Pushkin. When the team behind the annual World Happiness Report finds that Finns are happier than Danes, or that Canadians are happier than Americans, those broad results hide a ton of nuance. We've been unpacking some of the reports more interesting details in our last few episodes, but today we're going to tackle one of the most striking findings in this year's report. What's been happening to young people's happiness over the last few years. And the picture is pretty complicated.
The good news is that youth happiness has been rising in certain parts of the world. But the bad news is that some of the wealthy nations out there have seen worrying declines, and that includes the young people where I live in North America. But the big question is why and what can be done to halt this awful slide. If anyone can help us figure it all out, it's Yon Emmanuel Denev Hey Lauri.
I'm a professor of economics and behavioral science at the University of Oxford, where I also lead the Wellbeing Research Center.
He's also one of the co authors of the World Happiness Report and the lead author of the chapter that focused specifically on gen Z.
This year's report, we focus in on the age categories, and my team and I we've really worked hard on childhoodlessoned well being and so the way we define child and adlesson it is up for debate, but we've essentially put it as between ten and twenty four, so late adolescence, because there's still some neurological development happening at these later stages of late adolescents. And so it also was convenient
because that's where the data sort of starts. The earliest subjective wellbeing data starts around age ten thanks to the Children's World's data set, and then we do have the Gallop whirldpoll and that runs from about fifteen years of age all the way to twenty four. So it was also a convenient to some extent to make sure that we have these age cutoffs.
And so usually the World Happiness Report is often focused on adult well being. Why is it important to look at well being in children and adolescents?
Oh, I was absolutely adamant on the editorial board to start thinking more seriously about child adlesson well being is, as you say, the world happen and support which does the World's rankings of what the happiest populations are, but they were really eighteen plus and so at some point, and we obviously all knew with COVID putting a spotlight on child mental health that we had to take child
and ad last and wellbeing way more seriously. But there's always been a lack of data, and the Gallobral Pole, our workhorse, if you will, for the rankings only starts really from late adolescens onwards. So it was a massive effort, and we waited in a way for the PISA data. The OECD releases the PISA data, but that only happens once every four years or so, and so that combined with two other data sets, Children's Worlds and HPSC, allowed us to start piecing together the global map of child
and a lesson and Wellbeing. But to your question of why it matters, child and lesson and well being matters so much because it's the best predictor of how you will be doing as an adult d and so mental health as a child or and as an adolescent is the best predictor of life outcomes and quality of life for life satisfaction as an adult. And one particular study that I care much about not just because I'm a
quothor on it. It's about ten years ago and the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, Andrew Roswell and I published a paper where we show that adolescent well being and we were able to get data from the American National Lujournal Study of Adolescent Health, and we found that at different ages around adolescents, their well being at those ages was most predictive of the same individual's earnings as they were growing up. What we found is that ages
I think twelve, fifteen, nineteen and twenty one. It's a panel study, so it's the same fifteen thousand American youth that have been tracked over time. This was started in the early nineties and they continued to be followed with surveys all the way into their thirties. So we have what their well being when they're adolescents, and we have their sort of adult outcomes, including how much they're earning
age thirty and above. And what we found was that their levels of well being adolescents was a massive predictor of how they would be doing later in life, even
as measures through their earnings. Now one could say, well, maybe it's because happy or from richer families and socio economic status is higher for these youngsters, but we were able to control for that in a nifty way, if I may say so, which is in that sample of American youth of about fifteen thousand, they were about three thousand siblings.
So what we did is introduce what we call sibling fixed effects or family fixed effects, where we would start looking at the differences between the siblings well being and seeing how explanatory that is of the differences in the
future earnings of these siblings. So, say, Laura, you and I are sister and brother, not unfeasible, and we would be looking at your well being, my well being, looking at the differences between them, and then see whether that can explain differences in our later earnings and labor market outcomes, if you will, when we're thirty and above and low and behold it did.
And so it's kind of like, if you know, if you and I were brother and sister, but I was less happy, maybe I was more depressed, even though we grew up in the same house, probably went to the same schools and so on, I'd be less happy as an adult and I'd be earning less as an adult.
Too precisely, and it's quite significant. So this is all data, but it was thousands of already back in those days when the study was run.
So we really need to understand like kid mental health, because it's having these important predicted outcomes. But my understanding was always that the story was that overall kids tended to be happier than adults. So walk me through the kind of typical patterns like happiness. Researchers have seen it about what happens to age across the life course. What we kind of used to think happened.
Well typically and we still find it mostly to be the case around the world. Is what you will know better than anyone else is the U shape relationship between age and well being. So essentially we start at quite high in terms of our well being. We're happy as kids, We're happy happy as we can be as kids, and in fact then the report this to me was insight
for me, is just how happy kids really are. So if you look at the earliest ages that we have data for in life satisfaction, they start like at nine out of ten as an average in some countries in
terms of life satisfaction. So we start really happy, and then we slide down the U curve towards the midlife crisis, which typically late thirties early forties, with the pressures of life coming through, mortgage to be paid off, small kids to be dealing with, and the prime of your careers and the pressures of that, and then you sort of like things brighten up again.
Kids leave.
You have the benefit of having kids, but without the negativity around having to deal with it day in day out. Your expectations become more realistic and you start climbing up the other side of the U shape between age and
well being that has broken down in certain societies. So the big insight coming through in this year's World Happy Sport with a focus on age is that in North America, the US in particular, needless to say, and to a lasser extent in Western Europe and Britain, you find that the first element of the U shape is no longer there. It's completely flattened, and in the US it's even reversed.
Where youth in this case is below thirty or below twenty five, depending on which data set you look at, they start lower in terms of their self rated quality of life, their well being lower than the adults and that's really disconcerting, and that trend has started what is it ten to fifteen years ago, but sort of in twenty eighteen, it's sort of flipped where you see that the youngsters in America below twenty five in this case are less happy than the adults.
That's nowhere else to be seen.
And this is something that really affected me a lot.
Right.
This is one of the reasons that I started my happiness class at Yale is that, you know, I was looking at college students who I remember back when I was in college in the nineties. I remember them being they weren't happy all the time, but not the rates of depression and anxiety that we're seeing in our current students, and I just felt like there was an enormous shift there. It sounds like, at least with the North American data that's being born out and the report.
Absolutely so what your famous experience there is born out in the data has never seen before in this way, and that trend that you picked up way back when you launched your famous class has continued and actually exacerbated during COVID that hasn't recovered since either for the first time in the world happening support We've done this test to see if you were to split the population youth, older,
and everyone in between. If you were to do a ranking just on youth populations around the world, the US would drop to sixty third.
Sixty third, sixty third.
We're usually in the top twenty.
Yeah, actually like in the top end of the top twenty normally is the population as a whole. But because of youth falling off a cliff in terms of their well being, the general population in the US has now dropped from i think place fifteen to place twenty third, and that's wholly driven by youth not reporting their life's going well.
And the problem is, it's probably not just the youth of today, right, given what we talked about earlier, where youth mental health is actually predicting something about what those young people are going to be experiencing later on. Not investing in the youth of today being sixty third means or likely to be sixty third, you know, into adulthood and into many decades to come.
That is absolutely true.
So not only is there an urgent need to do something because you can, but also because you have to, because, as you say, the predictive power of child and adolescent wellbeing and mental health will track throughout people's life course, and that doesn't bode well for the future.
So I think one of the big puzzles though, is that, yes, this is the trend that we're seeing in North America, this is the kind of thing that I saw in my college students in the US. But my understanding is this doesn't seem to be the trend that we're seeing around the world.
Correct.
Absolutely, So this is one of the other big insights coming out from the World Happiness Support and where really put the word world into the World Happening Support because of this is we piece data together from the global South, for example, and unlike North America and Western Europe, to some extent, you find in places like Sub Saharan Africa you find that youth has actually increased their self rate a well being, so they find that the culity lives
is higher these days than it was before. And that's in a way good news. It shows that this is not a universal thing. It shows that this can be reversed as a negative trend in North America and the US in particular, and I think that's really important to understand that globally there are massive regional differences.
And so talk about what could be causing these differences, because this isn't just kind of, you know, a subtle pattern, like we're just seeing these extreme differences in how unhappy North America and to some extent Australia and New Zealand teens are, but how much happier you know, folks are in the global South and even in in Europe. So like, what's going wrong in North America?
Well, before we dig into North America, I think the reason why you have sort of a convergence really it's not like youth in Sub Sahara, Africa is happier than youth in say Belgium where I'm from, or the United Kingdom. It's that they're sort of catching up and Western Europe
and North America coming down. So there's, if you will, a global convergence to some extent, and we've got an amazing figure in the World Happen Sport Chapter three that kind of where you see that quite clearly, we see North America, Western Europe come down, Central Eastern Europe come up, sub so Aheran Africa come up, and some regions in Asia come up as well. And I think that global convergence is probably a result of the global inequalities reducing.
So we always talk about inequality rising, and that's certainly the case within countries and especially in North America and Western Europe and Australia New Zealand, but globally you see actually a reduction between countries in wealth and income, and I think that's partially also behind this convergence that we see in well being and in youth well being in particular.
So in some ways it's awesome that the youth of these parts of the world are kind of getting happier over time, But when we look at North America, what factors are causing you know, North American kids and kids in Australia and New Zealand to feel so unhappy these days.
So I don't think there's one smoking gun, if you will, that you can point to, but there's a lot going on that it's not going in the right direction. And so we can point to the inequalities within society in the United States, for example, rising, which then obviously have to downstream consequence on people's mental health and wellbeing and
opportunities for youth from less privileged backgrounds. We can talk about polarization, politics teering people apart, social fabric being in the US being torn apart, communities being torn apart, within families, youth and older generations, or between youth, brothers and sisters, those discussions falling apart, and then I think there's no way around that. We also need to look at technology.
You kind of get around the fact also that the slide in youth well being coincience with the coming up of social media and how people use social media, so that can have positives and negatives, but if people use it passively, people who are young and vulnerable, and what they use in terms of social media and for how long. And so we had the privilege of speaking with Vec
Murphy the USR surge in general. Recently he noted data that people now spent on average in the United States about four and a half hours a day on social media. And that's not even accounting for work on your computer or Google or whatever.
It's really just social media.
So with the US falling to sixty third position, if you were to just look at youth to blow thirty, that is really a shame. And I would challenge everybody in the United States, the society is government leaders to not punch below its way by this much. Because the objective dimensions that you have in placed, wealth, health, and much else, you should be doing a lot better for you.
What can we do for our young people and what can they do for themselves? John has plenty of suggestions right after the If social media, driven by the big tech firms that dominate our economy is to blame for the unhappiness we see in young people across North America, Western Europe and as far away as Australia, there's probably not much we can do about it, right well, Oxford professor Joan Emmanuel Jenev billed out a bit more hope.
Technologies have come around. They tend to help and be helpful, but with certain boundaries in place that evolve over time as we better understand the impact of these technologies. So an obvious one that we owe to Vivicmurphy, the US serge in general, is he made the parallel between cars, and at first cars were driving around in the streets with huge numbers of traffic fatalities as a result because of the cars weren't safe enough. We weren't wearing our seatbelts.
So over time we realize that this is a good technology but needs specific limitations in place, and then they were slowly but gradually put in place, and now we're all benefiting from mobility in a relatively safe way as a result of this coevolution between technology and social norms. And the same could be done here with social media. I think this can be a cocreation where everybody benefits from these new technologies, but with certain guardrails in place.
And so the idea is that as a society, as parents, as people, we can sort of advocate for those guardrails. We can, you know, push the government to say, hey, what does the seat belt look like for Facebook, for TikTok or something like that, What is maybe a speed limit look like for maybe the amount of time you're on these kinds of things and so on. Like, if we push for that, then we can get maybe the benefits of technology would like less of the limitation precisely.
And so we need to think carefully about how we harness the positives of social media and make sure that these virtual connections ultimately lead to physical connections amongst people. Because we also heard from the US Surgeon General that in his tour around these colleges, who's talking about a change of culture where kids in high schools come up to them and say, look, but we don't have a culture anymore of speaking to each other, and let that
sink in for a moment. That's pretty bad. And it also makes sense because if you now walk into a lunch cafeteria in a high school, people will be behind their screens and so it's much harder to stroke up a conversation between each other and bond as human beings and not just through virtual means. So we need to think very carefully as a society to harness the good elements of technology and make sure that social media puts the social frankly and social media.
You know, this is something that I saw like rit large when I was working with students at Yale. I remember one kind of moment where I was thinking, like, Wow, the youth are really struggling with their social connection and
they're turning to technology to like solve it. We had this kind of competition on campus for like a new app, right, you know, like they're all these schools kind of do these like tech competitions, And one of the potential apps that won the competition that I was looking at at Yale was this app that was called Let's Get a Meal, And the idea is like you go to the dining hall and you're scared to talk to people, but you go in Let's get a Meal, which is kind of
like Tinder for the dining hall, and you say, you know, I could want to get a meal with somebody who would want to get a meal with me, And you sort of swipe and find like, oh, I'll eat with that person. And like the older folks who are judging this competition like me, were like, wait, but it's the dining hall. Why don't you just like sit down with someone. It's like one hundred students that you all should really know because they're like in your same dorm, Like just
talk to somebody. But the students really felt like they needed a tool, a technological tool, to like connect and just talk with somebody in their lunch cafeteria.
I think that speaks to what Vivik Merthy you as certain general toll is that that culture has changed. It's now not easy to sort of reach out to other people in the cafeteria in person. We need to bring it back into people's comfort zone to be able and willing and actually be able to reach out to human beings in person and not necessarily neat the technology enabling of that when people are literally sitting in the cafeteria.
But this idea raises a certain hypothesis, which is that the way that technology is affecting social connection is in some sense worse for youth in North America and Australia and New Zealand versus in Europe and in Africa.
Do we know that that's the case, We need to mean, it's an empirical question, you're asking, So we need to find out data of how much time they spend and obviously in the US we now know it's about four and a half hours a day. My guesstimate is that will be slightly less in the Global South or Central and Eastern Europe. Then the question is also not just how much time they spend on the social media, but also what kind of social media and then how people are using it. Is a passive use or is it
an active use, which is also very different. So passive use is not to be recommended, but active use of social media, where we actively reach out to people, actively talk about yourself and connect with others, can be beneficial for people's well being and mental health. So it's hard to say there is something this is quirky, but we ran an extra analysis to try and understand this. And
North America obviously is the US and Canada. The Canada is split between the Francophones Quebecua and the English or Native English Canadians, which are then obviously closer with the US counterparts who look at sort of US slash Canadian English spoken medium and there's something really striking there that could point us in the direction a thought, which is Quebecqui youth have seen a drop but by no means as large as the English spoken Canadian youth, and that
was not obviously in line with the American youth. And so John Halliwell, my wonderful colleague and really the heart and soul of the Royal Happiness Report, has noted that and sees it as suggestive of the fact that the English slash American media is perhaps more dominated by negative news or calls that out in more conflictual ways then say,
the more international global Francophone way of news access. And so this may not be social media, but more how news is presented to youth in the world, in the Francophone world, it might be less conflectual, less negative, speaking, less to our negativity biases in terms of news than it is in the English spoken the world in North America. So there's an interesting hint there of something going on that will not explain everything, but it's quite striking, we thought, and.
It fits with the thing that you were saying earlier, which is, you know that many of the changes in the US are about political polarization, and if you have a news media that's kind of biased towards pulling that out, and we have youth have phones in their pockets that are dinging every time some politicians says something mean or you know that negativity bias can get strugg over.
It can get overwhelming and dominates, and it's really sad that then it doesn't allow any space for positive news.
And if you think about, you know, just like the way college was, news was back when I was in college. You know, it was just so different then, right. I could pull up a newspaper and read something terrible, but then I would put the newspaper down and I could go to the library and hang out with my friends. And again it wasn't like diinging with a notification in my pocket. About something terrible that was happening in the world.
And when I just think about the kind of anxiety that can come from that theft of my attention and that constant negative information, like it just must feel so different for the youth of today.
It certainly does.
And the algorithms behind social media are obviously optimized to get our attention. And as you know, well, we're hardwired to be more attentive to negative things that are potential threats or issues that are alarming, rather than positive news, and so the algorithm tries to seek our attention and then obviously does it by pinging us with negative news because they know that we'll get our attention more easily
than positive news. So here too, maybe we should start nudging or providing frameworks in place to maybe balance us out a bit more.
Or we can do this ourselves.
We can undertake these automatic notifications, I'm sure than typically negative news. We can perhaps subscribe to more positive news sources. And I think I've actually heard there's a sort of a new journal that is meant to be mostly trying to balance out towards pulsitive news.
Maybe we can subscribe to that. We'll find out about.
When dogs are being found, we'll find out about the World Happiness Report and the good things that are happening, not just the bad things, et cetera, et cetera, et c to help us ourselves regain our sanity.
In that way.
So let's say you're a parent listening to this, maybe even a parent in North America for example, watching these trends and just feeling really worried. You are there particular strategies or practices you could suggest for parents for how they could reverse the trend, maybe not in their whole country, but maybe in their own community or in their own family.
Well, I think as parents who are really concerned and probably rightly so, what they need to do is, I think try and understand their kids first foremost, because their kids are good kids, but they're in a tough, complex situation and not because of them, because of society around
them making it very difficult. So the social media that tries to really attract all of their attention, and there's everything possible with the most brilliant designers and software engineers designing algorithms to really try and keep them hook to the screens. There's AI automation that is making the future of work cloak both interesting but also difficult and complex. I mean, as a youth today, think about choices you
need to make for say studies. You might be saying, oh, I'd love to be a lawyer and start legal studies. But by the end of view four or five years of law school, everything you've learned could be obsolete because they chat GPT in some legal version of it. So there's so many uncertainties that kids live with today and so many technologies trying to get their attention. So I think the first thing that parents need to do really is to try and understand the complexity with which they live.
And I love this advice because, you know, honestly, even with my yal students, sometimes I get people who react of like, oh, what's their problem, you know, those snowflakes, Like they really can't handle it. But I think when you look carefully at the actual societal struggles that young people are facing today, like it makes sense that you're freaked out and feeling anxious about what's happening in the world of work. It makes sense that you're freaked out
and anxious about political polarizing and inequality. We see, you know, at least in the United States, and so I love this idea that what parents need to start with is just to recognize, like, it's tough out there for young people today, it's.
Very tough out there, and so they need to start with listening to their own children rather than trying to bust them around and put these hard limits in place, and understand the pressures they're under. And if they do that, then I think they'll understand, for example, that there's lots
of peer pressure. So for example, if you say to your child you cannot have an iPhone or an iPad, or you can't go onto this particular app then your child may actually be missing out on important things happening in their.
Own school community.
And this then leads to a second thought that parents could perhaps do is to coordinate with other parents or their local school to see, hey, if there are specific peer pressures or some people have access to something and others do not, and that puts sort of inequalities in place that are really harmful, then can there be a coordinate approach amongst the parents of kids that are friends or in the same class, or can they work at the school boards to say, like, hey, can we have
a norm or a reference point or something that we would recommend as a school or the parents of a whole club of school friends.
And I think this is really important because it really is not trying to intervene on, say, your kids particular social media use or the fact that they're on TikTok all the time. It's actually working in their community to try to get these norms changed around, which makes it easier for the individual to end up engaging in practices
that might be healthier for people's happiness exactly. And some of the folks listening to the Happiness Lab right now might themselves be in the category of folks that you put in there. You know, what is it ten to twenty five is your definition of youth? If there's a teenager listening right now, what advice might you have for them as an individual for how to kind of fight some of these trends.
I think the first thing is to understand again that you are living in a complex situation, that your attention is being fought over, and that you should not let yourself be had. If you will buy the brilliant software engineers of these social media platforms, take agency over your own time. Follow Laurie's principles.
Around listen to the rest of the happiness lab, observe exactly and.
Apply these principles about setting your own boundaries and not letting yourself be consumed by the big social media platforms. And by all means, try and re establish a culture of connection. And I know it's changed, there's no longer a culture of speaking to each other, but make efforts to get out of your comfort zone and do so.
And if I may want very specific practical piece of advice is one thing we've seen in the wellbeing science is that it's ultimately all about social connection and when you do good things for other people pro social behaviors as we call it in the industry, but really benevolent acts like volunteering, donating small amounts, helping strangers in need,
talking to strangers. That doesn't just help the people on the receiving end, but we've now shown over and over again in large studies with causal inference that this also helps yourself. And so by all means, try and do good things for other people, and you will see it shouldn't be the goal line and of itself, but you'll see that will help improve your own well being too.
And So one of the reasons I've loved dear chapter on the World Happiness Report is that it kind of calls out the trends that I was seeing in North America. But I think it also provides us with a lot of hope, right, Like, it isn't just the case that youth mental health is going down all over the world. If anything, what we're seeing is like there are possibilities for improving things. They involve changes, and they involve both societal changes like maybe making things more equal, and also
individual changes like engaging in more social connection. But there's hope there. The trend isn't just like, you know, a downward slope forever. We can all take agency and change these things exactly.
And you mentioned social connection, and I think that's probably the real key, and again putting social in social media and connecting in person. And it's a bit silly to say it's a bit, but if you think about moving from ill being to well being, it doesn't take much. It takes moving from I to E and you move ill being to well being. And that's just not just a symbolically or figuratively, but that's for real. And the more I've studied well being, and I know you've done
the same, Laurie. It's always about ultimately social capital, the social fabric of society, your own quality social connections. So yes, by all means, do social media, but make sure it's with people that you actually connect with in a way that works for your well being and in real life and in real life. Actually, I'm not reminded your calling down.
Nick Christakis and James Fowler way back they did some of the first studies of social media around Facebook, and they looked at sort of connections on Facebook and numbers of connections, and then they really cleverly look that are these connections that are sort of quite remote or quite close. And the way they did this is by looking at
the pictures you're posting. Are the people you were tagging actual people that you were meeting also live and so that sort of became a proxy for qualitative social connections rather than sort of more distant connections that are more
virtual in nature. And they found a big difference between having actual ties with people being tagged together with you in photos circling in social media, then having lots of other friends that weren't actually part of your actual physical surroundings and environment, and so that I think is a big hint.
It's an old study, but it was ahead of.
Its time, and so so far we've been talking about kind of what's gone wrong in North America. But I love the World Happiness Report youths data because it's really showing that something actually much more positive is happening in the global South and in Europe, and so I want to talk about the positive trends in those countries. You know, what do we think is changing that's actually making people happier in those parts of the world.
So I think what's happening in say subseri, in Africa, parts of Asia, and especially Central and Eastern Europe. Because by the way, you should know that if you were to do a ranking of countries just based on youth in the world happen sport rather than just the general population of countries, it'd be Lithuania on top for the below thirties. And that's really striking. So the Central and Eastern European countries have really come to the fore on
that front. That's with driving obviously their general rise and the rankings as well into the top twenty really and so that's exciting and we should look at those cases in a bit like off a positive psychology approach, we're rather than focusing in on what's going wrong in America with youth, maybe we can learn something from what's going right in say Lithuania, or in other parts of the world. And so in particular Subsiharan Africa, we see that youth
below twenty five in this case is rising. Adults are rising as well, but the delta difference between youth and adults is increasing, So youth are proportionally getting happier and that's exciting. And it's obviously the exactly opposite, the mirror image of what's happening in the United States. Why and so why I don't know is the honest answer, But I think it will have to do with something we touched upon earlier, which is the global convergence in terms
of income, so globalization. Of being an economist, we do think about the economics of trade, global trade, globalization, and it's probably behind much of the inequality within countries, but it has effectively reduced inequality between countries, and so it has lifted lots of people out of poverty. And for example, China having become the blasto now but about ten twenty years ago, because of globalization, became sort of the factory
of the world. While it brought a lot of wealth, half a billion people rose out of poverty, and it's the same across Africa, parts of Asia, et cetera.
It's probably most striking.
In the context of Central and Eastern Europe because you'll remember, in the early two thousands the Central and Eastern European countries joined the EU, and that meant a lot of wealth transfer from Western Europe to Eastern Europe. So I think Romania, Lithuania, and the other Baltic nations, et cetera.
Poland probably a lot of hope among the youth. Right we were thinking about their job prospects in a different way now.
So suddenly from being a Polish youth in Poland looking for jobs there, the whole EU open up to you as essentially a way of travel and job opportunities. And then these wealth transfers through the European Union's funds and subsidies, if you will, from the western, richer countries in Europe to the not so rich Eastern European countries also meant a certain degree of convergence in economic GDP per capital levels.
What's interesting here is that in Eastern Europe there has always been a foundation of redistribution for good or bad reasons. They were in the orbit of communism or socialism. So that meant that there's always been sort of a DNA of redistributing wealth to some extent, which isn't there in
other countries. So the reason why I'm emphasizing this is one of the reasons why the Kandonavian countries do so well is because they're wealthy, but more importantly, they redistribute their wealth and there's an equality there which and also feeds into the welfare state. There's other wealthy countries out there, the United States amongst others, the US amongst others, where there's a lot of wealth. So gdpeper a capital, the
average wealth is huge, but it's not equally distributed. So that then also feeds into well being in equalities.
And so totally, particularly well being in young people right who are looking at the next generation and their economic prospects and so on.
Exactly and are not seeing the same prospects or not as looking forward to the future as previous generations were.
Just to finish the thought, so what could be driving say central in Eastern Europe is not just sort of a wealth transfer convergence between West and Eastern Europe in terms of wealth, but then also the foundations were in place in Eastern Europe to build a welfare state and redistribute this to a large extent so that everybody sort of benefits from the rising tide, if you will, And I think that will probably be the fuel, the main driver behind I think my youth well being in this
place is starting to pick up. In addition to the prospect of having way more job opportunities opening up through the EU.
In addition to the sort of positive changes that we're seeing in the global South and in Europe, we're also seeing some countries that are pushing to make child happiness and national priority. So tell me about some of the successes that we've seen in those countries that really pay attention to this in particular and push for improved child wellbeing.
So I know for a fact that in Japan they have a whole new program around child health and wellbeing, and they take this very seriously, and part because they're moving towards well being more generally, but they've also really gotten the importance of youth wellbeing today pays dividends over
time in the later lives of these youngsters. You see that the focus then goes into schooling, the education system, what can we do there, And so you find in places like Japan, but also China and South Korea and many other places, we're all sort of teaching to the test, the SATs in the United States, the GCSS and the A levels here in the United Kingdom. And that's also raising questions because if that's the only basis of sort
of success is to do well on these tests. And so you see new programs being developed around say Healthy Minds is one of the programs that Lord Layard that they heard or mentor has really introduced in the United Kingdom, showing and teaching people life skills in addition to stem science, technology, engineering, math. And what we find is that introducing life skills makes
for happier, more balanced human beings. It's pretty crazy to think that we'd only focus in on the science elements, or perhaps English literature and others and not teach people to live good lives, especially in the era of social media where people need to be given a sense of what's happening on that front. A good example here on the policy front is actually is Manchester, so they have
the whole school system round. Manchester is part of a program called be Well where they are introducing essentially life skill courses and tracking thousands and thousands students across many dozens of schools to see what the impact is on their well being and ultimately also their performance on these testcores. Is to see that if you feel better, feel more balanced as youth, as a student, is that also improve actually your performance. The big question here is can we
have it both? Can we have great performance on our tests and SATs and GCSS while being and leading happier lives.
I think that's so important. I mean, it's one of the reasons that I started my class at Yale. But I agree completely, Like you know, those are twenty one year old. You know, if we could just start that earlier, when kids are ten, eleven, twelve, I think it would make such a difference.
Anybody with young kids.
Mine are too young for this, but anybody I know who has kids that are now in high school know the impact of say high school, primary and secondary school is huge and perhaps more influentially than the parents have influence on their kids. We need to work really with the schools and the curriculum to make sure people get life skills and learn how to lead fulfilling lives.
As you know, I'd love to see the fundamentals of happiness science taught to kids in more schools around the world. I mean, we do so much to educate young people about math and literature. Why aren't we also teaching young people the happiness skills they'll need later in life. Why aren't we ensuring that they know more about how to
prioritize friendships, sleep, gratitude, and doing good for others. If you're a teen, or if you know a teen, you should check out the new version of my happiness course that's just for young people. It's called The Science of well Being for Teens, and you can access the course for free at Corsera dot org. That's Coursera, the word course ra dot org. And again the free class is called The Science of well Being for Teens. We're leaving the World Happiness Report behind for now, but we still
have some happiness science treats in store for you. On the day the report was released, the United Nations International Day of Happiness, I had the good fortune to attend the World Happiness Summit in London. Welcome to the WAHASU Live version of the Happiness Lab, where I got to speak to a medical doctor also happens to be one of Europe's top wellness podcasters. To introduce my guest, doctor
Rungan Chatterjee, the host of the Feel Better, Live More podcast. Today, we're going to be talking about why medical doctors need to pay even more attention to happiness. Well, how's the audience. Are you all interested in medical doctors paying more attention to happiness? And you'll get to hear more of my awesome conversation with doctor Rungin Chatterjee Next time on the Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos