Episode description

Do you want to know what 6 factors contribute most to an individuals and country's happiness?

John Helliwell is the co- editor of The World Happiness Report, a landmark survey of the state of global happiness that ranks 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be that has been running for the last decade! He is also the Professor emeritus of Economics at University of British Columbia and a distinguished senior fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is one of the first economist to begin to research happiness and its effect on individuals, countries, and even GDP.

In this episode we talk about the 6 factors that consistently show the highest correlation to a nation's happiness along with how to measure dystopia, dropping wallets with money around cities, and the effects of COVID on world happiness and mental health!

I wanted to rerun this episode because today (March 20th) is World Happiness Day which was founded in part due to the efforts of John Helliwell among others.

I interviewed not one, but three of the editors (John Helliwell, Dr. Lara Aknin, Lord Richard Layard) of the World Happiness Report who will all give different perspectives on happiness based on their areas of expertise in the next three episodes.

I would highly recommend that you check out the World Happiness Report here!

It is an astounding amount of research over a decade with new additions into genetics and even social media as a indicator of the happiness of various regions. Fascinating!