What was striking the likelihood of your wallet being returned was much more important to people's life evaluations than whether they were safe in the streets or whether they thought they were at risk of mental health. Or being unemployed or being in ill health. It's quite extraordinary. Not that these other things don't count, they account a lot, but the idea of living in a society where people watch your back makes it much easier for you to deal with the bad things that happen, right?
Hello, everybody, whether you've been listening for a while or whether this is your first time here, we are happy to have you. Before we jump into the episode, it would be awesome. If you could write a review for this show, especially on apple podcasts. So it takes less than a minute or two. It's pretty straightforward. So you click on the show, you scroll all the way down to the bottom. And there's a little button that says, write a review.
And as always, if there's an episode, you really like send it over to your friends They'll probably like it too. Thank you so much. And let's get back to the show. So welcome back to Success Engineering. I'm your host, Michael Bauman I have the incredible honor of having John Helliwell. He's a professor emeritus of economics at the University of British Columbia. A distinguished senior fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
I could literally spend the whole podcast episode talking about his accomplishments and awards and incredible things he's done, but he's the editor for the World Happiness Report. So this is a landmark survey, of the state of global happiness that ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be. That's actually been running, this is the 10th year anniversary for it.
A lot of times we talk about happiness and we think that different things make a difference in terms of moving the needle on it, but he knows, right. He's studied it for longer than even those 10 years. It's incredible. So this is the science about what makes people happy across internationally, globally. So really excited to have you on this show here. Welcome to the show, John
Pleasure to be here.
Absolutely. So I wanna start and just kind of dip our toes into a little bit of your background. So, I mean, you did a ton in economics, you were studying economics for quite a while. You got your doctor's of philosophy in economics, you know, your thesis was on the investment process at Oxford, but I'm curious, you know, you had all this background in economics.
What happened to shift you from studying economics to the integration of economics and happiness, and then what you're doing currently?
It was like a lot of these things, happenstance. During the years I was in the visiting chair of Canadian studies at Harvard, we had a regular seminar and one of the members of that international relations group was Robert Putnam. And he was presenting in that seminar his Italian book in the early nineties. And then working later towards Bowling Alone, his famous social capital.
Well, he and I started working on social capital together in the early nineties spurred by what I found very interesting about his Italian work. And we worked together on Italy and also then trying to get social capital being measured in the United States and the UK and Canada.
Can you, can you really quick just define for our listeners what social capital, because you know, like you mentioned tremendous research around that, that was really groundbreaking at the time.
The core variables that we ended up studying and most people do are some mixture of trust as a lubricant and a consequence of good social connections and social connections themselves. So that most of the empirical work on social capital uses either measures of trust or measures the extent to which people connect with each other. And Putnam was putting together US surveys.
And at one stage he, he said, as he was preparing the final manuscript for Bowling Alone that people were happier in states that had higher levels of social capital. And I said, what do you mean they're happier? And he said, well, in this survey, we use that they've got measures of how happy people are with their lives.
And I said, they do And I said, well, that's what we've been doing without, for two or three centuries in economics, because in the absence of such measures, we inferred what we called utility, which is what will make people happy, but we just guessed what it was. We didn't have any way of measuring it. And so I said, as I had done earlier with the borders work, this is really important because we were trying to value social capital.
Well, you could imagine that's pretty hard to do unless you got some way of convert. Its value into terms that people can relate to. So think what you can do. If you've got measures of how much 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 your life on a ladder?
And you can then take these data and then look at people who have different measures of social capital, different types of social capital in their environment and see how much it matters to them in their life satisfaction. And we know about their income, how much does that matter to them?
And we know about whether they're employed or unemployed, married, or single many things we know about the respondents and we can work out how much changing each one of those would do to their level of satisfaction. So right away, we were then able to value social capital and find out how much it matters to people to be in a high trust environment.
And we found of course, among other things, when we dug into the global data that the kinds of social connections people have in their neighborhoods, in their communities, in their families and on the job are extraordinarily important to their lives. And previously people either didn't know that, or if they thought it was true, didn't realize how important it was.
So it's changed the way in which a lot of people in employers, workers people running various kinds of organizations, how they see their jobs.
And I mean, it's just tremendous what you're talking about. Cuz a lot of this stuff is, you know, quote unquote common knowledge at this point, but it wasn't at that point and you and Putnam and you know, ed diner, people like that, you're the people that were doing the work that was actually showing the tangible evidence, looking at how important this is.
And especially, you know, when I work with entrepreneurs it's interesting because we, you know, a lot of times they spend all their life going this is my definition of wealth or this is my definition of success like I get this amount of money, but once you start realizing there's other ways to, if you want to classify it as be wealthy in life or rich in life, and that's the term like even social capital, you know, you have regular monetary capital and you also have social capital.
What if you optimized for that? And we'll get into, you know, the World Happiness Report and how like four out of those six measures are actually on the social side. And how they make more of a difference. But, I wanna dive into that and kind of get an idea around the origin of the World Happiness Report and how Bhutan actually played a role in that as well. And you can share about the country of Bhutan and why it's important in terms of happiness research.
Well, the whole the World Happiness Report has its roots in several places. One is one we've already talked about the availability of data about how happy people are around the world that was made possible by the Gallup organizations starting in 2005. The Gallup world pole and Ed Deiner and Danny Kahnmann and I were all involved in helping them get that started.
And, I'd spent a lot of time working with the data during that period over that same period of years Bhutan had been running a series of gross national happiness conferences based on the Kings earlier view that, and it was a bit of a joke in a way in way of putting it that way that were after gross national happiness instead of gross national product. Well, of course what do you mean by gross? Et cetera.
But the point was to change the metrics that you think of when you're looking at the quality of life. And so I'd been going to several of their conferences who drew together, people who were trying to change lives for the better. People running there was a barefoot college in India. I remember one of these conferences where they have essentially empowering people in these far away villages to create their own water systems, but more important, linking them up through solar power to the world.
And he had a very broad agenda. He said, when he was doing this, he was gonna say, change the social structure as well as the technical structure. And he went into the villages and said, who are the people who are least status in this? And I'm going to make them most status by making them the people who are. Trained to deliver and operate these solar systems.
So it was always a woman and often somebody who'd come from an unfavor background and he then brought them along and changed the structure of the villages at the same time he was changing their access to the world. Well, you could imagine the the gross national happiness movement and conferences were filled with projects and people like that. And the other strand of this, we've got the data, we then have a Bhutan clearly taking this seriously and onto the world stage.
Then the third was the bringing that forward as a United Nations resolution in 2011 jointly by prime minister, Thinley of Bhutan. And he made this resolution and it was facilitated very much by Jeffrey Sachs, who was an advisor to the secretary general and helped smooth that resolution with enthusiasm.
And then in the follow up to that meeting was held in Thimpu in July of 2011, in order to plan for a high level meeting at the United nations in April of 2012 at that meeting where they had a number of experts in both in gross national happiness side of things and in the study of happiness, more generally in other countries and in other ways and I was there both as a user and understanding of the data and also as being involved with the Bhutan and the previous period.
During the course of that meeting it was decided, and I think it was Jeffrey Sach's suggestion with the prime minister's strong approval that part of this meeting, which had a mixture of environmental objectives and happiness objectives. So it was a double agenda for this high level meeting.
But on the happiness side that we would prepare a report setting the scientific background, because if you're gonna, if you're gonna tell countries as the motion did, they should take wellbeing seriously, then they have to know what it is they're taking seriously, and something about how to do so. And so the science then become central in order to convert, talk into action. So we did the first report for that drew together.
This, the science had lots of things, that data that we reported and it was a very big, well covered meeting at the United nations. And these copies of the report just flew off the stacks and the reception was much more then we might have expected. I mean, we hoped it would be important because as you'll remember prior to that, there was this movement beyond GDP. The question is what do you do beyond? Oh yeah. so you have to have something to replace it or to augment it.
And so to have some core data, well understood, well presented around the world then gives people something that is much broader. Then the economic variables includes them in a sense that economic factors remain very important, but it then gives you an umbrella measure of wellbeing in which everything can fit. And to then make those data available, turned out to fill a gap and a need. That was became later.
It became obvious as the report acquired currency and interest over the years that it was clearly filling a need.
Absolutely. So can you kind of lay out, you know what, I'm sure the listeners are really curious of like how this data, you know, you talked about the Gallup world pole, so talk about how that data is collected and how it can get a representative sampling of data from the countries, and then also break down the six different categories that are measured and how that data is typically collected. So people can get an idea of what we're looking
at. Yes. I'm delighted you ask the question in that way, because it allows me to correct a misunderstanding not your part, but in the part of many reporters and at many websites. And so people think the ranking we do across countries is based somehow on the six factors that we use to explain wellbeing. Well, it isn't initially and always. Our rankings of countries are based on the average values of people's answer to a question.
And then we average 'em over three years to get a sample size of roughly 3000 per country. To that doesn't jump around for sample size reasons too much from year. A question asking people to think about their lives as a whole, with the best possible life as a 10, and the worst is a zero. How would they rate their life today? And of course we found quite quickly on.
That these averages differ hugely around the world from averages up close to eight in some countries and down below three in some other countries. And they go up and down according to how life really is in different countries. So, the first year we presented these data and a lot of other data and quite it naturally people spend a lot of time looking at the rankings, where is our country and how do we relate to our neighbors?
And so how do we fit in among the 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 a happier country? So we. When dug more deeply research had already been built up in using these data and other data. So we weren't starting from zero, but we were bringing into the report itself starting in 2013 which was the second report, an explanation.
So we took the data and then took other variables from outside the Gallup World Poll and other variables within it's not a perfect or complete explanation cuz we don't have all the data you might want and you're having to Simplified complicated lives. But we have found, and this is now going back almost 10 years that we've been doing this astonishing level of continued support in every year's data for an explanation that is essentially based on six factors.
And because that's become so much a part of what the report says and what it's talked about, people then talk about it being a happiness index based on those six factors, but it's not Yeah. It's important distinction. It's actually what people say about their lives. It has nothing to do. And we wanted to do that. We wanted it not to be a product of experts. We wanted to represent a democratic collection.
The sampling comes in Gallup get, gets population representative samples in every country, and then does interview process, which is face to face in most countries and in the richer countries, mainly telephone and sometimes mixed and asks what are more than a hundred questions of all these people.
Wow. And we have a choice of variables we use and the ones that continue to have broad support year after year that to first are obvious of income per capita and healthy life expectancy, because they've been the poles. Assessing the quality of development efforts for decades or longer the variables that you mentioned earlier is having a social connection contain a variety of channels. But between them, they cover a lot of the important aspects of life.
The first and most important is you have someone to count on in times of trouble. It's not the only way of measuring your personal support networks, but it's a good way. And I would like it if it was a long scale, it's only a yes, no. So across country, it's just the frequency of people who have somebody to count on. What's not a very good measure then, right? A lot of countries in the world are all above 95%.
And so that you can't discriminate very much about some of the differences that relationship quality we like to look at, but nonetheless it remains a very powerful variable. Another one is the extent to which people think corruption is a problem in government and industry separate questions. We take the average of the two in their country. Yes or no. And then.
We ask people, to what extent do you have a sense of freedom to make your key life decisions that was discovered in this strand of earlier research and turned out to be very powerful and continues to be very powerful.
And of course it's at its highest levels in countries, not that necessarily say freedom is their primary objective, but where everybody has enough access to opportunities, which usually then means everybody gets access to good education, good healthcare and employment opportunities and living opportunities. They tend to be open societies where everybody is treated pretty equally. You then get a big share of the population that feel they're free to make their key life decisions.
And then we have benevolence and the measure that's used in the report, or have you given to charity in the last month, the variety of other measures that do roughly as well. And people are happier living in societies where everyone is generous. They're not only happier being generous themselves, but they're happy when other people, when they're living in that kind of environment.
And then talk about how the positive affect or positive emotions are measured, the negative affect, and then the concept of the dystopia as a baseline as well.
Okay. You're digging really deep.
Yeah. We are really getting in there!
Okay. In the first report we said, look, there are three ways of looking at wellbeing that have been established. And a lot of it is Ed deiner's primary work in this field separating life evaluations of which about which we've just spoken. How satisfied are you with your life as a whole? And there are measures of positive affect joy contentment of a range, did you laugh a lot yesterday and so on and then measures of negative emotions, sadness, anger misery. Worry.
And so, we have several measures of positive and negative emotions. Some people use those as primary measures of wellbeing. We think they are primary measures, but they're not the central measures. And so as we've evolved our explanatory framework, we treat these emotions, which are more volatile than life evaluations. So you get weekend effects with emotions. You don't get them with life evaluations and so on.
But they feed in just as Aristotle said, they would the emotions feed in to determine how happy people are with their lives. And that's we find, but we find at the national level the average levels of positive emotions come through more strongly than the negative ones at the individual level. It's more balance. So that's the way we see those three measures fitting together. The emotions are very important, but they're essentially building blocks in which support better lives.
You've asked about dystopia well, you could imagine dystopia is the adverse of utopia and utopia would be where everything was for the best dystopia is where everything is for the worst. And why did we even think about that in a World Happiness Report? It's because we wanted a way when we're showing that key chart, which gives the overall score for each country, and then how much is contributed by each of the six variables.
Well, to do that in order for each contribution to be positive, it has to be positive to some zero baseline. Well, what we use as the zero baseline for each of those variables is the country in the sample that has the lowest value. So one country's lowest for freedom and other's lowest for GDPper capita,, and other is lowest for health. We define dystopia as the country that has the lowest. It isn't a real country.
Of course, that would have the lo world's lowest values of all those six variables. Now it's not the ultimate dystopia because this is only based on the lowest actual in the world today. But you could imagine going back several centuries things dystopia, would've been a lot worse. So then we calculate from these equations. We have what the happiness level of dystopia would be, you know? What would be the level for a country that had the world's lowest values of each of those six variables.
And that's a number jumps up or down, according to how bad things are going. And these situations, you know, when you get the complete falling apart of GDP in Venezuela, that's drops dystopia down on, on that front and so on. And then every other country has a level that's higher than that because at least one variable they're above the dystopia. And so it allows us to decompose how happy a country is relative to a baseline.
So it was just in order to make our results more understandable and more, more easily presented that we had to get this notion of a baseline. And we called it dystopia for the obvious reason that it's the country that in which everything is going is. Badly as it has done anywhere in the world.
yeah. And even in this conversation, you can get a tiny little piece of the scope of this report. And I would highly recommend everybody check it out the World Happiness Report, cuz you can see as as he's mentioning, you can see that on this graph, basically you'll see a chart and you'll see the overall life evaluations and you can kind of see how much of that is contributed by these different six areas.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but those factors, those six areas you guys have shown explain about 85% of the difference in national the life evaluations. Is that
correct? Well, we'd be happy if it was 85. It somewhere between 75 and a little more. Okay. So 75% that's over, over the years and across countries.
Yeah. So we're gonna, we're gonna keep diving in here to, I mean, there's so much stuff to unpack. We can talk for a very long time, but I do wanna talk about the aspect of trust and trustworthiness and the dropping, dropping wallets with $20 in them, around the city and how that played in with the research that you guys were doing
well, that came into my research interest and agenda before the world happiness support back before the turn of the century, we were having a big survey in Canada grant sponsored survey, where we were measuring social capital and a whole lot of other things.
And some of my surveying colleagues hardnosed said this classical question that had been introduced in the 1950s by almond and Verba and their study of democracy then was in general, do you think people can be trusted or on the other hand, you can't be too careful in dealing with people knows a zero one scale. And they said, we are not sure what people really mean by that question. And you know, what does it, so how do we interpret it?
So we then said, all right, let's ask a very specific question where we'll know exactly what it means. And what's more there already had been some examples of people dropping wallets with money in them, in various cities of the world, done by the readers digest. And it turns out the average values of wallet return were as Steve Nack and others showed, were in fact correlated with general trust measures.
So we knew we were tapping into the same kind of space we, since of course have realized it's much more than whether other people can be trusted because you're not just saying, are they gonna do something dishonest or not? It's are they going to step out of their daily lives to improve my life? So it's very actively benevolence, not just a trustworthiness in the narrowest sense of following rules and not doing me an injustice.
These are people going much beyond what's required in order to do you a favor. So, it, we then asked this question how likely is it your wallet would be returned if it was found by a police officer, a stranger or a neighbor? Well, this was rather nice because the answers differed of course and they differed by different amounts in different societies and at different times.
So they became a way of judging the quality of public institutions, as well as the neighborhoods in which people worked as well as some notion about the structure of life in a whole, in the country. And so it was turned out to be very valuable.
Talk about the difference there that was shown between how many wallets were actually returned and how many people said that they were returned and how that's actually really important in terms of the lens that we view the world.
Yes. Well, there, there were only a small number of countries and cities involved in the first experiments, very small civil, fortunately two or three years ago, there was a big survey done, not quite dropping wallets in the way we've done in other experiments, but pretty close large samples of hundreds of people in each of 40 countries. And so we have those data and we're able to compare. We also then got the Gallup organization to agreed to ask the wallet question in one of their surveys.
In fact, the way we got it into the whole round most recently was as part of the Lloyd's foundation, Lloyd's register foundation risk survey. And they'd asked me for help in designing their risk survey. And I said, well, you know, all of your questions, there are all about things going wrong. Don't you think you might have. It would be useful and important to ask questions about positive risks. What are the chances of something going well?
Because lotteries are about something going well, accidents may be about something going wrong and it would be nice to have both of those in there. So, on that basis, they agreed to put the wallet question in that special round. Well, that was especially valuable. First of all, it gave us a full round. We, 10 years ago, we had a partial round of two thirds of the countries.
So we already knew roughly what we were getting, but here now we had a full round which had an overlap of 39 countries, which actually had dropped wallets in roughly the same year. And so we could compare actual return with return. What's more because this was in the Lloyd's Register Foundation, Risk Poll, they asked this question with the same answer scale as how likely is your wallet to be returned. And then the same answer range. They said, how likely are you to be subject to violent crime?
How likely are you to suffer mental health problems? So we knew a variety of things that bad things that could happen. And we also knew the wallet returned and what was striking. When we put these together is because now these rest of the same people on the same scale, that the likelihood of your wallet being returned was much more important to people's life evaluations than whether they were safe in the streets or whether they thought they were at risk of mental health. So, wow.
And, or being unemployed or being in ill health. It's quite extraordinary. Not that these other things don't count, they account a lot, but the idea of living in a society where people watch your back, of course, we know being in a society where people watch your bac makes it much easier for you to deal with the bad things that happen, right? If you're in an accident or any kind of tough situation, you wanna be with people who work together to deal with it. So there's an interaction.
Wow. Let me get finally to your question about the actual return and the expected return, because we knew we had the actual rate of return of the wallets and the expect. That was one of the advantages of the question. Of course you knew exactly because it was such a precise question. You knew it was being asked about.
You could run an experiment that actually said not just so you can find out across countries, whether it's correlated, but whether people in general are too pessimistic or too optimistic. About the benevolence of the people around them. And we found in this latest global study, as we found in earlier, countries studies in particular countries but on average people expected their wallet to be returned about half as frequently as it actually was returned.
In other words, people are much more generous than their fellow citizens think they are And so you say, why would that be? Well, of course, one of the likely answers is in the media, you hear about bad things happening, typically done by bad people. And so you overestimate the frequency of bad events and the overestimate, the frequency of bad people. And so people are just simply not aware of how strong the social fabric is in which they lived.
Now. It's not equally strong everywhere, but the point is almost everywhere. It's stronger than people think.
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 view the entire world. Do you view people around you as, like you said, you know, do they have your back? And unfortunately, it's half as likely to rate that, you know, as they have my back, as in reality actually shows and anybody that's done international travel, it's a similar kind of thing.
Like, you'll hear the negative things that are happening in a particular country, but when you get there, most of the time, the people are like lovely and hospitable, even more so than you know, maybe your neighbors back home. And it's extraordinary to see that just tremendous amount of Generosity, goodness, kindness, support, trust, things that you're talking about. So I wanna actually get into that specifically with COVID right. So we had this massive global pandemic.
It has just, I mean, still far reaching effects and we tend to view it through this negative lens, you know, and obviously there's tons of negative stuff that happened, but talk about kind of the pandemic of benevolence that's going on as well. And, you know, maybe even get into some of the suicide rates and things like that, that different terms of expectations that we have.
There was a lot of of thinking about what we would find in the report for 2020, which was the first year of COVID, because there'd been a lot of indicators of calls on various kinds of help lines. And of course people's lives had been turned upside down that they couldn't work. They couldn't meet with their friends, all the things that support a good life or many of them were simply torn.
So the assumption would be people's life evaluations would be equally shattered and we found that wasn't the case. And so then you have to sort of try and unpack it and see what was supporting life evaluations during this period? And in general, it was the kind of things that we saw in our daily lives, but we probably didn't think of them as being as important as they are, that the. Face to face contacts, which all the research showed are terribly important.
But what people did under COVID is they developed meetings like this one across the world where you actually can be face to face with someone and connect in a way that they hadn't done before. And you found it within families and neighborhoods as well, that there were actual connections established that weren't there before There was a UK program for putting out a call for volunteers to help their neighbors.
You know, getting groceries medicines checking check-ins and so on the call was dramatically oversubscribed. They had to shut it off in days. It was the biggest assembly of volunteer effort since the second world war people immediately wanted to help.
Well, we already know of course that the wallet finders are as happy as the people who have their wallets found or who feel that it would be to live in a society where, you know, other people are ready to come out And what natural disasters can do and we found this with looking at earthquakes and fires and previous diseases and tsunamis, and so on that. It gives people a chance to actually test and see the quality of the social fabric in which they're living.
And because they previously thought it wasn't as good as it is. And the disaster brings out the fabric as it is, then people are surprised by how benevolent are the actions of others. And of course that makes them happier to see that. So it's one of the good things that can happen from bad things is that it gives you a chance to see if you've underestimated benevolence. Then you find yourself more benevolent feeling better about your life than other peoples.
Well, That turns out to be very important, because if you think you're in a high trust environment and see it, you yourself are then more likely to reach out than even than you were before because you no longer think of a stranger as a stranger, but as a friend, you haven't met yet. You change your attitude. And another helping hand in that was caused by the fact that people weren't going off to Machu Pichu in 2020 and 21, they were walking in their neighborhoods.
And in the course of that, they were establishing human connections with their neighbors of a sort they hadn't had before. And you'll find that in, I don't know about your neighborhood but it's true of all the neighborhoods I've talked to people about that they're more connected than they were pre COVID, even though many of the restrictions made it less easy to make any of these connections.
Yeah. And that's interesting cuz I mean, we lived in Shanghai for three years and we aren't right now, but this last year, I mean, if you heard Shanghai basically locked down for three months straight, like you basically couldn't even leave your apartment. So we have a bunch of friends there and that's exactly what they said.
I mean, obviously there's a lot of, you know, systemic things and, you know, challenges and it was a really difficult time, but they said that about their local communities, like all these people in apartment complexes, they would meet their neighbors and they would get together and pool like their resources to go, what food do we need collectively so that we can order and get these deliveries. And people were volunteering to walk other people's dogs and I mean, the list just goes on and on.
And so I think, I mean, and that's what you've even seen a lot of times in your research. Or just the research in general, those things that we think will make us happy, like winning the lottery. A lot of times the people are more unhappy or they return to their baseline. You have your hedonic adaptation. And then the opposite side of things, the suffering that we typically thinks makes us unhappy.
You know, and even in your research, you talk about the tsunami in Japan and how people are happier after that. And tons of other examples of that, but the things that we think make unhappy, actually, like you said, test the fabric of our values. They test the fabric of our social connections and they have a way of bringing that out. I even had a fellow on the podcast. He was a rugby player and then he had a paralyzing neck injury.
So he is paralyzed from the neck down, but he became a mouth artist and he actually said, I'm happier 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 hear your thoughts, some of that around suffering and it's kind of linked to happiness and how resilience plays into that equation?
Oh, well the example some people have said these life evaluations don't mean anything because something would show obviously destroys a person's life, like a spine destroying accident. And how could they possibly there's something wrong there they're doing adaptation and it means measures not any good, but that's not the right way of thinking about it. And I think your story or the rugby player was the right way to think about it.
That in fact, it changes people's conception of life as a whole, and they so value different things. It's like pressing the reset button and COVID has done that for a lot of people press the reset button on life. You'll find people actually talking about what are their fundamental objectives now, and they're different than they were three years ago. Because they've had a chance to try things differently, but also to think things more deeply.
And so we don't have to break our spines to get a kind of reset button it, and there is a lot of research about how much physical disability hurts people's wellbeing and what levels of adaptation exist. And the evidence is pretty clear on average, it's a serious hit to your wellbeing and the recovery is partial, but not complete.
And the more damage you are, the more it affects your long term wellbeing, that doesn't threaten the reality of these stories, but there's a balance of people for whom the injury is destroys their conception of their lives and they never do recover that And so those are people who don't have that resilience and that adaptability, and there's some people who have so much and refocus their lives, that they can come quite honestly, and have a higher level of life satisfaction than they did before.
It doesn't mean that these circumstances don't matter. It's just that people differ a lot in their ability to discover new paths that may indeed be better than the ones they know before There's a fellow named Randy Nest. Who's a great specialist in the power of unhappiness. And his point is cuz he's a psychiatrist and he deals with people who've had their life hope shattered because they didn't get the job they wanted. They didn't get their tenure at a university posting.
They didn't get their celloist position in an orchestra and they have to sort of go through all this terrible unhappiness.. The unhappiness can then be a root to a rethinking of the lives. And so that's the positive role of unhappiness that in fact, these unhappiness bad things can in fact, force you into a situation where you rethink what's important and how to get there and who you can trust and expect to help you get there.
That's huge, cannot be overstated to that aspect of who you can trust to help you get there. Can you talk about, you know, so COVID as well was very isolating in a lot of ways and people do talk about the kind of the epidemic of loneliness and things like that. Can you talk about your perspective on loneliness as well, and even the reality of how COVID affected it?
Well, the sort of standard measures about, do you have someone to count on, which is one measure of loneliness, but there are lots of others have not been damaged very much in, in the raw data. And it's in part, cuz people have substituted other forms of connection for the ones that were cut and finding some of them to be effective. I have resisted from the beginning, this notion of an epidemic of loneliness, cuz it then creates in general.
See if you come from the side of positive psychology you see how important it is to measure things like wallet return rather than, or in addition to risk of illness or risk of being mugged in the streets. Not that they aren't relevant, but if you focus only on things that are going badly, then you'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 because of course it's in the public health field where this epidemic of loneliness is talked about, cuz epidemics are a good way of getting attention. I said, if you think there's an epidemic of loneliness, what you need is not a treatment, but you need a vaccine and the vaccine should be taken by everybody. And the vaccine is a friend and people who have friends are not lonely.
They can be alone, but because they've got the friends and people to count on and easy and powerful connections, they're never lonely, and so you don't wait until someone's lonely and then find them a friend that's too late. You want to. Produce an environment. So that's why I say you don't want a minister of loneliness.
You don't need a minister of friendship, which you need is every ministry thinking about the way in which they do their policies and every company thinking about the way in which they operate, that teams are more productive, the more friendly they are. We have a lot of evidence about the degree of verticality and a corporate structure as a powerful question in the Gallup daily poll. And do you think of your immediate work superior as a more as a partner or a boss?
And of course the more vertical structure you think of them as a boss and the flatter one, and they're much happier that way. And the weekend effects that are common in a boss environment, fade away in a partnership environment. And that turns out to be very important.
And that's why I wanted to ask you about that, cuz I saw that quote on doing my research, you know, loneliness doesn't need a cure, you need a vaccine. And I think it's really important because you don't want, like you mentioned, you don't wanna be finding a friend when you need it in a car accident, right? Like you don't wanna be like, oh, now I need a friend. Like you wanna have the network and the social support before that.
So that, that act helps mitigate some of the effects of whatever ends up happening in life. So I appreciate your insight and wanted to talk to you about that. The other thing I wanted to dive into, and I know you have a strong opinion about this as well, on pursuing individual happiness. So let's say like, I wanna be happier and I'm like, okay I'm gonna go about creating my life to be happier. What are your thoughts about that?
Well, it turns out it's once again, it's the wrong way, because it's got me focus and we know that the people who actually end up happier are not the ones with have a me focus, but have a, we focus or an even a other's focus. There, there was a, an extra set of questions sponsored by a Japanese foundation in the, a recent world, having Gallup world poll. And in the most recent world happiness support, we had a chapter explaining the results.
And one of these questions was, "In general, do you think your focus should be helping others or helping your self and family?" And people who had their focus on others were happier, even though as it were, their objectives were not to help themselves. And that, I mean, there's lots of other evidence on pro-social behaviors that people who have resources and use them to help others are happier than help them themselves.
But this focus on getting things right for everybody rather than targeted to waiting until something goes wrong and then trying to fix it is very powerful. So it should be true. I've talked to mental health people about this issue that you, it isn't as though you have cognitive behavioral therapy and medicines, and you bring them out in some mix. When your patients come in.
GP's who are the first line in all of these meetings of, you know, they're the people who end up sending people to psychiatrists, they should be themselves asking people, how is your social life? How happy are you? These positive questions should be asked and encouraged. So you know that you don't just, like they say, walk 10,000 steps a day, start 10 elevator conversations in a day.
They need people need advice and encouragement in order to do things that'll improve lives for themselves and others, but the doctor would be doing this in this context. It's, he's really saying this is about your long term mental health. This will in fact improve your mental and physical health and it will and you don't have to wait until someone's sick to give them that advice. That advice works for everybody. And of course it has positive spillovers as well.
And in mental health, that's particularly important because if you operate positively and proactively and protectively then people don't get in a situation where they're actively and painfully lonely or where their mental health needs them to go to a professional. If you talk to the professionals, they say one of the big problems is there's a stigma about mental illness. So people won't come to us, even though they should. Well, that's the point.
Once you treat it as an mental illness and stigmatize it, then you clearly don't want that to be the only way in which you get help to people. So the best way to do it is proactively. Because after all there is no budget for friendship. It isn't as though you're taking scarce resources away from hip surgeries in order to set an environment in which people are encouraged to make life better for others. And that includes peer groups among people who have a condition.
You know, once you think about it, you say, oh, there are almost anything we do in the design and delivery of healthcare could be set up in order to allow people to connect more happily. And productively and protectively with each other.
Yeah. And very important, very important because we do, we can get lost in the rabbit hole of just trying to create the happiness for ourselves. And as all the research shows it's that result, you know, it's the result of especially shifting your focus to the people around you and tremendously important. Before we wrap up, I did want to ask cuz you've included a couple extra things in this most recent report.
So you include more stuff on genetics, which is becoming bigger area that we can actually measure genes that contribute to happiness. And I'd love for you to talk about that. And then also kind of the aspect of looking at peace and harmony as well. Some of those more quote unquote like neutral states and how that research has been starting to get incorporated.
One of the things we're doing in more recent reports is opening up new areas where we got chapter this year on state capacity and another follow up chapter on using internet and Twitter feeds to monitor the state of people's thinking. On genetics, there's a, well, the chapter was called the biology of happiness and the biggest focus was on twin based studies of of happiness.
And they find a sort of 30 to 50% of the interpersonal differences are genetic based on fraternal and identical twin differences. That leads some people to think, well, all these differences, then you say, is this really true? And the answer is it's true because the twins being studied are all being brought up typically on 99% being brought up, if not the same neighborhood, at least in the same town, at least in the same general social environment.
So of course it leaves more room for the genetic differences to play a bigger role or subject to the same circumstances. We find when we look at migration, that people who move from a country to another country is big numbers. Right? Right. They then end up having the happiness of the country. They move to. And even the subregion of the country, they move to. So that's not coming from their genes. They brought their genes with them.
it's their environment in which they live, that are the primary things. And these people are sometimes moving from an average to of three to seven or going from seven to five or something. These are big changes that are happening. So the important thing to look and the most positive thing important thing to come out of the genetics chapter was to emphasize people really are different.
You know, we're looking at national averages, a lot of these things, but actually how you provide a program to help people. You really, we do wanna have a lot of varieties of what you provide and how you provide it to reflect people's different openness and receptivity. People can be changed. We have a lot of neurological work being done saying a lot of what is regarded as basic personality in fact is very subject to change.
The original genetic makeup doesn't change, but actually the expression of the genes does depend on the environment enormously. So there's a big gene environment interaction. And so how that operates depends a lot on the circumstances in which people live. And so to recognize these differences across types of people can then lead you to think of a better set, a way of setting up a workplace even, right. I mean, you can have horses for courses.
You don't have to have one scheme that works for everybody. On the Peace and harmony questions. I think quite clearly, the people who proposed this edition in the first place were saying that when you put in these Eastern value type questions, which is to what extent do you feel a sense of peace in your life? And the one about value others versus yourself. That was another one.
And they were expecting to find those values were more, were found more in the east Asian cultures where they had been fact been placed on a, more of more central in terms of how life is described. Well, of course, what we found is we found so often in other aspects of life, that these things are universal. They matter to everybody. And it turns out that by and large, the societies that have done best in this creating environment where people do care about each other.
It both feeds them to be caring about others, as well as they're better societies cuz people do care about others. So the Nordic countries, which routinely five of them are almost always in the top 10. They have the highest global averages for not only trust in others, in return of wallets and trust to their public institutions, but a sense of balance in their lives sense that it's more important to look after others and to look after yourself.
And so thanks to this survey we now are able to show that these things are important all over the world. And it's a positive thing that for a culture to emphasize these, because we know they're important and it's wrong to ignore them.
So what specifically, I mean, you mentioned some of the things, what specifically are the Nordic countries doing? And I wanna ask this in a two-prong way. So, you know, we have this research, we have the countries and we can see these countries rank consistently. Like it's not a one-off thing. They rank consistently higher. So what are they doing?
But then also, how can we change both our environment and our systems to better reflect things that promote happiness and then also on an individual level or community level? How can we go about doing that maybe as an example from the Nordic to countries or just something else that you wanna leave the audience with?
Successful development was typically regarded in more income related terms. But the World Happiness Report has said systematically, these are not the richest countries of the world, but they're systematically the happiest countries in the world. And so they become a focus for attention partly tourism, but most importantly, people are saying, what is going on there? What is different about it? And I say, well, it turns out the happiest societies generally are for people care about each other.
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 try and dismiss that and say, these are homogeneous countries and they don't have immigrants. And so on. Well, of course that's false there they're all five countries are among the top 20% of immigrant receiving countries in the world. They all have double digit foreign born in their capital cities.
And they all do a better job than most countries at integrating their immigrants and caring about them. Cuz that's the way you treat people. And many of them have been through very hard times as you know, in, in different ways. And the hard times in fact reward cooperation, because when things are tough, you really wanna be able to count on other people. And that's, it's one of the reasons why in many societies, people are happier in cities than they are.
I mean, in the rural areas than, oh, it's like Yeah. Well, I mean, in the number of developing countries, they are happier in the cities and the rural areas. Cuz a lot of the rural areas are pretty tough places and the, but in the Western industrial countries, for sure the rural areas are happier in part cuz the cities are very busy places where the social contacts are take more effort to do. Isn't it? We will never.
Make them that we can't make them, but that without thinking about it, they'll fray while in the rural areas and especially those with harsh climates you have to rely on each other. And so you, you get that sense of community because you get repeated interactions, which is a, are a good thing, but you also get more actual physical necessity to work together for survival. And so that's been important in the nor partly important in the Nordic countries.
And the, so it's a confluence of things each of which is exportable. So it isn't as though you, everyone wants to go to, should go to Helsinki to be happy. These are exportable secrets. And of course, if you tried to put a billion people in Helsinki, good bye Helsinki. So the whole point is you have to export the ideas and everything that they do. There can be done anywhere. And it isn't expensive.
Yeah. And I had another guest on this show. Her name is Jessica Joelle Alexander, and she wrote the Danish way of parenting which is the most sold parenting book of all time. And it actually gets into, I would highly recommend it. It gets into some of these things, even the concepts that they have, like when she's talking about in Denmark, they just have a concept, like a word specifically for the ability to rest well within yourself. And I'm like, that's amazing.
And they teach, you know, in their classrooms, they have a class on if somebody's hurting, how do you comfort them? Right. So they actually like have classes and like it's built around empathy. It's built around like instead of competition and, you know, just all these different variables. And like you said it's exportable. So credible, incredible stuff. Is there anything that you want to leave the audience here before we wrapped up tremendous amount of insight? I mean, it's amazing what you do.
I love the conversation. Is there anything you wanna leave the audience before we finish?
Richard Layard has a nice way of putting it. He says, if you really want to be happy, your objective should be to make someone else happy. And so you get your own happiness by indirection because humans are essentially cooperators and they're happier when they cooperate and everyone wins.
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. And I'll put I'll put the links to the World Happiness Report in the show notes. Cuz I recommend everybody check it out. It's incredibly fascinating. Read the chapters, read the research behind it. It's amazing. So thank you so much, John. really appreciate it. And thanks from everybody that you've helped around the world as well.
My pleasure. Together we can make a happier world.
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