct?
Well, we'd be happy if it was85.
It somewhere between 75 and alittle more.
Okay.
So 75% that's over, over theyears and across countries.
Michael Bauman (28:15):
Yeah.
So we're gonna, we're gonna keepdiving in here to, I mean,
there's so much stuff to unpack.
We can talk for a very longtime, but I do wanna talk about
the aspect of trust andtrustworthiness and the
dropping, dropping wallets with$20 in them, around the city and
how that played in with theresearch that you guys were
doing
John Helliwell (28:35):
well, that came into my research interest and
agenda before the worldhappiness support back before
the turn of the century, we werehaving a big survey in Canada
grant sponsored survey, where wewere measuring social capital
and a whole lot of other things.
And some of my surveyingcolleagues hardnosed said this
(28:55):
classical question that had beenintroduced in the 1950s by
almond and Verba and their studyof democracy then was in
general, do you think people canbe trusted or on the other hand,
you can't be too careful indealing with people knows a zero
one scale.
And they said, we are not surewhat people really mean by that
question.
(29:16):
And you know, what does it, sohow do we interpret it?
So we then said, all right,let's ask a very specific
question where we'll knowexactly what it means.
And what's more there alreadyhad been some examples of people
dropping wallets with money inthem, in various cities of the
world, done by the readersdigest.
(29:37):
And it turns out the averagevalues of wallet return were as
Steve Nack and others showed,were in fact correlated with
general trust measures.
So we knew we were tapping intothe same kind of space we, since
of course have realized it'smuch more than whether other
people can be trusted becauseyou're not just saying, are they
(29:57):
gonna do something dishonest ornot?
It's are they going to step outof their daily lives to improve
my life?
So it's very activelybenevolence, not just a
trustworthiness in the narrowestsense of following rules and not
doing me an injustice.
These are people going muchbeyond what's required in order
(30:17):
to do you a favor.
So, it, we then asked thisquestion how likely is it your
wallet would be returned if itwas found by a police officer, a
stranger or a neighbor?
Well, this was rather nicebecause the answers differed of
course and they differed bydifferent amounts in different
societies and at differenttimes.
So they became a way of judgingthe quality of public
(30:38):
institutions, as well as theneighborhoods in which people
worked as well as some notionabout the structure of life in a
whole, in the country.
And so it was turned out to bevery valuable.
Michael Bauman (30:50):
Talk about the difference there that was shown
between how many wallets wereactually returned and how many
people said that they werereturned and how that's actually
really important in terms of thelens that we view the world.
John Helliwell (31:03):
Yes.
Well, there, there were only asmall number of countries and
cities involved in the firstexperiments, very small civil,
fortunately two or three yearsago, there was a big survey
done, not quite dropping walletsin the way we've done in other
experiments, but pretty closelarge samples of hundreds of
people in each of 40 countries.
(31:25):
And so we have those data andwe're able to compare.
We also then got the Galluporganization to agreed to ask
the wallet question in one oftheir surveys.
In fact, the way we got it intothe whole round most recently
was as part of the Lloyd'sfoundation, Lloyd's register
foundation risk survey.
And they'd asked me for help indesigning their risk survey.
(31:49):
And I said, well, you know, allof your questions, there are all
about things going wrong.
Don't you think you might have.
It would be useful and importantto ask questions about positive
risks.
What are the chances ofsomething going well?
Because lotteries are aboutsomething going well, accidents
may be about something goingwrong and it would be nice to
(32:11):
have both of those in there.
So, on that basis, they agreedto put the wallet question in
that special round.
Well, that was especiallyvaluable.
First of all, it gave us a fullround.
We, 10 years ago, we had apartial round of two thirds of
the countries.
So we already knew roughly whatwe were getting, but here now we
had a full round which had anoverlap of 39 countries, which
(32:34):
actually had dropped wallets inroughly the same year.
And so we could compare actualreturn with return.
What's more because this was inthe Lloyd's Register Foundation,
Risk Poll, they asked thisquestion with the same answer
scale as how likely is yourwallet to be returned.
(32:55):
And then the same answer range.
They said, how likely are you tobe subject to violent crime?
How likely are you to suffermental health problems?
So we knew a variety of thingsthat bad things that could
happen.
And we also knew the walletreturned and what was striking.
(33:15):
When we put these together isbecause now these rest of the
same people on the same scale,that the likelihood of your
wallet being returned was muchmore important to people's life
evaluations than whether theywere safe in the streets or
whether they thought they wereat risk of mental health.
So, wow.
And, or being unemployed orbeing in ill health.
(33:38):
It's quite extraordinary.
Not that these other thingsdon't count, they account a lot,
but the idea of living in asociety where people watch your
back, of course, we know beingin a society where people watch
your bac makes it much easierfor you to deal with the bad
things that happen, right?
If you're in an accident or anykind of tough situation, you
(33:59):
wanna be with people who worktogether to deal with it.
So there's an interaction.
Wow.
Let me get finally to yourquestion about the actual return
and the expected return, becausewe knew we had the actual rate
of return of the wallets and theexpect.
That was one of the advantagesof the question.
Of course you knew exactlybecause it was such a precise
(34:22):
question.
You knew it was being askedabout.
You could run an experiment thatactually said not just so you
can find out across countries,whether it's correlated, but
whether people in general aretoo pessimistic or too
optimistic.
About the benevolence of thepeople around them.
And we found in this latestglobal study, as we found in
(34:44):
earlier, countries studies inparticular countries but on
average people expected theirwallet to be returned about half
as frequently as it actually wasreturned.
In other words, people are muchmore generous than their fellow
citizens think they are And soyou say, why would that be?
Well, of course, one of thelikely answers is in the media,
(35:06):
you hear about bad thingshappening, typically done by bad
people.
And so you overestimate thefrequency of bad events and the
overestimate, the frequency ofbad people.
And so people are just simplynot aware of how strong the
social fabric is in which theylived.
Now.
It's not equally strongeverywhere, but the point is
(35:29):
almost everywhere.
It's stronger than people think.
Michael Bauman (35:32):
And that's just, I mean, it's just the insight in
there is just tremendous.
Because it really is it's.
I mean, how, it's, how you viewthe entire world.
Do you view people around youas, like you said, you know, do
they have your back?
And unfortunately, it's half aslikely to rate that, you know,
as they have my back, as inreality actually shows and
anybody that's doneinternational travel, it's a
similar kind of thing.
(35:52):
Like, you'll hear the negativethings that are happening in a
particular country, but when youget there, most of the time, the
people are like lovely andhospitable, even more so than
you know, maybe your neighborsback home.
And it's extraordinary to seethat just tremendous amount of
Generosity, goodness, kindness,support, trust, things that
you're talking about.
So I wanna actually get intothat specifically with COVID
(36:13):
right.
So we had this massive globalpandemic.
It has just, I mean, still farreaching effects and we tend to
view it through this negativelens, you know, and obviously
there's tons of negative stuffthat happened, but talk about
kind of the pandemic ofbenevolence that's going on as
well.
And, you know, maybe even getinto some of the suicide rates
and things like that, thatdifferent terms of expectations
(36:35):
that we have.
John Helliwell (36:36):
There was a lot of of thinking about what we
would find in the report for2020, which was the first year
of COVID, because there'd been alot of indicators of calls on
various kinds of help lines.
And of course people's lives hadbeen turned upside down that
they couldn't work.
They couldn't meet with theirfriends, all the things that
support a good life or many ofthem were simply torn.
(36:59):
So the assumption would bepeople's life evaluations would
be equally shattered and wefound that wasn't the case.
And so then you have to sort oftry and unpack it and see what
was supporting life evaluationsduring this period?
And in general, it was the kindof things that we saw in our
daily lives, but we probablydidn't think of them as being as
(37:21):
important as they are, that the.
Face to face contacts, which allthe research showed are terribly
important.
But what people did under COVIDis they developed meetings like
this one across the world whereyou actually can be face to face
with someone and connect in away that they hadn't done
(37:41):
before.
And you found it within familiesand neighborhoods as well, that
there were actual connectionsestablished that weren't there
before There was a UK programfor putting out a call for
volunteers to help theirneighbors.
You know, getting groceriesmedicines checking check-ins and
so on the call was dramaticallyoversubscribed.
(38:04):
They had to shut it off in days.
It was the biggest assembly ofvolunteer effort since the
second world war peopleimmediately wanted to help.
Well, we already know of coursethat the wallet finders are as
happy as the people who havetheir wallets found or who feel
(38:25):
that it would be to live in asociety where, you know, other
people are ready to come out Andwhat natural disasters can do
and we found this with lookingat earthquakes and fires and
previous diseases and tsunamis,and so on that.
It gives people a chance toactually test and see the
(38:46):
quality of the social fabric inwhich they're living.
And because they previouslythought it wasn't as good as it
is.
And the disaster brings out thefabric as it is, then people are
surprised by how benevolent arethe actions of others.
And of course that makes themhappier to see that.
So it's one of the good thingsthat can happen from bad things
(39:09):
is that it gives you a chance tosee if you've underestimated
benevolence.
Then you find yourself morebenevolent feeling better about
your life than other peoples.
Well, That turns out to be veryimportant, because if you think
you're in a high trustenvironment and see it, you
yourself are then more likely toreach out than even than you
(39:31):
were before because you nolonger think of a stranger as a
stranger, but as a friend, youhaven't met yet.
You change your attitude.
And another helping hand in thatwas caused by the fact that
people weren't going off toMachu Pichu in 2020 and 21, they
were walking in theirneighborhoods.
And in the course of that, theywere establishing human
(39:54):
connections with their neighborsof a sort they hadn't had
before.
And you'll find that in, I don'tknow about your neighborhood but
it's true of all theneighborhoods I've talked to
people about that they're moreconnected than they were pre
COVID, even though many of therestrictions made it less easy
to make any of theseconnections.
Michael Bauman (40:12):
Yeah.
And that's interesting cuz Imean, we lived in Shanghai for
three years and we aren't rightnow, but this last year, I mean,
if you heard Shanghai basicallylocked down for three months
straight, like you basicallycouldn't even leave your
apartment.
So we have a bunch of friendsthere and that's exactly what
they said.
I mean, obviously there's a lotof, you know, systemic things
(40:33):
and, you know, challenges and itwas a really difficult time, but
they said that about their localcommunities, like all these
people in apartment complexes,they would meet their neighbors
and they would get together andpool like their resources to go,
what food do we needcollectively so that we can
order and get these deliveries.
And people were volunteering towalk other people's dogs and I
mean, the list just goes on andon.
And so I think, I mean, andthat's what you've even seen a
(40:55):
lot of times in your research.
Or just the research in general,those things that we think will
make us happy, like winning thelottery.
A lot of times the people aremore unhappy or they return to
their baseline.
You have your hedonicadaptation.
And then the opposite side ofthings, the suffering that we
typically thinks makes usunhappy.
You know, and even in yourresearch, you talk about the
tsunami in Japan and how peopleare happier after that.
(41:18):
And tons of other examples ofthat, but the things that we
think make unhappy, actually,like you said, test the fabric
of our values.
They test the fabric of oursocial connections and they have
a way of bringing that out.
I even had a fellow on thepodcast.
He was a rugby player and thenhe had a paralyzing neck injury.
So he is paralyzed from the neckdown, but he became a mouth
(41:39):
artist and he actually said, I'mhappier now than I would've been
before.
And I wouldn't change anything,which is.
Which is really crazy.
And I'm curious even to hearyour thoughts, some of that
around suffering and it's kindof linked to happiness and how
resilience plays into thatequation?
John Helliwell (41:56):
Oh, well the example some people have said
these life evaluations don'tmean anything because something
would show obviously destroys aperson's life, like a spine
destroying accident.
And how could they possiblythere's something wrong there
they're doing adaptation and itmeans measures not any good, but
that's not the right way ofthinking about it.
(42:18):
And I think your story or therugby player was the right way
to think about it.
That in fact, it changespeople's conception of life as a
whole, and they so valuedifferent things.
It's like pressing the resetbutton and COVID has done that
for a lot of people press thereset button on life.
You'll find people actuallytalking about what are their
(42:39):
fundamental objectives now, andthey're different than they were
three years ago.
Because they've had a chance totry things differently, but also
to think things more deeply.
And so we don't have to breakour spines to get a kind of
reset button it, and there is alot of research about how much
physical disability hurtspeople's wellbeing and what
(43:00):
levels of adaptation exist.
And the evidence is pretty clearon average, it's a serious hit
to your wellbeing and therecovery is partial, but not
complete.
And the more damage you are, themore it affects your long term
wellbeing, that doesn't threatenthe reality of these stories,
but there's a balance of peoplefor whom the injury is destroys
(43:24):
their conception of their livesand they never do recover that
And so those are people whodon't have that resilience and
that adaptability, and there'ssome people who have so much and
refocus their lives, that theycan come quite honestly, and
have a higher level of lifesatisfaction than they did
before.
It doesn't mean that thesecircumstances don't matter.
It's just that people differ alot in their ability to discover
(43:47):
new paths that may indeed bebetter than the ones they know
before There's a fellow namedRandy Nest.
Who's a great specialist in thepower of unhappiness.
And his point is cuz he's apsychiatrist and he deals with
people who've had their lifehope shattered because they
didn't get the job they wanted.
They didn't get their tenure ata university posting.
(44:09):
They didn't get their celloistposition in an orchestra and
they have to sort of go throughall this terrible unhappiness..
The unhappiness can then be aroot to a rethinking of the
lives.
And so that's the positive roleof unhappiness that in fact,
these unhappiness bad things canin fact, force you into a
(44:30):
situation where you rethinkwhat's important and how to get
there and who you can trust andexpect to help you get there.
Michael Bauman (44:37):
That's huge, cannot be overstated to that
aspect of who you can trust tohelp you get there.
Can you talk about, you know, soCOVID as well was very isolating
in a lot of ways and people dotalk about the kind of the
epidemic of loneliness andthings like that.
Can you talk about yourperspective on loneliness as
well, and even the reality ofhow COVID affected it?
John Helliwell (44:59):
Well, the sort of standard measures about, do
you have someone to count on,which is one measure of
loneliness, but there are lotsof others have not been damaged
very much in, in the raw data.
And it's in part, cuz peoplehave substituted other forms of
connection for the ones thatwere cut and finding some of
them to be effective.
I have resisted from thebeginning, this notion of an
(45:22):
epidemic of loneliness, cuz itthen creates in general.
See if you come from the side ofpositive psychology you see how
important it is to measurethings like wallet return rather
than, or in addition to risk ofillness or risk of being mugged
in the streets.
Not that they aren't relevant,but if you focus only on things
(45:42):
that are going badly, thenyou'll ignore ways of improving
lives in a deeper way.
Well, Loneliness in my view,I've talked to public health
conferences in this vein becauseof course it's in the public
health field where this epidemicof loneliness is talked about,
cuz epidemics are a good way ofgetting attention.
(46:04):
I said, if you think there's anepidemic of loneliness, what you
need is not a treatment, but youneed a vaccine and the vaccine
should be taken by everybody.
And the vaccine is a friend andpeople who have friends are not
lonely.
They can be alone, but becausethey've got the friends and
people to count on and easy andpowerful connections, they're
(46:27):
never lonely, and so you don'twait until someone's lonely and
then find them a friend that'stoo late.
You want to.
Produce an environment.
So that's why I say you don'twant a minister of loneliness.
You don't need a minister offriendship, which you need is
every ministry thinking aboutthe way in which they do their
policies and every companythinking about the way in which
(46:50):
they operate, that teams aremore productive, the more
friendly they are.
We have a lot of evidence aboutthe degree of verticality and a
corporate structure as apowerful question in the Gallup
daily poll.
And do you think of yourimmediate work superior as a
more as a partner or a boss?
And of course the more verticalstructure you think of them as a
(47:12):
boss and the flatter one, andthey're much happier that way.
And the weekend effects that arecommon in a boss environment,
fade away in a partnershipenvironment.
And that turns out to be veryimportant.
Michael Bauman (47:24):
And that's why I wanted to ask you about that,
cuz I saw that quote on doing myresearch, you know, loneliness
doesn't need a cure, you need avaccine.
And I think it's reallyimportant because you don't
want, like you mentioned, youdon't wanna be finding a friend
when you need it in a caraccident, right?
Like you don't wanna be like,oh, now I need a friend.
Like you wanna have the networkand the social support before
that.
So that, that act helps mitigatesome of the effects of whatever
(47:48):
ends up happening in life.
So I appreciate your insight andwanted to talk to you about
that.
The other thing I wanted to diveinto, and I know you have a
strong opinion about this aswell, on pursuing individual
happiness.
So let's say like, I wanna behappier and I'm like, okay I'm
gonna go about creating my lifeto be happier.
What are your thoughts aboutthat?
John Helliwell (48:07):
Well, it turns out it's once again, it's the
wrong way, because it's got mefocus and we know that the
people who actually end uphappier are not the ones with
have a me focus, but have a, wefocus or an even a other's
focus.
There, there was a, an extra setof questions sponsored by a
(48:28):
Japanese foundation in the, arecent world, having Gallup
world poll.
And in the most recent worldhappiness support, we had a
chapter explaining the results.
And one of these questions was,"In general, do you think your
focus should be helping othersor helping your self and
family?" And people who hadtheir focus on others were
(48:48):
happier, even though as it were,their objectives were not to
help themselves.
And that, I mean, there's lotsof other evidence on pro-social
behaviors that people who haveresources and use them to help
others are happier than helpthem themselves.
But this focus on getting thingsright for everybody rather than
(49:12):
targeted to waiting untilsomething goes wrong and then
trying to fix it is verypowerful.
So it should be true.
I've talked to mental healthpeople about this issue that
you, it isn't as though you havecognitive behavioral therapy and
medicines, and you bring themout in some mix.
When your patients come in.
(49:32):
GP's who are the first line inall of these meetings of, you
know, they're the people who endup sending people to
psychiatrists, they should bethemselves asking people, how is
your social life?
How happy are you?
These positive questions shouldbe asked and encouraged.
So you know that you don't just,like they say, walk 10,000 steps
(49:56):
a day, start 10 elevatorconversations in a day.
They need people need advice andencouragement in order to do
things that'll improve lives forthemselves and others, but the
doctor would be doing this inthis context.
It's, he's really saying this isabout your long term mental
health.
This will in fact improve yourmental and physical health and
(50:16):
it will and you don't have towait until someone's sick to
give them that advice.
That advice works for everybody.
And of course it has positivespillovers as well.
And in mental health, that'sparticularly important because
if you operate positively andproactively and protectively
then people don't get in asituation where they're actively
(50:39):
and painfully lonely or wheretheir mental health needs them
to go to a professional.
If you talk to theprofessionals, they say one of
the big problems is there's astigma about mental illness.
So people won't come to us, eventhough they should.
Well, that's the point.
Once you treat it as an mentalillness and stigmatize it, then
you clearly don't want that tobe the only way in which you get
(51:01):
help to people.
So the best way to do it isproactively.
Because after all there is nobudget for friendship.
It isn't as though you're takingscarce resources away from hip
surgeries in order to set anenvironment in which people are
encouraged to make life betterfor others.
And that includes peer groupsamong people who have a
condition.
(51:22):
You know, once you think aboutit, you say, oh, there are
almost anything we do in thedesign and delivery of
healthcare could be set up inorder to allow people to connect
more happily.
And productively andprotectively with each other.
Michael Bauman (51:37):
Yeah.
And very important, veryimportant because we do, we can
get lost in the rabbit hole ofjust trying to create the
happiness for ourselves.
And as all the research showsit's that result, you know, it's
the result of especiallyshifting your focus to the
people around you andtremendously important.
(51:57):
Before we wrap up, I did want toask cuz you've included a couple
extra things in this most recentreport.
So you include more stuff ongenetics, which is becoming
bigger area that we can actuallymeasure genes that contribute to
happiness.
And I'd love for you to talkabout that.
And then also kind of the aspectof looking at peace and harmony
as well.
(52:17):
Some of those more quote unquotelike neutral states and how that
research has been starting toget incorporated.
John Helliwell (52:23):
One of the things we're doing in more
recent reports is opening up newareas where we got chapter this
year on state capacity andanother follow up chapter on
using internet and Twitter feedsto monitor the state of people's
thinking.
On genetics, there's a, well,the chapter was called the
(52:46):
biology of happiness and thebiggest focus was on twin based
studies of of happiness.
And they find a sort of 30 to50% of the interpersonal
differences are genetic based onfraternal and identical twin
differences.
That leads some people to think,well, all these differences,
then you say, is this reallytrue?
(53:09):
And the answer is it's truebecause the twins being studied
are all being brought uptypically on 99% being brought
up, if not the sameneighborhood, at least in the
same town, at least in the samegeneral social environment.
So of course it leaves more roomfor the genetic differences to
play a bigger role or subject tothe same circumstances.
(53:31):
We find when we look atmigration, that people who move
from a country to anothercountry is big numbers.
Right?
Right.
They then end up having thehappiness of the country.
They move to.
And even the subregion of thecountry, they move to.
So that's not coming from theirgenes.
They brought their genes withthem.
(53:52):
it's their environment in whichthey live, that are the primary
things.
And these people are sometimesmoving from an average to of
three to seven or going fromseven to five or something.
These are big changes that arehappening.
So the important thing to lookand the most positive thing
important thing to come out ofthe genetics chapter was to
emphasize people really aredifferent.
(54:14):
You know, we're looking atnational averages, a lot of
these things, but actually howyou provide a program to help
people.
You really, we do wanna have alot of varieties of what you
provide and how you provide itto reflect people's different
openness and receptivity.
People can be changed.
We have a lot of neurologicalwork being done saying a lot of
(54:35):
what is regarded as basicpersonality in fact is very
subject to change.
The original genetic makeupdoesn't change, but actually the
expression of the genes doesdepend on the environment
enormously.
So there's a big geneenvironment interaction.
And so how that operates dependsa lot on the circumstances in
(54:55):
which people live.
And so to recognize thesedifferences across types of
people can then lead you tothink of a better set, a way of
setting up a workplace even,right.
I mean, you can have horses forcourses.
You don't have to have onescheme that works for everybody.
On the Peace and harmonyquestions.
I think quite clearly, thepeople who proposed this edition
(55:16):
in the first place were sayingthat when you put in these
Eastern value type questions,which is to what extent do you
feel a sense of peace in yourlife?
And the one about value othersversus yourself.
That was another one.
And they were expecting to findthose values were more, were
(55:37):
found more in the east Asiancultures where they had been
fact been placed on a, more ofmore central in terms of how
life is described.
Well, of course, what we foundis we found so often in other
aspects of life, that thesethings are universal.
They matter to everybody.
And it turns out that by andlarge, the societies that have
(55:58):
done best in this creatingenvironment where people do care
about each other.
It both feeds them to be caringabout others, as well as they're
better societies cuz people docare about others.
So the Nordic countries, whichroutinely five of them are
almost always in the top 10.
They have the highest globalaverages for not only trust in
(56:22):
others, in return of wallets andtrust to their public
institutions, but a sense ofbalance in their lives sense
that it's more important to lookafter others and to look after
yourself.
And so thanks to this survey wenow are able to show that these
things are important all overthe world.
And it's a positive thing thatfor a culture to emphasize
(56:44):
these, because we know they'reimportant and it's wrong to
ignore them.
Michael Bauman (56:49):
So what specifically, I mean, you
mentioned some of the things,what specifically are the Nordic
countries doing?
And I wanna ask this in atwo-prong way.
So, you know, we have thisresearch, we have the countries
and we can see these countriesrank consistently.
Like it's not a one-off thing.
They rank consistently higher.
So what are they doing?
But then also, how can we changeboth our environment and our
(57:11):
systems to better reflect thingsthat promote happiness and then
also on an individual level orcommunity level?
How can we go about doing thatmaybe as an example from the
Nordic to countries or justsomething else that you wanna
leave the audience with?
John Helliwell (57:26):
Successful development was typically
regarded in more income relatedterms.
But the World Happiness Reporthas said systematically, these
are not the richest countries ofthe world, but they're
systematically the happiestcountries in the world.
And so they become a focus forattention partly tourism, but
most importantly, people aresaying, what is going on there?
(57:49):
What is different about it?
And I say, well, it turns outthe happiest societies generally
are for people care about eachother.
And so all of these measures of"other regarding" are higher in
those countries.
Each one has got its own way,reason for how it ended up that
way.
And then people sometimes tryand dismiss that and say, these
(58:10):
are homogeneous countries andthey don't have immigrants.
And so on.
Well, of course that's falsethere they're all five countries
are among the top 20% ofimmigrant receiving countries in
the world.
They all have double digitforeign born in their capital
cities.
And they all do a better jobthan most countries at
integrating their immigrants andcaring about them.
(58:30):
Cuz that's the way you treatpeople.
And many of them have beenthrough very hard times as you
know, in, in different ways.
And the hard times in factreward cooperation, because when
things are tough, you reallywanna be able to count on other
people.
And that's, it's one of thereasons why in many societies,
(58:51):
people are happier in citiesthan they are.
I mean, in the rural areas than,oh, it's like Yeah.
Well, I mean, in the number ofdeveloping countries, they are
happier in the cities and therural areas.
Cuz a lot of the rural areas arepretty tough places and the, but
in the Western industrialcountries, for sure the rural
areas are happier in part cuzthe cities are very busy places
(59:13):
where the social contacts aretake more effort to do.
Isn't it?
We will never.
Make them that we can't makethem, but that without thinking
about it, they'll fray while inthe rural areas and especially
those with harsh climates youhave to rely on each other.
And so you, you get that senseof community because you get
repeated interactions, which isa, are a good thing, but you
(59:34):
also get more actual physicalnecessity to work together for
survival.
And so that's been important inthe nor partly important in the
Nordic countries.
And the, so it's a confluence ofthings each of which is
exportable.
So it isn't as though you,everyone wants to go to, should
go to Helsinki to be happy.
(59:55):
These are exportable secrets.
And of course, if you tried toput a billion people in
Helsinki, good bye Helsinki.
So the whole point is you haveto export the ideas and
everything that they do.
There can be done anywhere.
And it isn't expensive.
Michael Bauman (01:00:11):
Yeah.
And I had another guest on thisshow.
Her name is Jessica JoelleAlexander, and she wrote the
Danish way of parenting which isthe most sold parenting book of
all time.
And it actually gets into, Iwould highly recommend it.
It gets into some of thesethings, even the concepts that
they have, like when she'stalking about in Denmark, they
just have a concept, like a wordspecifically for the ability to
(01:00:32):
rest well within yourself.
And I'm like, that's amazing.
And they teach, you know, intheir classrooms, they have a
class on if somebody's hurting,how do you comfort them?
Right.
So they actually like haveclasses and like it's built
around empathy.
It's built around like insteadof competition and, you know,
just all these differentvariables.
And like you said it'sexportable.
(01:00:53):
So credible, incredible stuff.
Is there anything that you wantto leave the audience here
before we wrapped up tremendousamount of insight?
I mean, it's amazing what youdo.
I love the conversation.
Is there anything you wannaleave the audience before we
finish?
John Helliwell (01:01:06):
Richard Layard has a nice way of putting it.
He says, if you really want tobe happy, your objective should
be to make someone else happy.
And so you get your ownhappiness by indirection because
humans are essentiallycooperators and they're happier
when they cooperate and everyonewins.
Michael Bauman (01:01:25):
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
And I'll put I'll put the linksto the World Happiness Report in
the show notes.
Cuz I recommend everybody checkit out.
It's incredibly fascinating.
Read the chapters, read theresearch behind it.
It's amazing.
So thank you so much, John.
really appreciate it.
And thanks from everybody thatyou've helped around the world
as well.
John Helliwell (01:01:45):
My pleasure.
Together we can make a happierworld.
Michael Bauman (01:01:48):
Absolutely.
Before you go, I would love it.
If you actually just shared thisepisode with a friend, I'm sure.
While you were listening, youknow, someone just popped into
your head and you're like, oh,they would probably like this as
well.
So it's really easy.
You just click the share buttonon either the website or
whatever podcast platform you'reon and send it over to them.
And chances are, they'llprobably like it, too until next
(01:02:08):
time, keep engineering yoursuccess.
/What was striking the likelihood of your
(00:03):
wallet being returned was muchmore important to people's life
evaluations than whether theywere safe in the streets or
whether they thought they wereat risk of mental health.
Or being unemployed or being inill health.
It's quite extraordinary.
Not that these other thingsdon't count, they account a lot,
but the idea of living in asociety where people watch your
(00:24):
back makes it much easier foryou to deal with the bad things
that happen, right?
Michael Bauman (01:11):
Hello everybody.
Welcome back to SuccessEngineering.
I'm your host, Michael Bauman.
So it's been a couple of weekssince I last population episode.
I apologize for that.
I've been launching mymastermind for entrepreneurs and
as some of you guys know,launching, uh, mastermind can be
a little bit crazy.
So that's, The reason for that,but I wanted to come out with a
bang.
(01:31):
So the next three episodes, Ireally wanted to focus on
happiness and wellbeing and whatthe research actually shows
about what factors contribute toour happiness.
And so to do that, I invitedthree.
so not one, but three of theco-editors of the World
Happiness Report onto my show.
And so the World HappinessReport, it's a landmark survey
(01:53):
of the state of globalhappiness.
It's actually been running for adecade now.
So this was its 10th yearanniversary.
It ranks 156 countries by howhappy their citizens perceive
themselves to be.
Landmark, massive amounts ofstatistical data around what
actually makes us happiness.
And then they've shown in thisreport that six factors
(02:15):
contribute to about 75% of thevariability between countries.
And so we'll get into that.
So the first episode, I'mactually gonna rerun.
One that I had done, before withJohn Helliwell.
He's the editor of,the WorldHappiness Report.
Like I mentioned, professorEmeritus of Economics at
University of British Columbia,distinguished Senior Fellow at
the Canadian Institute forAdvanced Research.
(02:36):
He's one of the first.
Economists to actually begin toresearch happiness and how that
affects economics and even GDPsof countries.
He's one of the first people todo that.
So I wanna re-release thisepisode because we talk a lot
about the structure of it, thedifferent factors that affect
happiness, how the data iscollected.
Um, so it gives you a reallygood idea of what the World
(02:58):
Happiness Report is.
And then in the next twoepisodes, we will, we will dive
into some of the otherco-editors of the World
Happiness Report.
,Dr.
Lara Aknin and Lord RichardLayard to expand on different
aspects of happiness, wellbeing,mental health, all around the
world.
So Dr.
Lara Aikman is distinguishedprofessor of Psychology, Simon
Fraser, former fellow withCanadian Institute for Advanced
(03:20):
Research, she holds a PhD socialpsychology chair of the Mental
Health and Wellbeing Task Forceof Lance at COVID 19 commission,
which we'll talk about in ourepisode as well for next week.
Um, and her research really.
Around happiness and generosityand how those two things are
linked together.
She's been published in a ton ofjournals, science, nature, human
(03:42):
Behavior, Lance at PublicJournal, journal Personality,
and then a lot of theinternational media outlets such
as cbc, cnn, New York Times,wall Street, that kind of thing.
And then the one after that willrelease Lord Richard Layard so
he has worked for most of hislife to understand how he can
reduce unemployment, reduceinequality.
Um, he's one of the firsteconomists to work on happiness.
(04:04):
And then he is the founder forthe Center for Economic
Performance at London School ofEconomics.
He's written multiple books onhappiness from happiness,
lessons from a new science tothrive, how we can secure a
better deal for mental health.
And again, we'll talk aboutthat.
And then, um, the latest book,can we be Happier?
He started Action for Happiness,which is incredible.
It's an international movementto promote a happier way of
(04:27):
living.
And then, like I mentioned,co-editor of the World Happiness
Report.
So the list just goes on and onand on.
So this is like I said, the 10thyear for the World Happiness
Report.
In 2012, the United NationsGeneral Assembly proclaimed
March 20th so Monday today asthe International Day of
Happiness.
So there's no better day thantoday to release, start to
(04:47):
release these episodes.
So I know you're gonna get a tonout of this.
Um, and it's so fascinating tounderstand what the research
actually says about what arethese top six factors that
contribute to our happyhappiness.
Um, and you'll learn all that.
You're not gonna be disappointedand then I would highly
recommend actually just goingand checking out the report.
It's, it's amazing.
(05:07):
Full of just tons of superfascinating, super, interesting
information.
You can dothat@worldhappiness.report and
there's tons of stuff.
In there.
It'll show you the differencesbetween countries and why some
rank higher and lower and whatvariables are contributed to
that.
And then also this year they'vealso started to include work on
genetics and how that affectshappiness.
(05:29):
Looking at social media and thelike, words that we use on
social media and can that beused to as a general proxy for
the happiness of that, thatregion, that area, that country.
Super fascinating stuff.
So definitely go and check that.
Um, again, worldhappiness.report.
Amazing.
So let's dive into this episode.
(05:49):
Like I said, it's a rerun frombefore, but I'll talk with John
Helliwell we will get into thebackground, the origin story,
the World Happiness Report.
You guys are gonna love it.
So here we go.
I have the incredible honor ofhaving John Helliwell.
He's a professor emeritus ofeconomics at the University of
British Columbia.
A distinguished senior fellow atthe Canadian Institute for
(06:10):
Advanced Research.
I could literally spend thewhole podcast episode talking
about his accomplishments andawards and incredible things
he's done, but he's the editorfor the World Happiness Report.
So this is a landmark survey, ofthe state of global happiness
that ranks 156 countries by howhappy their citizens perceive
themselves to be.
That's actually been running,this is the 10th year
(06:32):
anniversary for it.
A lot of times we talk abouthappiness and we think that
different things make adifference in terms of moving
the needle on it, but he knows,right.
He's studied it for longer thaneven those 10 years.
It's incredible.
So this is the science aboutwhat makes people happy across
internationally, globally.
So really excited to have you onthis show here.
Welcome to the show, John
John Helliwell (06:52):
Pleasure to be here.
Michael Bauman (06:54):
Absolutely.
So I wanna start and just kindof dip our toes into a little
bit of your background.
So, I mean, you did a ton ineconomics, you were studying
economics for quite a while.
You got your doctor's ofphilosophy in economics, you
know, your thesis was on theinvestment process at Oxford,
but I'm curious, you know, youhad all this background in
economics.
What happened to shift you fromstudying economics to the
(07:18):
integration of economics andhappiness, and then what you're
doing currently?
John Helliwell (07:23):
It was like a lot of these things,
happenstance.
During the years I was in thevisiting chair of Canadian
studies at Harvard, we had aregular seminar and one of the
members of that internationalrelations group was Robert
Putnam.
And he was presenting in thatseminar his Italian book in the
(07:44):
early nineties.
And then working later towardsBowling Alone, his famous social
capital.
Well, he and I started workingon social capital together in
the early nineties spurred bywhat I found very interesting
about his Italian work.
And we worked together on Italyand also then trying to get
social capital being measured inthe United States and the UK and
(08:07):
Canada.
Michael Bauman (08:07):
Can you, can you really quick just define for our
listeners what social capital,because you know, like you
mentioned tremendous researcharound that, that was really
groundbreaking at the time.
John Helliwell (08:17):
The core variables that we ended up
studying and most people do aresome mixture of trust as a
lubricant and a consequence ofgood social connections and
social connections themselves.
So that most of the empiricalwork on social capital uses
either measures of trust ormeasures the extent to which
people connect with each other.
(08:39):
And Putnam was putting togetherUS surveys.
And at one stage he, he said, ashe was preparing the final
manuscript for Bowling Alonethat people were happier in
states that had higher levels ofsocial capital.
And I said, what do you meanthey're happier?
And he said, well, in thissurvey, we use that they've got
measures of how happy people arewith their lives.
(09:01):
And I said, they do And I said,well, that's what we've been
doing without, for two or threecenturies in economics, because
in the absence of such measures,we inferred what we called
utility, which is what will makepeople happy, but we just
guessed what it was.
We didn't have any way ofmeasuring it.
(09:22):
And so I said, as I had doneearlier with the borders work,
this is really important becausewe were trying to value social
capital.
Well, you could imagine that'spretty hard to do unless you got
some way of convert.
Its value into terms that peoplecan relate to.
So think what you can do.
(09:43):
If you've got measures of howmuch people value their lives,
how much they rate their lives.
And it's a scale of zero to 10,typically, how satisfied are you
with your life or where's yourlife on a ladder?
And you can then take these dataand then look at people who have
different measures of socialcapital, different types of
(10:07):
social capital in theirenvironment and see how much it
matters to them in their lifesatisfaction.
And we know about their income,how much does that matter to
them?
And we know about whetherthey're employed or unemployed,
married, or single many thingswe know about the respondents
and we can work out how muchchanging each one of those would
do to their level ofsatisfaction.
(10:29):
So right away, we were then ableto value social capital and find
out how much it matters topeople to be in a high trust
environment.
And we found of course, amongother things, when we dug into
the global data that the kindsof social connections people
have in their neighborhoods, intheir communities, in their
(10:51):
families and on the job areextraordinarily important to
their lives.
And previously people eitherdidn't know that, or if they
thought it was true, didn'trealize how important it was.
So it's changed the way in whicha lot of people in employers,
workers people running variouskinds of organizations, how they
(11:12):
see their jobs.
Michael Bauman (11:14):
And I mean, it's just tremendous what you're
talking about.
Cuz a lot of this stuff is, youknow, quote unquote common
knowledge at this point, but itwasn't at that point and you and
Putnam and you know, ed diner,people like that, you're the
people that were doing the workthat was actually showing the
tangible evidence, looking athow important this is.
And especially, you know, when Iwork with entrepreneurs it's
(11:34):
interesting because we, youknow, a lot of times they spend
all their life going this is mydefinition of wealth or this is
my definition of success like Iget this amount of money, but
once you start realizing there'sother ways to, if you want to
classify it as be wealthy inlife or rich in life, and that's
the term like even socialcapital, you know, you have
regular monetary capital and youalso have social capital.
(11:56):
What if you optimized for that?
And we'll get into, you know,the World Happiness Report and
how like four out of those sixmeasures are actually on the
social side.
And how they make more of adifference.
But, I wanna dive into that andkind of get an idea around the
origin of the World HappinessReport and how Bhutan actually
played a role in that as well.
And you can share about thecountry of Bhutan and why it's
(12:18):
important in terms of happinessresearch.
John Helliwell (12:20):
Well, the whole the World Happiness Report has
its roots in several places.
One is one we've already talkedabout the availability of data
about how happy people arearound the world that was made
possible by the Galluporganizations starting in 2005.
The Gallup world pole and EdDeiner and Danny Kahnmann and I
(12:45):
were all involved in helpingthem get that started.
And, I'd spent a lot of timeworking with the data during
that period over that sameperiod of years Bhutan had been
running a series of grossnational happiness conferences
based on the Kings earlier viewthat, and it was a bit of a joke
(13:05):
in a way in way of putting itthat way that were after gross
national happiness instead ofgross national product.
Well, of course what do you meanby gross?
Et cetera.
But the point was to change themetrics that you think of when
you're looking at the quality oflife.
And so I'd been going to severalof their conferences who drew
together, people who were tryingto change lives for the better.
(13:30):
People running there was abarefoot college in India.
I remember one of theseconferences where they have
essentially empowering people inthese far away villages to
create their own water systems,but more important, linking them
up through solar power to theworld.
And he had a very broad agenda.
(13:52):
He said, when he was doing this,he was gonna say, change the
social structure as well as thetechnical structure.
And he went into the villagesand said, who are the people who
are least status in this?
And I'm going to make them moststatus by making them the people
who are.
Trained to deliver and operatethese solar systems.
(14:14):
So it was always a woman andoften somebody who'd come from
an unfavor background and hethen brought them along and
changed the structure of thevillages at the same time he was
changing their access to theworld.
Well, you could imagine the thegross national happiness
movement and conferences werefilled with projects and people
(14:35):
like that.
And the other strand of this,we've got the data, we then have
a Bhutan clearly taking thisseriously and onto the world
stage.
Then the third was the bringingthat forward as a United Nations
resolution in 2011 jointly byprime minister, Thinley of
(14:56):
Bhutan.
And he made this resolution andit was facilitated very much by
Jeffrey Sachs, who was anadvisor to the secretary general
and helped smooth thatresolution with enthusiasm.
And then in the follow up tothat meeting was held in Thimpu
in July of 2011, in order toplan for a high level meeting at
(15:20):
the United nations in April of2012 at that meeting where they
had a number of experts in bothin gross national happiness side
of things and in the study ofhappiness, more generally in
other countries and in otherways and I was there both as a
user and understanding of thedata and also as being involved
(15:42):
with the Bhutan and the previousperiod.
During the course of thatmeeting it was decided, and I
think it was Jeffrey Sach'ssuggestion with the prime
minister's strong approval thatpart of this meeting, which had
a mixture of environmentalobjectives and happiness
objectives.
So it was a double agenda forthis high level meeting.
But on the happiness side thatwe would prepare a report
(16:05):
setting the scientificbackground, because if you're
gonna, if you're gonna tellcountries as the motion did,
they should take wellbeingseriously, then they have to
know what it is they're takingseriously, and something about
how to do so.
And so the science then becomecentral in order to convert,
talk into action.
So we did the first report forthat drew together.
(16:28):
This, the science had lots ofthings, that data that we
reported and it was a very big,well covered meeting at the
United nations.
And these copies of the reportjust flew off the stacks and the
reception was much more then wemight have expected.
I mean, we hoped it would beimportant because as you'll
(16:51):
remember prior to that, therewas this movement beyond GDP.
The question is what do you dobeyond?
Oh yeah.
so you have to have something toreplace it or to augment it.
And so to have some core data,well understood, well presented
around the world then givespeople something that is much
(17:11):
broader.
Then the economic variablesincludes them in a sense that
economic factors remain veryimportant, but it then gives you
an umbrella measure of wellbeingin which everything can fit.
And to then make those dataavailable, turned out to fill a
gap and a need.
That was became later.
(17:31):
It became obvious as the reportacquired currency and interest
over the years that it wasclearly filling a need.
Michael Bauman (17:39):
Absolutely.
So can you kind of lay out, youknow what, I'm sure the
listeners are really curious oflike how this data, you know,
you talked about the Gallupworld pole, so talk about how
that data is collected and howit can get a representative
sampling of data from thecountries, and then also break
down the six differentcategories that are measured and
(18:01):
how that data is typicallycollected.
So people can get an idea ofwhat we're looking
John Helliwell (18:04):
at.
Yes.
I'm delighted you ask thequestion in that way, because it
allows me to correct amisunderstanding not your part,
but in the part of manyreporters and at many websites.
And so people think the rankingwe do across countries is based
somehow on the six factors thatwe use to explain wellbeing.
(18:27):
Well, it isn't initially andalways.
Our rankings of countries arebased on the average values of
people's answer to a question.
And then we average'em overthree years to get a sample size
of roughly 3000 per country.
To that doesn't jump around forsample size reasons too much
from year.
A question asking people tothink about their lives as a
(18:48):
whole, with the best possiblelife as a 10, and the worst is a
zero.
How would they rate their lifetoday?
And of course we found quitequickly on.
That these averages differhugely around the world from
averages up close to eight insome countries and down below
three in some other countries.
And they go up and downaccording to how life really is
(19:10):
in different countries.
So, the first year we presentedthese data and a lot of other
data and quite it naturallypeople spend a lot of time
looking at the rankings, whereis our country and how do we
relate to our neighbors?
And so how do we fit in amongthe countries, in our part of
the world these days, et cetera,et cetera.
But then naturally people said,well, what is it that makes for
(19:32):
a happier country?
So we.
When dug more deeply researchhad already been built up in
using these data and other data.
So we weren't starting fromzero, but we were bringing into
the report itself starting in2013 which was the second
report, an explanation.
(19:53):
So we took the data and thentook other variables from
outside the Gallup World Polland other variables within it's
not a perfect or completeexplanation cuz we don't have
all the data you might want andyou're having to Simplified
complicated lives.
But we have found, and this isnow going back almost 10 years
that we've been doing thisastonishing level of continued
(20:15):
support in every year's data foran explanation that is
essentially based on sixfactors.
And because that's become somuch a part of what the report
says and what it's talked about,people then talk about it being
a happiness index based on thosesix factors, but it's not Yeah.
(20:35):
It's important distinction.
It's actually what people sayabout their lives.
It has nothing to do.
And we wanted to do that.
We wanted it not to be a productof experts.
We wanted to represent ademocratic collection.
The sampling comes in Gallupget, gets population
representative samples in everycountry, and then does interview
(20:55):
process, which is face to facein most countries and in the
richer countries, mainlytelephone and sometimes mixed
and asks what are more than ahundred questions of all these
people.
Wow.
And we have a choice ofvariables we use and the ones
that continue to have broadsupport year after year that two
(21:17):
first are obvious of income percapita and healthy life
expectancy, because they've beenthe poles.
for Assessing the quality ofdevelopment efforts for decades
or longer the variables that youmentioned earlier is having a
social connection contain avariety of channels.
But between them, they cover alot of the important aspects of
(21:38):
life.
The first and most important isyou have someone to count on in
times of trouble.
It's not the only way ofmeasuring your personal support
networks, but it's a good way.
And I would like it if it was along scale, it's only a yes, no.
So across country, it's just thefrequency of people who have
somebody to count on.
What's not a very good measurethen, right?
(22:00):
A lot of countries in the worldare all above 95%.
And so that you can'tdiscriminate very much about
some of the differences thatrelationship quality we like to
look at, but nonetheless itremains a very powerful
variable.
Another one is the extent towhich people think corruption is
a problem in government andindustry separate questions.
We take the average of the twoin their country.
(22:22):
Yes or no.
And then.
We ask people, to what extent doyou have a sense of freedom to
make your key life decisionsthat was discovered in this
strand of earlier research andturned out to be very powerful
and continues to be verypowerful.
And of course it's at itshighest levels in countries, not
that necessarily say freedom istheir primary objective, but
(22:46):
where everybody has enoughaccess to opportunities, which
usually then means everybodygets access to good education,
good healthcare and employmentopportunities and living
opportunities.
They tend to be open societieswhere everybody is treated
pretty equally.
You then get a big share of thepopulation that feel they're
(23:06):
free to make their key lifedecisions.
And then we have benevolence andthe measure that's used in the
report, or have you given tocharity in the last month, the
variety of other measures thatdo roughly as well.
And people are happier living insocieties where everyone is
generous.
(23:27):
They're not only happier beinggenerous themselves, but they're
happy when other people, whenthey're living in that kind of
environment.
Michael Bauman (23:33):
And then talk about how the positive affect or
positive emotions are measured,the negative affect, and then
the concept of the dystopia as abaseline as well.
John Helliwell (23:43):
Okay.
You're digging really deep.
Michael Bauman (23:45):
Yeah.
We are really getting in there!
John Helliwell (23:48):
Okay.
In the first report we said,look, there are three ways of
looking at wellbeing that havebeen established.
And a lot of it is Ed deiner'sprimary work in this field
separating life evaluations ofwhich about which we've just
spoken.
How satisfied are you with yourlife as a whole?
And there are measures ofpositive affect joy contentment
(24:09):
of a range, did you laugh a lotyesterday and so on and then
measures of negative emotions,sadness, anger misery.
Worry.
And so, we have several measuresof positive and negative
emotions.
Some people use those as primarymeasures of wellbeing.
We think they are primarymeasures, but they're not the
(24:29):
central measures.
And so as we've evolved ourexplanatory framework, we treat
these emotions, which are morevolatile than life evaluations.
So you get weekend effects withemotions.
You don't get them with lifeevaluations and so on.
But they feed in just asAristotle said, they would the
emotions feed in to determinehow happy people are with their
(24:50):
lives.
And that's we find, but we findat the national level the
average levels of positiveemotions come through more
strongly than the negative onesat the individual level.
It's more balance.
So that's the way we see thosethree measures fitting together.
The emotions are very important,but they're essentially building
blocks in which support betterlives.
(25:12):
You've asked about dystopiawell, you could imagine dystopia
is the adverse of utopia andutopia would be where everything
was for the best dystopia iswhere everything is for the
worst.
And why did we even think aboutthat in a World Happiness
Report?
It's because we wanted a waywhen we're showing that key
(25:34):
chart, which gives the overallscore for each country, and then
how much is contributed by eachof the six variables.
Well, to do that in order foreach contribution to be
positive, it has to be positiveto some zero baseline.
Well, what we use as the zerobaseline for each of those
(25:57):
variables is the country in thesample that has the lowest
value.
So one country's lowest forfreedom and other's lowest for
GDPper capita,, and other islowest for health.
We define dystopia as thecountry that has the lowest.
It isn't a real country.
Of course, that would have thelo world's lowest values of all
(26:17):
those six variables.
Now it's not the ultimatedystopia because this is only
based on the lowest actual inthe world today.
But you could imagine going backseveral centuries things
dystopia, would've been a lotworse.
So then we calculate from theseequations.
We have what the happiness levelof dystopia would be, you know?
(26:38):
What would be the level for acountry that had the world's
lowest values of each of thosesix variables.
And that's a number jumps up ordown, according to how bad
things are going.
And these situations, you know,when you get the complete
falling apart of GDP inVenezuela, that's drops dystopia
down on, on that front and soon.
And then every other country hasa level that's higher than that
(27:01):
because at least one variablethey're above the dystopia.
And so it allows us to decomposehow happy a country is relative
to a baseline.
So it was just in order to makeour results more understandable
and more, more easily presentedthat we had to get this notion
(27:22):
of a baseline.
And we called it dystopia forthe obvious reason that it's the
country that in which everythingis going is.
Badly as it has done anywhere inthe world.
Michael Bauman (27:33):
yeah.
And even in this conversation,you can get a tiny little piece
of the scope of this report.
And I would highly recommendeverybody check it out the World
Happiness Report, cuz you cansee as as he's mentioning, you
can see that on this graph,basically you'll see a chart and
you'll see the overall lifeevaluations and you can kind of
see how much of that iscontributed by these different
(27:54):
six areas.
And correct me if I'm wrong, butthose factors, those six areas
you guys have shown explainabout 85% of the difference in
national the life evaluations.
Is that
John Helliwell (28:04):
correct?
Well, we'd be happy if it was85.
It somewhere between 75 and alittle more.
Okay.
So 75% that's over, over theyears and across countries.
Michael Bauman (28:15):
Yeah.
So we're gonna, we're gonna keepdiving in here to, I mean,
there's so much stuff to unpack.
We can talk for a very longtime, but I do wanna talk about
the aspect of trust andtrustworthiness and the
dropping, dropping wallets with$20 in them, around the city and
how that played in with theresearch that you guys were
doing
John Helliwell (28:35):
well, that came into my research interest and
agenda before the worldhappiness support back before
the turn of the century, we werehaving a big survey in Canada
grant sponsored survey, where wewere measuring social capital
and a whole lot of other things.
And some of my surveyingcolleagues hardnosed said this
(28:55):
classical question that had beenintroduced in the 1950s by
almond and Verba and their studyof democracy then was in
general, do you think people canbe trusted or on the other hand,
you can't be too careful indealing with people knows a zero
one scale.
And they said, we are not surewhat people really mean by that
question.
(29:16):
And you know, what does it, sohow do we interpret it?
So we then said, all right,let's ask a very specific
question where we'll knowexactly what it means.
And what's more there alreadyhad been some examples of people
dropping wallets with money inthem, in various cities of the
world, done by the readersdigest.
(29:37):
And it turns out the averagevalues of wallet return were as
Steve Nack and others showed,were in fact correlated with
general trust measures.
So we knew we were tapping intothe same kind of space we, since
of course have realized it'smuch more than whether other
people can be trusted becauseyou're not just saying, are they
(29:57):
gonna do something dishonest ornot?
It's are they going to step outof their daily lives to improve
my life?
So it's very activelybenevolence, not just a
trustworthiness in the narrowestsense of following rules and not
doing me an injustice.
These are people going muchbeyond what's required in order
(30:17):
to do you a favor.
So, it, we then asked thisquestion how likely is it your
wallet would be returned if itwas found by a police officer, a
stranger or a neighbor?
Well, this was rather nicebecause the answers differed of
course and they differed bydifferent amounts in different
societies and at differenttimes.
So they became a way of judgingthe quality of public
(30:38):
institutions, as well as theneighborhoods in which people
worked as well as some notionabout the structure of life in a
whole, in the country.
And so it was turned out to bevery valuable.
Michael Bauman (30:50):
Talk about the difference there that was shown
between how many wallets wereactually returned and how many
people said that they werereturned and how that's actually
really important in terms of thelens that we view the world.
John Helliwell (31:03):
Yes.
Well, there, there were only asmall number of countries and
cities involved in the firstexperiments, very small civil,
fortunately two or three yearsago, there was a big survey
done, not quite dropping walletsin the way we've done in other
experiments, but pretty closelarge samples of hundreds of
people in each of 40 countries.
(31:25):
And so we have those data andwe're able to compare.
We also then got the Galluporganization to agreed to ask
the wallet question in one oftheir surveys.
In fact, the way we got it intothe whole round most recently
was as part of the Lloyd'sfoundation, Lloyd's register
foundation risk survey.
And they'd asked me for help indesigning their risk survey.
(31:49):
And I said, well, you know, allof your questions, there are all
about things going wrong.
Don't you think you might have.
It would be useful and importantto ask questions about positive
risks.
What are the chances ofsomething going well?
Because lotteries are aboutsomething going well, accidents
may be about something goingwrong and it would be nice to
(32:11):
have both of those in there.
So, on that basis, they agreedto put the wallet question in
that special round.
Well, that was especiallyvaluable.
First of all, it gave us a fullround.
We, 10 years ago, we had apartial round of two thirds of
the countries.
So we already knew roughly whatwe were getting, but here now we
had a full round which had anoverlap of 39 countries, which
(32:34):
actually had dropped wallets inroughly the same year.
And so we could compare actualreturn with return.
What's more because this was inthe Lloyd's Register Foundation,
Risk Poll, they asked thisquestion with the same answer
scale as how likely is yourwallet to be returned.
(32:55):
And then the same answer range.
They said, how likely are you tobe subject to violent crime?
How likely are you to suffermental health problems?
So we knew a variety of thingsthat bad things that could
happen.
And we also knew the walletreturned and what was striking.
(33:15):
When we put these together isbecause now these rest of the
same people on the same scale,that the likelihood of your
wallet being returned was muchmore important to people's life
evaluations than whether theywere safe in the streets or
whether they thought they wereat risk of mental health.
So, wow.
And, or being unemployed orbeing in ill health.
(33:38):
It's quite extraordinary.
Not that these other thingsdon't count, they account a lot,
but the idea of living in asociety where people watch your
back, of course, we know beingin a society where people watch
your bac makes it much easierfor you to deal with the bad
things that happen, right?
If you're in an accident or anykind of tough situation, you
(33:59):
wanna be with people who worktogether to deal with it.
So there's an interaction.
Wow.
Let me get finally to yourquestion about the actual return
and the expected return, becausewe knew we had the actual rate
of return of the wallets and theexpect.
That was one of the advantagesof the question.
Of course you knew exactlybecause it was such a precise
(34:22):
question.
You knew it was being askedabout.
You could run an experiment thatactually said not just so you
can find out across countries,whether it's correlated, but
whether people in general aretoo pessimistic or too
optimistic.
About the benevolence of thepeople around them.
And we found in this latestglobal study, as we found in
(34:44):
earlier, countries studies inparticular countries but on
average people expected theirwallet to be returned about half
as frequently as it actually wasreturned.
In other words, people are muchmore generous than their fellow
citizens think they are And soyou say, why would that be?
Well, of course, one of thelikely answers is in the media,
(35:06):
you hear about bad thingshappening, typically done by bad
people.
And so you overestimate thefrequency of bad events and the
overestimate, the frequency ofbad people.
And so people are just simplynot aware of how strong the
social fabric is in which theylived.
Now.
It's not equally strongeverywhere, but the point is
(35:29):
almost everywhere.
It's stronger than people think.
Michael Bauman (35:32):
And that's just, I mean, it's just the insight in
there is just tremendous.
Because it really is it's.
I mean, how, it's, how you viewthe entire world.
Do you view people around youas, like you said, you know, do
they have your back?
And unfortunately, it's half aslikely to rate that, you know,
as they have my back, as inreality actually shows and
anybody that's doneinternational travel, it's a
similar kind of thing.
(35:52):
Like, you'll hear the negativethings that are happening in a
particular country, but when youget there, most of the time, the
people are like lovely andhospitable, even more so than
you know, maybe your neighborsback home.
And it's extraordinary to seethat just tremendous amount of
Generosity, goodness, kindness,support, trust, things that
you're talking about.
So I wanna actually get intothat specifically with COVID
(36:13):
right.
So we had this massive globalpandemic.
It has just, I mean, still farreaching effects and we tend to
view it through this negativelens, you know, and obviously
there's tons of negative stuffthat happened, but talk about
kind of the pandemic ofbenevolence that's going on as
well.
And, you know, maybe even getinto some of the suicide rates
and things like that, thatdifferent terms of expectations
(36:35):
that we have.
John Helliwell (36:36):
There was a lot of of thinking about what we
would find in the report for2020, which was the first year
of COVID, because there'd been alot of indicators of calls on
various kinds of help lines.
And of course people's lives hadbeen turned upside down that
they couldn't work.
They couldn't meet with theirfriends, all the things that
support a good life or many ofthem were simply torn.
(36:59):
So the assumption would bepeople's life evaluations would
be equally shattered and wefound that wasn't the case.
And so then you have to sort oftry and unpack it and see what
was supporting life evaluationsduring this period?
And in general, it was the kindof things that we saw in our
daily lives, but we probablydidn't think of them as being as
(37:21):
important as they are, that the.
Face to face contacts, which allthe research showed are terribly
important.
But what people did under COVIDis they developed meetings like
this one across the world whereyou actually can be face to face
with someone and connect in away that they hadn't done
(37:41):
before.
And you found it within familiesand neighborhoods as well, that
there were actual connectionsestablished that weren't there
before There was a UK programfor putting out a call for
volunteers to help theirneighbors.
You know, getting groceriesmedicines checking check-ins and
so on the call was dramaticallyoversubscribed.
(38:04):
They had to shut it off in days.
It was the biggest assembly ofvolunteer effort since the
second world war peopleimmediately wanted to help.
Well, we already know of coursethat the wallet finders are as
happy as the people who havetheir wallets found or who feel
(38:25):
that it would be to live in asociety where, you know, other
people are ready to come out Andwhat natural disasters can do
and we found this with lookingat earthquakes and fires and
previous diseases and tsunamis,and so on that.
It gives people a chance toactually test and see the
(38:46):
quality of the social fabric inwhich they're living.
And because they previouslythought it wasn't as good as it
is.
And the disaster brings out thefabric as it is, then people are
surprised by how benevolent arethe actions of others.
And of course that makes themhappier to see that.
So it's one of the good thingsthat can happen from bad things
(39:09):
is that it gives you a chance tosee if you've underestimated
benevolence.
Then you find yourself morebenevolent feeling better about
your life than other peoples.
Well, That turns out to be veryimportant, because if you think
you're in a high trustenvironment and see it, you
yourself are then more likely toreach out than even than you
(39:31):
were before because you nolonger think of a stranger as a
stranger, but as a friend, youhaven't met yet.
You change your attitude.
And another helping hand in thatwas caused by the fact that
people weren't going off toMachu Pichu in 2020 and 21, they
were walking in theirneighborhoods.
And in the course of that, theywere establishing human
(39:54):
connections with their neighborsof a sort they hadn't had
before.
And you'll find that in, I don'tknow about your neighborhood but
it's true of all theneighborhoods I've talked to
people about that they're moreconnected than they were pre
COVID, even though many of therestrictions made it less easy
to make any of theseconnections.
Michael Bauman (40:12):
Yeah.
And that's interesting cuz Imean, we lived in Shanghai for
three years and we aren't rightnow, but this last year, I mean,
if you heard Shanghai basicallylocked down for three months
straight, like you basicallycouldn't even leave your
apartment.
So we have a bunch of friendsthere and that's exactly what
they said.
I mean, obviously there's a lotof, you know, systemic things
(40:33):
and, you know, challenges and itwas a really difficult time, but
they said that about their localcommunities, like all these
people in apartment complexes,they would meet their neighbors
and they would get together andpool like their resources to go,
what food do we needcollectively so that we can
order and get these deliveries.
And people were volunteering towalk other people's dogs and I
mean, the list just goes on andon.
And so I think, I mean, andthat's what you've even seen a
(40:55):
lot of times in your research.
Or just the research in general,those things that we think will
make us happy, like winning thelottery.
A lot of times the people aremore unhappy or they return to
their baseline.
You have your hedonicadaptation.
And then the opposite side ofthings, the suffering that we
typically thinks makes usunhappy.
You know, and even in yourresearch, you talk about the
tsunami in Japan and how peopleare happier after that.
(41:18):
And tons of other examples ofthat, but the things that we
think make unhappy, actually,like you said, test the fabric
of our values.
They test the fabric of oursocial connections and they have
a way of bringing that out.
I even had a fellow on thepodcast.
He was a rugby player and thenhe had a paralyzing neck injury.
So he is paralyzed from the neckdown, but he became a mouth
(41:39):
artist and he actually said, I'mhappier now than I would've been
before.
And I wouldn't change anything,which is.
Which is really crazy.
And I'm curious even to hearyour thoughts, some of that
around suffering and it's kindof linked to happiness and how
resilience plays into thatequation?
John Helliwell (41:56):
Oh, well the example some people have said
these life evaluations don'tmean anything because something
would show obviously destroys aperson's life, like a spine
destroying accident.
And how could they possiblythere's something wrong there
they're doing adaptation and itmeans measures not any good, but
that's not the right way ofthinking about it.
(42:18):
And I think your story or therugby player was the right way
to think about it.
That in fact, it changespeople's conception of life as a
whole, and they so valuedifferent things.
It's like pressing the resetbutton and COVID has done that
for a lot of people press thereset button on life.
You'll find people actuallytalking about what are their
(42:39):
fundamental objectives now, andthey're different than they were
three years ago.
Because they've had a chance totry things differently, but also
to think things more deeply.
And so we don't have to breakour spines to get a kind of
reset button it, and there is alot of research about how much
physical disability hurtspeople's wellbeing and what
(43:00):
levels of adaptation exist.
And the evidence is pretty clearon average, it's a serious hit
to your wellbeing and therecovery is partial, but not
complete.
And the more damage you are, themore it affects your long term
wellbeing, that doesn't threatenthe reality of these stories,
but there's a balance of peoplefor whom the injury is destroys
(43:24):
their conception of their livesand they never do recover that
And so those are people whodon't have that resilience and
that adaptability, and there'ssome people who have so much and
refocus their lives, that theycan come quite honestly, and
have a higher level of lifesatisfaction than they did
before.
It doesn't mean that thesecircumstances don't matter.
It's just that people differ alot in their ability to discover
(43:47):
new paths that may indeed bebetter than the ones they know
before There's a fellow namedRandy Nest.
Who's a great specialist in thepower of unhappiness.
And his point is cuz he's apsychiatrist and he deals with
people who've had their lifehope shattered because they
didn't get the job they wanted.
They didn't get their tenure ata university posting.
(44:09):
They didn't get their celloistposition in an orchestra and
they have to sort of go throughall this terrible unhappiness..
The unhappiness can then be aroot to a rethinking of the
lives.
And so that's the positive roleof unhappiness that in fact,
these unhappiness bad things canin fact, force you into a
(44:30):
situation where you rethinkwhat's important and how to get
there and who you can trust andexpect to help you get there.
Michael Bauman (44:37):
That's huge, cannot be overstated to that
aspect of who you can trust tohelp you get there.
Can you talk about, you know, soCOVID as well was very isolating
in a lot of ways and people dotalk about the kind of the
epidemic of loneliness andthings like that.
Can you talk about yourperspective on loneliness as
well, and even the reality ofhow COVID affected it?
John Helliwell (44:59):
Well, the sort of standard measures about, do
you have someone to count on,which is one measure of
loneliness, but there are lotsof others have not been damaged
very much in, in the raw data.
And it's in part, cuz peoplehave substituted other forms of
connection for the ones thatwere cut and finding some of
them to be effective.
I have resisted from thebeginning, this notion of an
(45:22):
epidemic of loneliness, cuz itthen creates in general.
See if you come from the side ofpositive psychology you see how
important it is to measurethings like wallet return rather
than, or in addition to risk ofillness or risk of being mugged
in the streets.
Not that they aren't relevant,but if you focus only on things
(45:42):
that are going badly, thenyou'll ignore ways of improving
lives in a deeper way.
Well, Loneliness in my view,I've talked to public health
conferences in this vein becauseof course it's in the public
health field where this epidemicof loneliness is talked about,
cuz epidemics are a good way ofgetting attention.
(46:04):
I said, if you think there's anepidemic of loneliness, what you
need is not a treatment, but youneed a vaccine and the vaccine
should be taken by everybody.
And the vaccine is a friend andpeople who have friends are not
lonely.
They can be alone, but becausethey've got the friends and
people to count on and easy andpowerful connections, they're
(46:27):
never lonely, and so you don'twait until someone's lonely and
then find them a friend that'stoo late.
You want to.
Produce an environment.
So that's why I say you don'twant a minister of loneliness.
You don't need a minister offriendship, which you need is
every ministry thinking aboutthe way in which they do their
policies and every companythinking about the way in which
(46:50):
they operate, that teams aremore productive, the more
friendly they are.
We have a lot of evidence aboutthe degree of verticality and a
corporate structure as apowerful question in the Gallup
daily poll.
And do you think of yourimmediate work superior as a
more as a partner or a boss?
And of course the more verticalstructure you think of them as a
(47:12):
boss and the flatter one, andthey're much happier that way.
And the weekend effects that arecommon in a boss environment,
fade away in a partnershipenvironment.
And that turns out to be veryimportant.
Michael Bauman (47:24):
And that's why I wanted to ask you about that,
cuz I saw that quote on doing myresearch, you know, loneliness
doesn't need a cure, you need avaccine.
And I think it's reallyimportant because you don't
want, like you mentioned, youdon't wanna be finding a friend
when you need it in a caraccident, right?
Like you don't wanna be like,oh, now I need a friend.
Like you wanna have the networkand the social support before
that.
So that, that act helps mitigatesome of the effects of whatever
(47:48):
ends up happening in life.
So I appreciate your insight andwanted to talk to you about
that.
The other thing I wanted to diveinto, and I know you have a
strong opinion about this aswell, on pursuing individual
happiness.
So let's say like, I wanna behappier and I'm like, okay I'm
gonna go about creating my lifeto be happier.
What are your thoughts aboutthat?
John Helliwell (48:07):
Well, it turns out it's once again, it's the
wrong way, because it's got mefocus and we know that the
people who actually end uphappier are not the ones with
have a me focus, but have a, wefocus or an even a other's
focus.
There, there was a, an extra setof questions sponsored by a
(48:28):
Japanese foundation in the, arecent world, having Gallup
world poll.
And in the most recent worldhappiness support, we had a
chapter explaining the results.
And one of these questions was,"In general, do you think your
focus should be helping othersor helping your self and
family?" And people who hadtheir focus on others were
(48:48):
happier, even though as it were,their objectives were not to
help themselves.
And that, I mean, there's lotsof other evidence on pro-social
behaviors that people who haveresources and use them to help
others are happier than helpthem themselves.
But this focus on getting thingsright for everybody rather than
(49:12):
targeted to waiting untilsomething goes wrong and then
trying to fix it is verypowerful.
So it should be true.
I've talked to mental healthpeople about this issue that
you, it isn't as though you havecognitive behavioral therapy and
medicines, and you bring themout in some mix.
When your patients come in.
(49:32):
GP's who are the first line inall of these meetings of, you
know, they're the people who endup sending people to
psychiatrists, they should bethemselves asking people, how is
your social life?
How happy are you?
These positive questions shouldbe asked and encouraged.
So you know that you don't just,like they say, walk 10,000 steps
(49:56):
a day, start 10 elevatorconversations in a day.
They need people need advice andencouragement in order to do
things that'll improve lives forthemselves and others, but the
doctor would be doing this inthis context.
It's, he's really saying this isabout your long term mental
health.
This will in fact improve yourmental and physical health and
(50:16):
it will and you don't have towait until someone's sick to
give them that advice.
That advice works for everybody.
And of course it has positivespillovers as well.
And in mental health, that'sparticularly important because
if you operate positively andproactively and protectively
then people don't get in asituation where they're actively
(50:39):
and painfully lonely or wheretheir mental health needs them
to go to a professional.
If you talk to theprofessionals, they say one of
the big problems is there's astigma about mental illness.
So people won't come to us, eventhough they should.
Well, that's the point.
Once you treat it as an mentalillness and stigmatize it, then
you clearly don't want that tobe the only way in which you get
(51:01):
help to people.
So the best way to do it isproactively.
Because after all there is nobudget for friendship.
It isn't as though you're takingscarce resources away from hip
surgeries in order to set anenvironment in which people are
encouraged to make life betterfor others.
And that includes peer groupsamong people who have a
condition.
(51:22):
You know, once you think aboutit, you say, oh, there are
almost anything we do in thedesign and delivery of
healthcare could be set up inorder to allow people to connect
more happily.
And productively andprotectively with each other.
Michael Bauman (51:37):
Yeah.
And very important, veryimportant because we do, we can
get lost in the rabbit hole ofjust trying to create the
happiness for ourselves.
And as all the research showsit's that result, you know, it's
the result of especiallyshifting your focus to the
people around you andtremendously important.
(51:57):
Before we wrap up, I did want toask cuz you've included a couple
extra things in this most recentreport.
So you include more stuff ongenetics, which is becoming
bigger area that we can actuallymeasure genes that contribute to
happiness.
And I'd love for you to talkabout that.
And then also kind of the aspectof looking at peace and harmony
as well.
(52:17):
Some of those more quote unquotelike neutral states and how that
research has been starting toget incorporated.
John Helliwell (52:23):
One of the things we're doing in more
recent reports is opening up newareas where we got chapter this
year on state capacity andanother follow up chapter on
using internet and Twitter feedsto monitor the state of people's
thinking.
On genetics, there's a, well,the chapter was called the
(52:46):
biology of happiness and thebiggest focus was on twin based
studies of of happiness.
And they find a sort of 30 to50% of the interpersonal
differences are genetic based onfraternal and identical twin
differences.
That leads some people to think,well, all these differences,
then you say, is this reallytrue?
(53:09):
And the answer is it's truebecause the twins being studied
are all being brought uptypically on 99% being brought
up, if not the sameneighborhood, at least in the
same town, at least in the samegeneral social environment.
So of course it leaves more roomfor the genetic differences to
play a bigger role or subject tothe same circumstances.
(53:31):
We find when we look atmigration, that people who move
from a country to anothercountry is big numbers.
Right?
Right.
They then end up having thehappiness of the country.
They move to.
And even the subregion of thecountry, they move to.
So that's not coming from theirgenes.
They brought their genes withthem.
(53:52):
it's their environment in whichthey live, that are the primary
things.
And these people are sometimesmoving from an average to of
three to seven or going fromseven to five or something.
These are big changes that arehappening.
So the important thing to lookand the most positive thing
important thing to come out ofthe genetics chapter was to
emphasize people really aredifferent.
(54:14):
You know, we're looking atnational averages, a lot of
these things, but actually howyou provide a program to help
people.
You really, we do wanna have alot of varieties of what you
provide and how you provide itto reflect people's different
openness and receptivity.
People can be changed.
We have a lot of neurologicalwork being done saying a lot of
(54:35):
what is regarded as basicpersonality in fact is very
subject to change.
The original genetic makeupdoesn't change, but actually the
expression of the genes doesdepend on the environment
enormously.
So there's a big geneenvironment interaction.
And so how that operates dependsa lot on the circumstances in
(54:55):
which people live.
And so to recognize thesedifferences across types of
people can then lead you tothink of a better set, a way of
setting up a workplace even,right.
I mean, you can have horses forcourses.
You don't have to have onescheme that works for everybody.
On the Peace and harmonyquestions.
I think quite clearly, thepeople who proposed this edition
(55:16):
in the first place were sayingthat when you put in these
Eastern value type questions,which is to what extent do you
feel a sense of peace in yourlife?
And the one about value othersversus yourself.
That was another one.
And they were expecting to findthose values were more, were
(55:37):
found more in the east Asiancultures where they had been
fact been placed on a, more ofmore central in terms of how
life is described.
Well, of course, what we foundis we found so often in other
aspects of life, that thesethings are universal.
They matter to everybody.
And it turns out that by andlarge, the societies that have
(55:58):
done best in this creatingenvironment where people do care
about each other.
It both feeds them to be caringabout others, as well as they're
better societies cuz people docare about others.
So the Nordic countries, whichroutinely five of them are
almost always in the top 10.
They have the highest globalaverages for not only trust in
(56:22):
others, in return of wallets andtrust to their public
institutions, but a sense ofbalance in their lives sense
that it's more important to lookafter others and to look after
yourself.
And so thanks to this survey wenow are able to show that these
things are important all overthe world.
And it's a positive thing thatfor a culture to emphasize
(56:44):
these, because we know they'reimportant and it's wrong to
ignore them.
Michael Bauman (56:49):
So what specifically, I mean, you
mentioned some of the things,what specifically are the Nordic
countries doing?
And I wanna ask this in atwo-prong way.
So, you know, we have thisresearch, we have the countries
and we can see these countriesrank consistently.
Like it's not a one-off thing.
They rank consistently higher.
So what are they doing?
But then also, how can we changeboth our environment and our
(57:11):
systems to better reflect thingsthat promote happiness and then
also on an individual level orcommunity level?
How can we go about doing thatmaybe as an example from the
Nordic to countries or justsomething else that you wanna
leave the audience with?
John Helliwell (57:26):
Successful development was typically
regarded in more income relatedterms.
But the World Happiness Reporthas said systematically, these
are not the richest countries ofthe world, but they're
systematically the happiestcountries in the world.
And so they become a focus forattention partly tourism, but
most importantly, people aresaying, what is going on there?
(57:49):
What is different about it?
And I say, well, it turns outthe happiest societies generally
are for people care about eachother.
And so all of these measures of"other regarding" are higher in
those countries.
Each one has got its own way,reason for how it ended up that
way.
And then people sometimes tryand dismiss that and say, these
(58:10):
are homogeneous countries andthey don't have immigrants.
And so on.
Well, of course that's falsethere they're all five countries
are among the top 20% ofimmigrant receiving countries in
the world.
They all have double digitforeign born in their capital
cities.
And they all do a better jobthan most countries at
integrating their immigrants andcaring about them.
(58:30):
Cuz that's the way you treatpeople.
And many of them have beenthrough very hard times as you
know, in, in different ways.
And the hard times in factreward cooperation, because when
things are tough, you reallywanna be able to count on other
people.
And that's, it's one of thereasons why in many societies,
(58:51):
people are happier in citiesthan they are.
I mean, in the rural areas than,oh, it's like Yeah.
Well, I mean, in the number ofdeveloping countries, they are
happier in the cities and therural areas.
Cuz a lot of the rural areas arepretty tough places and the, but
in the Western industrialcountries, for sure the rural
areas are happier in part cuzthe cities are very busy places
(59:13):
where the social contacts aretake more effort to do.
Isn't it?
We will never.
Make them that we can't makethem, but that without thinking
about it, they'll fray while inthe rural areas and especially
those with harsh climates youhave to rely on each other.
And so you, you get that senseof community because you get
repeated interactions, which isa, are a good thing, but you
(59:34):
also get more actual physicalnecessity to work together for
survival.
And so that's been important inthe nor partly important in the
Nordic countries.
And the, so it's a confluence ofthings each of which is
exportable.
So it isn't as though you,everyone wants to go to, should
go to Helsinki to be happy.
(59:55):
These are exportable secrets.
And of course, if you tried toput a billion people in
Helsinki, good bye Helsinki.
So the whole point is you haveto export the ideas and
everything that they do.
There can be done anywhere.
And it isn't expensive.
Michael Bauman (01:00:11):
Yeah.
And I had another guest on thisshow.
Her name is Jessica JoelleAlexander, and she wrote the
Danish way of parenting which isthe most sold parenting book of
all time.
And it actually gets into, Iwould highly recommend it.
It gets into some of thesethings, even the concepts that
they have, like when she'stalking about in Denmark, they
just have a concept, like a wordspecifically for the ability to
(01:00:32):
rest well within yourself.
And I'm like, that's amazing.
And they teach, you know, intheir classrooms, they have a
class on if somebody's hurting,how do you comfort them?
Right.
So they actually like haveclasses and like it's built
around empathy.
It's built around like insteadof competition and, you know,
just all these differentvariables.
And like you said it'sexportable.
(01:00:53):
So credible, incredible stuff.
Is there anything that you wantto leave the audience here
before we wrapped up tremendousamount of insight?
I mean, it's amazing what youdo.
I love the conversation.
Is there anything you wannaleave the audience before we
finish?
John Helliwell (01:01:06):
Richard Layard has a nice way of putting it.
He says, if you really want tobe happy, your objective should
be to make someone else happy.
And so you get your ownhappiness by indirection because
humans are essentiallycooperators and they're happier
when they cooperate and everyonewins.
Michael Bauman (01:01:25):
Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
And I'll put I'll put the linksto the World Happiness Report in
the show notes.
Cuz I recommend everybody checkit out.
It's incredibly fascinating.
Read the chapters, read theresearch behind it.
It's amazing.
So thank you so much, John.
really appreciate it.
And thanks from everybody thatyou've helped around the world
as well.
John Helliwell (01:01:45):
My pleasure.
Together we can make a happierworld.
Michael Bauman (01:01:48):
Absolutely.
Before you go, I would love it.
If you actually just shared thisepisode with a friend, I'm sure.
While you were listening, youknow, someone just popped into
your head and you're like, oh,they would probably like this as
well.
So it's really easy.
You just click the share buttonon either the website or
whatever podcast platform you'reon and send it over to them.
And chances are, they'llprobably like it, too until next
(01:02:08):
time, keep engineering yoursuccess.
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