FUTURE OF HAPPINESS — WITH JOHN HELLIWELL
HOW TO CREATE A HAPPIER FUTURE
How can we create a happier future? What are the REAL factors that influence happiness in homes, communities and organizations? What can we do as managers and community leaders and as individuals to enhance the happiness of those around us, and why is this fundamental to achieving ALL our goals?
I enjoyed a deeply insightful discussion with John Helliwell, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the The University of British Columbia, and editor of the World Happiness Report 2025. With laughter and good humour and vast knowledge of his subject, John shared a ton of actionable advice.
They can be no more universal theme than this. Happier organizations are more productive. They are more innovative. They are more resilient. Happier societies are safer and healthier and more giving. We CAN influence happiness, and a deeper understanding of the factors helps all of us make more effective personal and professional decisions. Moving happiness back to centre-stage in our measures of progress has to be one of the surest pathways we can take to a better future. Happiness benefits EVERYONE.
Enjoy the conversation. As a side benefit, listening to John will leave you feeling a little happier and more optimistic about the world!
Afterwards, I urge you to download and read the report.
Scroll down for personal takeaways and a full transcript of our conversation, and don’t forget you can listen to more of my conversations with leading scientists and future-makers by subscribing to the “FutureBites With Dr Bruce McCabe” podcast on Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast platform.
PERSONAL TAKEAWAYS ON PATHWAYS TO A BETTER FUTURE
Here are some of the insights and takeaways that stuck with me from my conversation with John. Note again that there is much more in the report, including those famous country-by-country comparisons (the Scandinavian countries continue to do well!) as well as drill-downs into demographics and giving-related behaviours, so make sure to take a look.
The Factors Are Universal
The global trend in happiness 2013 - 2025, is not far off being flat, with some countries way up and other countries way down.
GDP per capita and health and life expectancy are important factors, but the data reveal a variety of social factors to be vitally important, especially having someone to count on in times of trouble, a sense of freedom to make key life decisions, generosity & giving, and trust.
Important measures of giving include whether people have donated, have helped strangers, have done voluntary activities, and people's assessments of how likely it is that other people would do good things for each other and for them. Important trust factors include perceived corruption in business and government, and perceived trustworthiness of your community.
If you change an environment, there will be a long-term change in happiness.
Migration data show happiness levels for migrants from different countries adjust to happiness levels for the countries and regions they move to.
People are not born with a ‘base level of happiness’ to which they keep returning.
Given environment is such a significant factor, policy-makers and decision-makers can greatly influence happiness by changing the environment.
Most of the happiness findings are universal; they may play out differently in different countries because of environmental differences, but the fundamentals apply everywhere.
Perception and Negativity Bias
It is the perceptions of trust, and the kindness of others, that impact most on happiness.
People in all geographies tend to significantly underestimate the trustworthiness of others. For example, people estimate the likelihood of dropped wallets being returned at half the actual number returned, and this is consistent in all geographies.
If you believe people will return your wallet, you're not only happier, you're more likely yourself to act in a way that will increase the happiness of others.
One of the easiest and most effective ways individuals can help reduce negativity bias is by spreading true stories and experiences about the kindness of others.
The opposite is also true: polarization and angry claims about alternative truths end up making people unrealistically pessimistic about the environment in which they live.
The data reveal Americans are becoming less trusting of each other as a result of the messages they are hearing, and less happy as a result (perception), and yet the data also show their fellow citizens are far more trustworthy than they think (reality).
NB:- I see this juxtaposition everywhere. Everywhere I go in the US, for example, every single community, every town and city, and in every state, fear and paranoia about the “other” dominates TV news coverage (perception), and yet in every single community and town and city and state, I witness first-hand a boundless affection and generosity and willingness to help others (reality). It gives truth to the quote from Mark Twain on one of my favorite T-Shirts: “Travel is fatal to prejudice!”
Reducing ‘negativity bias,’ which is currently on the increase in many countries, should be a number one policy priority for creating a better future.
All of this applies equally inside organizations.
Reversing Risk Management
Risk management functions tend to make employees unhappier (because employees perceive themselves to be less trusted and the environment to be less trustworthy) which negatively impacts productivity, staff turnover, creativity and innovation.
Risk management functions are becoming more prevalent over time. As John put it, “Nowadays almost every organization, profit or nonprofit or government [organization] has a risk committee [and] these are actually the reverse of a business trying to improve happiness … especially if those risk committees are too pessimistic about the environment they're trying to control.”
Risk-management functions typically measure lower incidence of bad outcomes but do not measure collateral damage.
Risk-management functions often slightly reduce the opportunities for bad things to happen while greatly reducing the opportunities for good things to happen.
Reversing risk-management dominance should be a high priority for organizations trying to increase productivity, staff retention and innovation.
Four-Day Work Week
Companies implementing a four-day work week mostly get MORE total output from the four days than they previously got from the five.
The reason is partly self-selection – the companies that take this on are already at the high trust end of the spectrum. Trust is the enabler for flexible work at the home or office, which in turn helps employees make their workdays count.
The best examples think quite a lot about how to organize joint time together with face-to-face and team collaborations.
Workplace happiness is fundamental to overall happiness. People who feel that their immediate superior at work is a partner rather than a boss have almost no ‘weekend effect’ where they feel significantly happier on a weekend than a weekday.
Common Purpose
The key lubricant for efficiency per hour is joyfulness; the simple enjoyment and sharing of a common purpose.
Happiness and efficiency comes from feeling better about the people you're working with, and the consequent level of commitment to the people you're collaborating with.
Employees need to believe in the common purpose (it cannot be a shallow or artificial mission statement) and believe that everybody else is doing their share.
Note how closely all of the above ties with the principles for a successful innovation culture in my discussion with Dr Ken Dovey in ‘Innovating For A Better Future.’
On the negative side, collaborating against perceived enemies can also generate common cause, even if the enemies are not real, and the overall objective becomes more difficult, and it's at the expense of others. Constructing a better future therefore also depends on NOT getting sucked into inventing enemies and constructing new realities as a mechanism to generate common cause.
Social Media
The decline in well-being of the young, starting about the time the cell phone came in 2010 or 2012 or so, correlates with how closely their social media consumption aligns with the United States. Anglosphere countries are much more affected.
In the Canadian context, Quebec data also offer useful validation (French speakers consuming more French content are much less negatively affected).
A corollary is: there is a kind of an electronically exported dissatisfaction coming out of the United States that is affecting people everywhere.
COVID
Helping of strangers went up by about a third during the COVID. The pandemic offered people a chance to come forward and help others and, even more importantly, to see others helping others. This led to systematic increases in the extent to which people thought their neighbours were trustworthy, which significantly improved happiness. Enough, indeed, to counterbalance most of the very significant and obviously negative factors.
But COVID also demonstrated the positive potential of social media!
Until COVID the tendency was to concentrate on the abundant data showing negative effects of social media use, for example on the happiness and wellbeing of adolescent women.
During COVID, however, the population groups that self-evaluated as least affected in terms of happiness were the same people who were losing their lives most: the elderly. Why? They were more in contact with family than they had been before, because of social media.
Ageing Populations
Slowing birthrates and aging populations do NOT imply an unhappier future.
The happiest countries are not necessarily those that are fastest growing, nor those declining. As John put it, “You have to smile. When population was growing fast, it was a terrible disaster. Where populations are shrinking, it's treated as a terrible disaster!”
All of the same happiness factors apply to our future world, and John predicts positive effects through “a resurgence of not just the actual extended family but virtual extended families, the extension of living arrangements, not to be isolated units separated by distance, but in fact ones that include people of all ages, where indeed the caring and sharing happens essentially automatically every minute [and] they're all contributing in their own different ways” as well as from changing how we think about our work:- “we'll make even less distinction than we have in the past between what goes on in a paid form and unpaid forms … it’s not the things you're paid to do, it's the things you do because you want to do them to help other people.”
In this sense, ageing populations offer as much opportunity as they do challenge.
This also speaks to healthcare polices such as hospital-at-home programs and assisted living programs designed to let the elderly live in their homes for as long as possible. Both deliver HUGE advantages in happiness and well-being, which translate to better health outcomes and better heath economics.
Income Inequality
Just as GDP growth and material income are poor proxies for success, income inequality is an imperfect measure of inequality. It can be important because it often signals other kinds of inequality, but the inequality that really matters is inequality of well-being.
Where inequality of well-being has trended negatively in the last 20 years has mostly been within countries, not between countries.
Giving
There are strong linkages between giving and happiness for both receivers and givers.
Important factors include the level of connection to who you are giving to, having a choice (the giving is not forced) and seeing a clear and positive impact.
This applies at both a personal level and at a national level (e.g. giving via international aid organizations). Again, I recommend reading the report, which contains many more insights on giving behaviours and happiness than we covered in our conversation.
Equality of Happiness
Equality of happiness is important. People love to live in a place where they're not just happier, but other people are happier too. The goal should be to restore and build mutual regard, affection, and connections.
A.I.
All the happiness factors we discussed, and everything I read in the report, reinforce my view that we will need to be especially vigilant about the ‘distancing’ effects of A.I. as we delegate and cede more agency for everyday social interactions. For a deeper look at this aspect of our future, read my essay The Real Threat From AI.
Happiness as a KPI
Moving happiness indicators back to centre stage might appear superficial to the profit-focused manager, but in fact happiness is universal and central to behaviours, it intertwines with reciprocity, and reciprocity underpins innovation and productivity.
Measuring happiness factors, and connecting policies and practices more effectively to those factors, can ONLY produce better future outcomes for organizations.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Please note, my transcripts are AI-generated and lightly edited for clarity and will contain minor errors. The true record of the interview is always the audio version.
BRUCE MCCABE: Welcome to FutureBites where we look at pathways to a better future. I'm your host, Bruce McCabe, the Global Futurist, and my guest today is Professor John Helliwell, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Welcome, John.
JOHN HELLIWELL: Good to be here.
BRUCE MCCABE: Great to have you on and a real privilege, because you're the editor of the World Happiness Report and we're here to talk about the latest report and maybe delve into what it means for the future and some of the things we can do to make the future a happier place, and I can't think of a more universally interesting topic than this one, wouldn't you agree?
JOHN HELLIWELL: Often put aside, when it should be left in the center of the stage.
BRUCE MCCABE: So one of the things I love so much about your methodology, you know, you go globally, you get lots of good data, you are asking people to self-assess on a number of different axes and then you do a rolling average. So you're not just, you know, you're eliminating some of those perturbations and trying to look really seriously at whether there's movements in different demographics, different geographies, and trying to dig deeper into the factors behind them. So it's very extensive.
I wonder, if we can, through all of that, start with the big picture? You know, when you look at it holistically, is the world as a whole getting a little happier or a little less happy over this last 10 to 13 years?
JOHN HELLIWELL: The world as a whole, it's not far off being flat. You look sort of from the first time we started ranking countries on this rolling basis you're describing 2013 until 2025. But some countries way up, some countries way down. It isn't as though everybody -- this is an important thing in the science -- is that there was a dominant view, or important view within psychology, that everyone had a happiness “set point.” So you could get them off their set point for a while, but then, whether it was a leg they'd lost or a lottery they'd won, they would, in fact, return to their base level of happiness, and so you could learn nothing by measuring happiness, and of course it wouldn't change because it was something that everyone had baked into them at birth. And, of course, we've been able, through this longish period and very specific circumstances, to show that's simply not true, that, although averages may be fairly constant, if you actually change an environment in which people live, importantly, then there will be a long-term change.
Two examples come easily to mind. One year we studied migration. That was in 2018. And so one of the things we did, we were able to assemble very large samples of data from the UK and Canada, because both of those have national agencies that measure these things for hundreds of thousands of people. So we knew where everybody was born. So we were able to look at the happiness of people who'd come from 100 or more countries to each of the United Kingdom or Canada and look at the happiness adjusting for who they were like in their origin country.
Though they came from countries with very different happiness levels, they all moved to the happiness level of the country they moved to, whether the United Kingdom or Canada, and even to the happiness level average in that part of Canada or that part of the United Kingdom.
So that shows, of course, that these life evaluations really do depend on the quality of life and at that time, the country with the happiest domestically born Finland. They also had the world's happiest immigrants and, of course, the result. That didn't mean that everybody should move to Helsinki, because you know what would happen if everybody ran to Helsinki, but it does mean you have to look deeper into how people work.
Another important example is that within Canada, where 40 years ago, and Canadian data do go back that far, the people living in Quebec were significantly less happy than those living in the rest of Canada, in the subsequent 40 years there's been what we call a quiet happiness revolution, that in fact they're now significantly more happy than those in the rest of Canada. So much so that, following an invitation or request from La Presse newspaper, this year we were able to calculate that if you just looked at the people in Quebec, they'd be the eighth happiest country in the world while Canada as a whole was 18th! And of course English Canada down lower than that.
BRUCE MCCABE: That is so fascinating.
JOHN HELLIWELL: Showing you that you can have long-term changes in the quality of life that show up in these evaluations.
BRUCE MCCABE: Well, it also says really powerfully that if the environment and if these things have such a significant impact on people's happiness when they move there. It speaks to policy and the fact that we can influence that environment, we can influence happiness. It's something where we can make a difference to it if we think or act differently, as company CEOs or community leaders or whatever, which I'd like to get into in a minute.
But I wonder if we can get into some of the findings of this latest report, because some of them reinforce well, they're really reinforcing many of the findings from previous years. But we get into relationships, we get into giving in a big way, this connection between not only receiving and having a reasonable economic situation, but the impact of giving on the giver's happiness, and there's a bunch of other things. I wonder if we can run through just the big top-line findings for the big factors.
JOHN HELLIWELL: Well, you want me to focus on this year's findings on sharing and caring?
BRUCE MCCABE: Well, no, let's do it broader, because we're looking at that future picture. So I guess the big findings that you think fall out of the whole project, that we should be focusing on.
JOHN HELLIWELL: This year's topic is part of that. The big things that are not in anybody's regular toolkit. Development economists, for example, have known and spoken for decades as though GDP per capita and healthy life expectancy were the holy grail, and they are very important. There are another four variables that happen to be reasonably well measured in these global statistics. It doesn't mean they're forever the most important things in the world, but of the things we get, there they are, and they're emblematic of different aspects of life, and in one way or another they all reflect the social context in which people live.
One of them is having someone to count on in times of trouble.
Another is very important, a sense of freedom to make your key life decisions.
And a third one is picking up what this year's focus is: generosity.
So one of the measures we're looking at this year is in the regular explanation, and the other is trust. The best measure of trust in the Gallup World Poll at current time is a measure of perceived corruption in business and government, and we average those two. It's not a full measure and we're now able, using other surveys, to dig deeper into the role of trust, which is also an important element of this year's report, which should allow us to segue into that, if you want.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah I'd like to, because and this might be a little random as we jump around, but I mean that's a great place to start. If we jump into that trust, you're also measuring it now, trying to measure a sense of perceived trust of other citizens of your community, rather than just the corruption and those sorts of levels in the hierarchy, let's call it. And you have this wonderful measure with dropped wallets so you can actually take data out of this by country and look at the number of returned wallets. I'd like to just get into that a little bit and what that tells us, because, from what I understand, that perceived level of trust that people have has a huge impact.
JOHN HELLIWELL: Well, this is an extended podcast where we can give people the paragraph behind the headline. And the way we what we did this year is not just rank countries by overall life evaluations. We said, ‘what about six measures of caring and sharing?’ So we had three benevolent acts whether people had donated in the past year, have helped strangers and have done voluntary activities. So that's all what people do for others.
The other three measures are people's assessments of how likely it is that other people would do good things for each other and for them, and for that we have questions that we had one round of the Gallup World Poll and the Lloyd's Register Foundation World Risk Poll, persuaded them to add a positive risk along with all the negative risks they normally measure, which is the likelihood of your wallet to be returned if it was found by (a) a stranger (b) a neighbour and (c) a police officer. And so we were able to rank countries according to those six measures, and the rankings were very different across the six measures.
We were then also able to ask, ‘are all those measures important to the quality of life?’ Short answer is, yes they are within some independent variance, but it was the perceptions of the kindness of others, as reflected by a wallet that would be returned, that dominated not just the benevolent acts that people had done themselves, but equivalently measured probabilities of being subject to violent crime or subject to mental health problems, and indeed twice as big as the well-established costs of being unemployed, to your happiness.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, incredible. And that return wallet thing. It reminds me so much, for example I travel to Japan very frequently, and it is almost physically impossible to lose something in Japan. If there's a way of tracing it back to you, it finds its way back to you. Quite recently, I left a credit card behind in a bar, rang the bar the following day, having worked out my own idiocy and realized what I'd done, had the bar, which is part of a hotel, ask if they'd like to courier it back to me in a taxi and I said no, no, I'm the fool here, I'll come and pick it up. At which point, when I arrived, I was greeted with someone who had gift wrapped my credit card, presented it to me with gloved hands and apologized for the inconvenience. You know, and I'm the guy who lost the credit card!
JOHN HELLIWELL: Wow, that's a lovely story.
BRUCE MCCABE: It's beautiful and it certainly contributed to my personal sense of well-being and happiness in a huge way. And that's a daily thing in Japan. People constantly think in a community-minded way, and they're aware of it. I find that speaks to everything in your research.
JOHN HELLIWELL: It does and it turns out like most of the things we discover about happiness is that it's universal. It's not isolated in one country. It varies in how it plays out in different countries, since there are some pretty big international differences in that, but the way in which you were drawn immediately to that lovely experience of your own and to tell it. I could see it's making you happy just talking about it.
BRUCE MCCABE: Absolutely.
JOHN HELLIWELL: And it's one of the features of this year's report, is that it's led to countless interviews and call-in shows on radio and other media where people are invited to call in with their experiences.
It's almost universal that there's an infinite supply of people ready to report on these kind things. Indeed, the BBC picked this up as the thing they would focus on, and so they sent their star reporter off to Belfast where he took his camera crew around and he dropped 10 wallets all over Belfast and then nervously awaited to see what would happen, and it was clear he was overjoyed to be able to report at the end of the segment that all 10 wallets had been returned.
BRUCE MCCABE: Isn't that beautiful. It also speaks to me in a different way, when you look at the United States at the moment and this era of highly divisive politics. At a certain level you can get the impression that the United States is populated by hundreds of millions of very, very hateful and sort of distrusting people, and there's certainly a lot of distrust and I believe the happiness level has been dropping and there's some correlation between these two, but when I travel, and I regularly visit 43 states to give you an idea, when I'm going through small communities, all I see everywhere is love. So this is like a paradox. I'm seeing at a community level, enormous affection and love for neighbours, willingness to contribute to communities, this sort of thing, but an absolute fear and paranoia about you know, the “other,” which is sort of built on top of it, and they're completely contrasting. The actual people have this enormous capacity for love and giving, and yet the politics is sort of laying on top.
JOHN HELLIWELL: Well, and this is a troubling juxtaposition, because the witnessing, the polarization and the angry claims about alternative truths, end up making people pessimistic about the environment in which they live. There have been some very large wallet dropping experiments done by some YouTube scientists in the US, where across 20 cities, they dropped many wallets -- I think it was 20 wallets in 20 cities -- and then plotted where they were returned. They did find that in smaller communities they were more likely to be returned than in big cities, but the most returned had a tie with New York City, so it isn't as though it was huge, but what was universal there and it turns out to be true all over the world, and this is the unfortunate thing that we have to repair, is that on average, two out of every three wallets they dropped right across the United States were returned, and the surveyors said that's more than twice what they thought would be returned. So that was what the surveyors thought. What the surveyors didn't know is that there was now a corresponding global database showing what the likelihood was of expected wallet return in the United States, and it was indeed half that. It was one third, not two thirds, and that turns out to be true all over the world.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yes.
JOHN HELLIWELL: And, of course, if you believe people will return your wallet, you're not only happier, but you're more likely yourself to act in a way that will increase the happiness of others. To think of the stranger you see in the street not as a potential enemy, but as a friend you haven't met yet, and you'll conduct your whole life quite differently.
So to get rid of the undue prevalence of what's known as a negativity bias, and is on the increase rather than the decrease in many countries now, has to be the number one policy answer, getting to your wanting to focus on the future.
And there's another aspect to that. Right, you have to get rid of the negativity bias by spreading the true good word about the kindness of others. If it was just a Pollyanna type comment, because people are always suspicious and surveys have shown forever that people's response about how they would act in a moral situation is always better than how they think other people would respond. And so we said, well, that's the same thing with these wallet things, right? You think they'll be returned, but you see, we have actual data, we know, and so we can show that in fact people are too pessimistic about the kindness of others and that has to be fixed, and that—and I'm going to sneak one more policy element in here ...
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, because I've got another one if you don't. Yeah, go on, go on.
JOHN HELLIWELL: Okay, a really big one is that what stops people from doing the day-to-day, either big changes in their own behaviour or changes in the rules that govern their corporate or organizational or civic behaviour, is that they're too risk averse. They are trying to avoid getting into trouble, and that has become a touchstone of running administrations, rather corporates, and of course, they can then say well, we have cut the degree of malfeasance by 2% or something. Typically, you don't even ask what improvements they've made in that. But they don't look at the collateral damage which is, by cutting the opportunity, slightly reducing the opportunities for bad things to happen, they've made it almost impossible for good things to happen.
So innovations, that would be sheer common sense anywhere, you know, to help people be in charge of their own lives, to co-create the better futures for their neighbourhood or their enterprise, you can't do it because of privacy concerns or you'll get sued, et cetera, et cetera, and I guess excess risk aversion couples with this excess pessimism to make a fabric that's very hard to get through. But we have to.
BRUCE MCCABE: That's exactly the one I was going to raise because you wrote about it, I think, in the report or I might have seen you write about it separately, and it speaks to everything I see in the corporate world. So busy focusing on what can go wrong and preventing it, that we're often losing focus on what could go right. You know, anecdotally, for example, I'm in the speaking industry and my contracts are two pages long and often a month later I get back a 30-page version, you know, from a corporation. I'm thinking what are they worried about?
JOHN HELLIWELL: [laughter] If you don't trust me to come and give this talk on my handshake, my talk obviously can't be very good.
BRUCE MCCABE: Exactly! And again, what could go wrong. This is the tiniest risk you can take in a sense.
It's fascinating to me because there's a whole industry that builds upon itself for risk management. Of consultancies, of which I've worked with and been sat within, of law firms, of practices within companies, the risk management practices. And they're growing. They're like a set of very effective brakes that are on the machinery, and, of course, they'll all be having heart attacks hearing me say that, but it's really true what you just said the cost of it is so great and we're not looking at the cost of it compared to the opportunity cost of what they've removed.
Yeah, it's huge. So there's a policy start. Let's start killing off risk management teams.
JOHN HELLIWELL: Absolutely. Well, not killing off. The point is, you need -- the revolution that has to happen is within each person’s own mind. So it’s through people like you going out, getting into the centre of an organization, earning their trust, telling them some jokes and then giving them this reality and giving enough examples to show what can be done if, in fact, they open the doors to well-being improving innovations instead of standing in the way of those same innovations or claiming to be reducing risks of malfeasance.
BRUCE MCCABE: Can we now jump into this notion of social capital and relationships which is really underpinning all of this? It's possibly the most universally accepted, I think, result of not only your data but lots of research. If we have more social capital, more relationships, better familial bonds, all that, we're going to be happier.
And yet we're living in an era where more and more activity and social connections -- let's sort of quantify them -- are moving into the online space, for example. People are obviously using and communicating more electronically and via social media, so the number of social connections in a pure quantitative form is probably gone up exponentially, but the social connectedness, the richness of those interactions seems to be greatly reduced.
I wonder if you can comment on that sort of as a relationship to your research?
JOHN HELLIWELL: Well (a) social relationships are absolutely fundamental, the warmth and quality of them. There are many years of research showing that face-to-face contacts beat the non-face-to-face ones, and let alone the purely anonymous ones, in terms of whether people would -- in the first research that was done on this was for design of systems to manage water supplies, and you can imagine that's important because you have to have a sense of common interest to get an efficient management of a water supply -- and the likelihood of getting a solution that increased the general quality of it was enormously increased when people had direct social connections with each other, the extent to which they were allowed to get to know one another. Because it's much harder to make an enemy with people you know face to face than with an anonymous “other.” So that's a very important part of that. So those kinds of relations are very important.
Well, that had been established now for decades, I guess, of this research, and along comes COVID. Well, you could imagine people are saying, oh, my goodness, all our social connections are being torn asunder, we're stuck at home, the kids aren't going to school, the world is going to hell in a handbasket!
And so we were busy monitoring this during these years, starting in 2020, 2021, 2022. And what do you think we found? Well, there were a lot of negative emotions creeping up here, anxiety and some sadness. I mean, many lives were being lost, along with all the other disassociations that were going on, but life evaluations were almost flat.
So what's going on here? And so now we're learning, have learned a number of lessons.
One we found -- as natural disasters we already knew could do -- we've known and discovered from earthquakes and fires and such things that they offer people a chance to come forward and help others and, what's more important, to see others helping others, and so that's a the best cure you can have to your negativity bias, is to see people doing good things with and for each other, and so natural disasters have that capacity.
Well, covid was a natural disaster of that sort, and it was universal so we saw it everywhere …
BRUCE MCCABE: Yep.
JOHN HELLIWELL: … and we found the helping of strangers went up by about a third during that period. It was a little harder to get increases in donations and volunteering because that was harder to do without the administrative structures in place, and all three went up, but mostly this idea of helping of strangers and people, of course, didn't go to Machu Picchu, as they might otherwise have done, but they were walking in their neighbourhoods and they met their neighbours, yes, and so we found systematic increases in the extent to which people thought their neighbours were trustworthy and liked their neighbors and many of those positive connections have carried on …
Third positive element that was thought to be negative was that the social media, which up to that time had been treated purely in their negative aspects. Indeed, we had a chapter by Jane Twenge several years ago showing how the extent of the use of some of these social media platforms was destroying the well-being of adolescent women in the United States, and so they were a scourge. But here we found that the social media in fact became social media.
And so I asked people for a thought experiment. “What do you think COVID would have looked like had we not the possibility of having something like Zoom that we are using now to allow us to carry on with our educations, our daily lives, and to see our families far flung all over the world?”
The answer would have been very different, because, it turns out, a little face to face is much better. Zoom beats telephone calls, it beats email, it beats all of those things, and, of course, it can be created at no environmental, social cost, almost all over the world.
And it ended up, so you found among the population groups that were less badly affected by COVID were precisely the people who were losing their lives most, the elderly population. You said how could that be? And the answer was, they were in fact more in contact with their family than they had been before COVID because of the social media that were now available and had become ubiquitous, and so they ended up finding they were hearing from and seeing their far-flung loved families even more than before.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, absolutely found the same thing. That's beautiful, john, because it really shows the yin and the yang. I mean, it depends on how the tool is used and in what context.
JOHN HELLIWELL: Precisely.
BRUCE MCCABE: And it also speaks to policy. There's another aspect of policy here, from a business point of view, particularly as a lot of companies are struggling with their work-at-home policies. Now the rubber band stretched this way through COVID as more people obviously had to work at home. Now a lot of managers are trying to pull the rubber band back.
Now, the reasons for that -- there are all kinds of reasons, some of them not good -- but one of the interesting things, and I encounter this all the time, people do crave at least occasional contact with their fellow colleagues face-to-face because it's so much richer, and the language they use with me is trust. Back to your very first point. When we're face-to-face, and I know the person in procurement as a person, I can trust that they're looking after my interests and they'll sort out what I need sorted out. Or the person in inventory or the warehouse. So this notion of the importance of gatherings carries on to big business. It doesn't have to be a hundred percent, obviously, but it's so important to keep reunifying those bonds.
JOHN HELLIWELL: Does that mean we should spend more time going to the legal department and meeting them personally, so that they will stop assuming that everybody is a criminal and needs to be treated as such?
BRUCE MCCABE: I think that's perfect. I well remember meeting the head of risk for a very large organization and I described him as “matter” and me as “anti-matter” because, because I was the wild sort of entrepreneurial, sort of creative person, but having met each other we got to like each other and, yeah, isn't that fundamental?
JOHN HELLIWELL: But still the contract with many pages
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah [laughter].
JOHN HELLIWELL: So that's the change that has to go back. There has been a movement. As you talk to risk committees. I've been around long enough, I've been in a world where there were no risk committees. Now almost every organization I know, whether profit or nonprofit or or governmental, has a risk committee. And of course, the risk committee busy study things that can go wrong. So they're actually the reverse of in a business of trying to improve happiness. They're trying to reduce risks and, as we previously have agreed, that's not the right way to get to happiness and especially if those risk committees are too pessimistic about the environment they're trying to control, then they'll put it in shackles and they'll make innovation painfully difficult.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, and you in your research point out there's some big gaps generationally. So the youth of today are feeling very much more isolated than the same demographic data showed in, say, 2006. So clearly we do have an issue with trying to reconnect or bring back face-to-face bonds or richer bonds as much as we can, don't we, in that community? And employers have to be careful of their young employees and letting them stay isolated.
JOHN HELLIWELL: We're getting into a slightly different issue there, because this is not a COVID-related one, but because these trends are not global -- downward well-being of the young -- and they're not COVID-related; they didn't either get worse in COVID or better in COVID. And they're restricted mainly, and this gets back to another thing we've discussed, that it's not the technologies, but it's how they're used. That somehow, the closer you are to the United States in terms of the social media you consume, and hence the Anglosphere countries that we isolate in a special group in the report are your country, Australia, my country, Canada, the United States and New Zealand as a separate group, are all much more affected by the social media. So they have this decline in the well-being of the young, starting about the time the cell phone came in in 2010 or 2012 or so.
And to show it's not just the technology, it doesn't happen in every country. Social media use is as prevalent in Italy as it is in the United States, but their youth have not been dragged down in the same way, which implies that what they [US] see and hear and share has got a more negative spin to it, and whether it's colonial guilt or anger about the idea of even the term culture wars is prevalent in those countries, but you don't hear about it elsewhere.
So these are artificial distinctions made up of what good people do and what good people do in the different parts of this space differ so much that not only is “us and them” distinctions made, they're made much wider and much more painful, and that's a way of thinking about that.
Supplemented by, once again we find Quebec is a useful touchstone, because their social media use is much more likely to be in French than in English and so it's more among themselves, and they’re less affected.
BRUCE MCCABE: That's fascinating, that's already fascinating. Wow. So yeah, there's also a kind of an electronically exported dissatisfaction coming out of the United States that's affecting people everywhere.
JOHN HELLIWELL: Quite clearly. And Canada's not guilt free because, since we have gone precisely the same way, there are obviously Canadian participants in that same process. We can't be just consumers of ill will. I think that -- and who gets the blame, I don't know -- but everyone has an opportunity to make it better.
BRUCE MCCABE: Wow.
And continuing on the relationships just a little bit, my greatest fear with regards to artificial intelligence. There's all these good things and there's obviously some dangers, but I look at AI very closely and I spend a lot of time with AI scientists at Columbia, Stanford, MIT just looking at what's coming, and what's coming leaves what we've got today in the dust. But one of the things that worries me -- and it started with a conversation with a professor who's on this podcast, Hod Lipson at Columbia -- he said to me, “You know we worry about our children when they have online friends. You know we worry about those interactions. But what happens when they have artificial friends?”
And in a sense, that's already started at many, many layers and I'm not talking about the more spectacular people falling in love with an AI or substituting a relationship, but also a disintermediation that's going on, a distancing of relationships. A.I. will do more for you, which means you do less talking to people to get things done for you. A.I. can field your calls, it can act as a butler, it can act as a concierge, it can actually go and execute conversations for you now, and I have many clients who do that, in hotels, for example.
Now I worry -- even though it's in small slices -- I worry about that trajectory that could have a very, very deep negative effect.
JOHN HELLIWELL: Absolutely. Whether every big technological change -- and here the techno optimist, this is the line they take -- and all of us have that part of our personalities, the optimist part that said this like electricity, like the motor vehicle, like the travel by air, can be used to good effect or ill effect. And the computer, right from its very beginning, has offered the possibility of something that will take important elements of our thought and do them much more efficiently than any one person could do, and to communicate them as well.
Now, because of Moore's Law and other things that have made it possible for your Dick Tracy ring or watch to have more power than was true in all the computers of the world as little as 30 years ago, uh means that you can get this substitution of the mechanical for the human, and so – and there's so much science fiction on this, well, how you get the machine that's been trained to help you and all of a sudden it turns on you because you realize you're not very efficient and not very nice -- but the important thing is to not let the risk aversion, which is really important here, you have to be aware of what can go wrong and you have to make the possibilities for that are constrained – but on the other side you have to mazimize the extent to which … as Cain said a century ago, the economic possibilities and social possibilities for our grandchildren are enormous, the extent to which you can actually do mechanically what used to be done [as] we've seen in agriculture in the last century, it's now happening in thinking occupations, as well as the growing occupations, and so the potential for disease reduction, you name, it is really enormous, but we have to make sure that it's managed correctly.
Just as seatbelts in cars or any number of things where you say guardrails are needed in order to (a) watch out for situations where this has been exploited for ill purpose, and hidden so that you can't see it, which then creates damage, but it also breeds ill-trust and, as you and I are discussing, it's the damage to the trust framework that, if anything, is the most important damage to be avoided.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now I'm aware of time here and I've got four or five other things. I wonder if we can sort of run through them and get your top-of-the-mind thoughts on them? They're big trends that are affecting our future.
If we look at sort of blended work, I did some research years ago a sample of about 300 people in the Australian geography looking at people's satisfaction when they mixed their working life with their home life, and as flexibility of work increased -- you know they could take their laptop home and do some work in different hours -- their happiness or their satisfaction in this case, as they self-scored, it increased. But as it got completely blended together and there was no real disconnect, you know, it just dropped off a cliff. So there's obviously some limits to that.
Have you any thoughts about the separation of work and leisure?
JOHN HELLIWELL: This has been very central to all we've been doing. After all, half of your non-sleeping life is spent in a workplace, typically, and we've discovered weekend effects. Why people are happier in a weekend. Well we went and found out that workplace happiness is absolutely fundamental, so that in the United States, people who felt that their immediate superior at work was a partner rather than a boss had almost no weekend effect.
BRUCE MCCABE: Oh, interesting.
JOHN HELLIWELL: What is a workplace but a bunch of people getting together, working together for a common cause? Well, tick! That's a recipe for happiness. So why isn't everyone happy when they're at work? Answer: it hasn't been set up so as to make it happen. They don't think of it in those terms and they should. It can be that best part of your day.
People who have trouble with work-life balance to some extent may be trading off a happy home and a happy workplace, but often it's it's they're not doing so well in either of those. The blending has to be done so as to keep both operating in a relevant way.
One of the examples I've been following because it's been going along more or less at the same time as the increase in interest in well-being has been increase in the practical applications of the four-day work week. Well, what is the four-day work week but an attempt to change the nature of the blending. And, of course, now these experiments have been done in enough countries and enough companies that we know quite a lot about what makes it work. And that's a separate thing from how much you work at home …
BRUCE MCCABE: No, it's good, it's really important.
JOHN HELLIWELL: And they find out that in most of their cases they look at, they actually get more output from the four days than they previously got from the five.
So how could that be? And the answer is, these things, there's some self selection, so that the companies that take this on are already ones that are probably on the high trust end of the spectrum, right? Because if you want to run the Panopticon control system, that's only necessary where you don't trust the people who are working for you.
But when trust levels are high, then that helps working from home versus at the office and a blending of that is possible. But it also means that you can really make those days at work count, just as you find now in the offices that have some days in and some days out. The best places that do that are ones that think quite a lot about how to organize their joint time together. We don't waste it in meetings. We actually waste it in face-to-face and working team collaborations, where you really want to collaborate together in real time with paper and pencils and ‘nudges.’ The workplaces that have made this four-day work week. You say how could that be? Because we already had measured efficiency. And you're telling me you can get the same amount of output by cutting the labour by 20 percent? And the answer is yep. And that tells you what used to be called in the literature “X efficiency,” ie how useful is a working hour with the same equipment? And the answer is, it's enormously variable. And the key thing, the lubricant that makes X efficiency high, is the kind of joyfulness, if you like. That's part of it, but it's the simple enjoyment and the sharing of a common purpose. So you want the common purpose to be important. You're not going to get people in these four-day workweek things that really work if they're busy doing something that's got an antisocial product or something they don't believe in. So you have to have belief in this common purpose, not its objectives, the efficiency, the way that the system is designed, and then the belief that everybody else is doing their share.
And most of the firms in the four-day workweek that have that, they find that they're ending up at no cost and often with some real gains, because, of course, if you can get done in four days which you previously took five in, there's money on the table for somebody and the answer is there's something there for everybody, as well as feeling good, because there's no way you could do it without feeling better about the people you're working with. Because it's that level of commitment to the people with whom you're collaborating that's fundamental, not just for the happiness but for the efficiency.
BRUCE MCCABE: John, that's pure gold and it really resonates with me, this common purpose, common cause. I see it everywhere. When people hire really diversely but they're hiring people and bringing together on the basis that they've bought into the same purpose, that's when all the magic happens. And there is no greater happiness than when you're with a group of like-minded people wanting to get the same thing done. Yeah, that really resonates with everywhere I've been in workplaces.
And it speaks to policy, doesn't it? The way you hire, the way you communicate your purpose, the way you unify around a particular goal, not paying lip service to mission statements, but actually making them central to what the organization does, should do. You know “who it is.”
JOHN HELLIWELL: Unfortunately, there's a political component of that which is not always positive. Is that one way of achieving common purpose is to invent or to celebrate or make obvious a devil without the gate. So, if you can have some enemy that you need to collaborate against to protect yourself and your families and your communities, you can generate happiness and a sense of working together, even if the overall objective for the world becomes more difficult and it's at the expense of other people. So that's one of the questions for this -- it's been true from Machiavelli on that some people exploit the power of a common purpose to find a common purpose of an “in-group” in order to fight against or subjugate an “out-group.”
We certainly see in Canada, since the President of the United States has taken his country or pushed his policies -- his country may or may not be willing to follow him -- but the point is he is deliberately taking friends and making them enemies, and the intent is, ‘you've never really been our friends, you've been tricking us and we're going to get you right.’ So you could imagine, like any friendship, if, in a surprising way, a friend turns against you, then what do you do? And one of the things you do is unite those of whom are turned against in a sense of common pause. We have to construct a new reality, and that's energizing, in other words to have a problem that has to be dealt with quickly and together, because we can no longer rely on somebody else to be our friend we have to create new friendships and new alternatives. So you want to avoid getting sucked in to requiring (because you don't need them) enemies in order to make common cause. Common cause can be as global as you want, and it can be as inclusive, as it should be, but some of the modern examples of unity being created out of misuse of power are too obvious to need witness.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, yeah, now just quickly. Are you okay for a little bit more time? Maybe another five or 10? There's a few things I want to ask, or we can wrap it up quite quickly. How are you doing?
JOHN HELLIWELL: I'll go ahead and I'll try and be briefer!
BRUCE MCCABE: No no, I’m loving everything you say John. It’s really useful and important.
I wanted to bring up a couple of demographic shifts. As the world heads towards peak population, demographics are moving upwards, “aging populations” we say, and we can see that effect very starkly in countries like Japan, does this speak to opportunity and policy in government on how do we keep people together longer, how do we keep families together longer? Um, it seems to me that, you know it's, it's the possibilities are there for having a positive effect if we, if we do it well.
JOHN HELLIWELL: Absolutely.
You have to smile and you see, when population was growing fast, it was a terrible disaster. Where populations are shrinking, it's treated as a terrible disaster.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yes!
JOHN HELLIWELL: The happiness evidence is, to have a bigger country in a sense of more people, in none of the obvious senses makes people happier, and it may not even be an accident that the happiest countries are not the biggest countries, but smaller ones. And they're not necessarily those that are fastest growing, are not even not declining. And, of course, from nature's perspective, nature would be much happier if we were fewer rather than more, and if we were better behaved rather than worse.
And so these demographic transitions are ones that are not to be bemoaned, but they're to be dealt with.
The people have to change how they think about work, how they do it. That's your trade, to help people redesign work so it's more effective and more congenial. And, of course, one of the things that's going to be happening as healthy lives grow longer, is that healthy working lives will be longer, and we'll make even less distinction than we have in the past between what goes on in a paid form and unpaid forms, because one of the aspects of this year's report is the most effective things you do to help the world and the people in it are not the things you're paid to do, it's the things you do because you want to do them to help other people.
So a lot of these demographic transitions are in fact going to be making use of the fact that to help others not just helps them but helps you as well. And so you'll find maybe a resurgence of not just the actual extended family but virtual extended families, the extension of living arrangements, not to be isolated units separated by distance, but in fact ones that include people of all ages, where indeed the caring and sharing happens essentially automatically every minute, and, in fact, the change, the age distribution of that little micro village, and it doesn't really matter because they're all contributing in their own different ways.
If you're really worried about people living too long, you'd be worried about that, because it's quite clear that people who are in an extended family with happiness at its core are going to live a lot longer than the ones who are shut away in elder care facilities where the only thing is there for them are pills and television.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, and it really speaks to health policy people in particular. Everywhere I go I'm seeing innovative health practitioners that are pushing more and more capabilities into the home, to keep people in their homes longer and with their loved ones longer, and the economic effects are fantastic. It's not just the happiness and well-being. It really works out. The cost of care can be similar to a hospital or whatever, but in terms of the knock-on costs of readmission rates or how quickly people heal, you know it's light years better to keep people with the people they love.
JOHN HELLIWELL: So what you and I have to do is make sure we don't sell it to people on the basis of the cost savings, because if you think of it in those terms, then they'll try to find the cheapest way to do everything, rather than the most efficient way to do everything. It turns out, the most efficient way is, in fact, pretty cheap. But you won't find it by going through the budget in the first instance. You go through it by saying what's going to make these people happier, and that is true for both the caregivers and the care receivers and the care exchangers.
BRUCE MCCABE: Two more, and I want to come back at the end to that giving and receiving. I'd like to close with that. But before that, I come across all the time wealth inequality. Not only is it increasing in certain geographies, so wealth disparity between the richest and the poorest, the poorest 50%, you can look at it any way you like, but I also see a relativism here, this perceived unfairness as being a big factor.
In the United States. Everywhere I go, a lot of the political motivation for the current president and supporters when I talk to them at grassroots level comes from a feeling of waste and dissatisfaction and at least a perception well, in fact a reality that they're not doing as well as they used to, and certainly not compared to the, the top echelon in in earners. So are you seeing that same effect everywhere? Am I right in treating it as a relative effect as well as a real effect? You know, perceived unfairness is a big issue here.
JOHN HELLIWELL: As a happiness researcher, of course, I regard income inequality as a very imperfect measure of inequality. The inequality that matters is the inequality of well-being. There are many societies where income really doesn't matter because there are exchange economies with coconuts falling and so on, where income is not the relevant inequality, although it's not unimportant because it often signals other kinds of inequality as well, in terms of what’s happening within countries there’s been a growing inequality of well-being over the last 20 years across countries, not the kind of overall convergence we'd like to see of the least happy countries becoming happier and closing the gap, but not a broadening either. So, the inequality trends that are negative have been within countries rather than the other way around.
BRUCE MCCABE: Interesting.
JOHN HELLIWELL: They need to be dealt with, clearly.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, absolutely. Within rather than between. That's really interesting. So, yeah, within the poorest countries, starting with your discussion of Bhutan, the happiness indices can be very, very high.
And in your latest report there was this whole drill down into giving as well as receiving, and the benefits of being a giver. And I just wanted to finish with that, because this idea of giving to charities it also relates to international aid programs? I think you found linkages between the countries that give more and overall happiness? And you also found linkages between giving and knowing the money is used well. So if you could elaborate on that I'd love you to, because it's such a positive message.
JOHN HELLIWELL: Well, we had two very good social psychologists helping us in Chapter 2 on precisely that part, and they're what they call the three C's that you want. The really effective helping of others comes about if you have caring connections, if you have choice -- it's not forced redistribution, it's you choosing to help others, and that's very important in dealing with inequalities – and the third one is clear and positive impact, that in fact it's being done efficiently.
Well, those three C's have turned up many times in the minutes of our discussion, slightly differently in each place we looked, whether it was a workplace or anywhere else, but hanging over all of this is the power of the wallet experiments, because what they show us is that to believe you operate in a situation where people do care about you, in other words, where in some sense, the three C's are important to determine how any individual act will affect well-being. But it's that overall climate of kindness that makes you yourself more able and willing to step out of your regular life and to help other people. And, of course, once you start going in the big picture across racial groups, across income groups, across genders, across national boundaries, then it becomes more difficult, it's a harder and a bigger journey, but of course it's the more important journey.
BRUCE MCCABE: Yeah, yeah, fantastic. Are there any other messages you'd like people to hear about the work and the research? And I will put a link to the report in the notes for the podcast, but, any other things that I guess are, you know, conventional wisdom doesn't see, you'd like the message to be more broadly “out there” about your findings.
JOHN HELLIWELL: Will in general of course, the most powerful thing – well there are two things – one, the report itself has changed public discussions in many countries about what the ‘objects of emulation’ are. They were, 20 years ago, much more on actual income levels, of material income. They're twisting. So you're looking at countries that manage, with whatever income levels they have, to produce higher levels of how people think about their lives as a whole, and one of the lessons from looking at those countries is that they are places where not only wallets are more likely to be returned, but people, as we discover elsewhere, people love to live in a place where they're not just they're happier, but other people are happier too. So the equality of happiness is a very important thing to be cherished, and so that then changes how people think about their own families, their own firms and their own communities. Can we not build up or restore the mutual regard, affection, and contacts? And that means that's most important to establish in fast-paced urban areas where otherwise it might be missing. Big firms are harder to get it done than in small firms. So you may want to start in the organizations that are closest to home, that may be your family and your neighborhood, but clearly the lessons are there for organizations large and small.
BRUCE MCCABE: Fantastic, wonderful John, it's been such a pleasure. You've personally made me very, very happy today listening to you and just knowing that this research is getting out there and, and being able to play a small role myself in helping to get word out. It is such a pleasure. So don't listen to your wife. You can't stop. You've got to keep going, okay, and keep us all very happy.
JOHN HELLIWELL: Well, I do listen to my wife, not on that score, but as I tell people all the time that I study happiness, she produces it. And that makes what she does much more important than what I do. And she doesn't base it on the research. She already knows that it's the quality of other regarding social connections, so it's ones where you come in, not “what's in this for me?” but “who are you? I'd like to know more about you, and can we together make a tighter bond and have some fun?”
BRUCE MCCABE: All good things come through other people, don't they? That's a great way to end it. John, thank you so much for being on FutureBites today.
JOHN HELLIWELL: I've enjoyed it, take care.
John also discussed how he became associated with happiness research. For reasons of length this didn’t make the audio version of the podcast, but I’ve included the transcript below because it’s an inspiring story, especially for researchers starting out and thinking of following a similar path!
JOHN HELLIWELL: Most paths through life are circuitous, and I think one of the lessons about life is follow your nose, and something new to you comes along, then look it over carefully and decide if it's helpful.
I was working in the early 1990s – because I happened to be in the Canadian Studies Chair at Harvard for several years at the time – I was linking up with a group of first-rate social scientists there who would meet to talk about their new work, and one of these was Robert Putnam who was talking about his book on making modern democracy in Italy, which then was a precursor to his much more famous Bowling Alone, and I worked with him directly on this topic, and in the course of that our work together, he told me that, and he used it in Bowling Alone, that people in states with higher social capital, that is, higher levels of social trust and more mixing with each other, were happier. And I said, ‘what do you mean happier?’ And indeed there had been a modest collection of such data in the United States, and so I said ‘well, that's either the most important thing I've heard in a long time or it's wrong’ and I mean accidental rather than wrong, and so I got a fellowship to go back to Oxford, where I've spent many years to be Aristotle's research assistant, essentially to ask the same question he did, which is asking people (because that's what was done in the early surveys, which the World Values Survey was the first one that asked this in a world level) one way or another, to say ‘how do you value your life as a whole?’ And that's with 10 as the top and zero as the bottom, and people are simply entitled to report that.
And so I started working in that field and about the turn of the century there were other things also happening. There was a flourishing of something called positive psychology, which is a group of important psychologists who said, ‘you know, psychology is all about identifying and curing ill states of health. Surely, as in the medical profession as well as in the clinical psychological tradition, we should be studying what's right about life because they aren't the same things, to eliminate the negative and to create the positives, so we should be doing it differently and researching differently.’
So I got involved with some of the leaders in that field, especially Ed Diener [Professor and psychologist celebrated for three decades of research on happiness] and Danny Kahneman [Princeton psychologist, 2002 Nobel Prize Winner in Economics, author of international bestseller ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’] and we were moving ahead with some research projects simultaneously. And one of the places where I met first with both Diener and Kahneman was in the offices of the Gallup Organization New York office, because they were starting and this is 2005, at that time the Gallup World Poll and they invited three of us in. They were central advisors in the poll. I was just brought in as a worker, a research worker in the field, and I also invited Jeff Sachs, who was the leading development economist for his knowledge of countries around the world which is without parallel, and so we helped interpret the answers to that simultaneously ... This is a long story. This is going to take up your whole podcast! [laughter]
The government of Bhutan had started quite early, also 30 years earlier, to focus on gross national happiness rather than gross national product. It's kind of a joke in a way, but it's deeply gripping because it says you know, you take the economy out of it or put it in the background and think about the happiness of life as a whole. And they had started gross national happiness global conferences. The first was, I think, outside in Nova Scotia, in Eastern Canada, and I was there and got to meet all the principals, and the next one, I think, was in Brazil and there, the prime minister was there and their key national experts and I was there and other people before a thousand Brazilians who took their happiness very seriously indeed and with lots of laughter.
So then, fast forward, or slow forward, to the Bhutanese resolution before the General Assembly in 2011, supported by Jeffrey Sachs, of course, who was an advisor to the Secretary General at the time, and introduced by Digby Thinley, the Prime Minister of Bhutan, the first elected Prime Minister of Bhutan, advising countries to, inviting countries to take happiness and well-being as a focus of their national policies.
So two months later, a conference was held, chaired by the Prime Minister and Jeffrey Sachs, in Thimphu, to say what to do about this next, and obviously the next step was going to be a high-level meeting at the United Nations, and that was to be in April 2012. And Jeffrey Sachs said we really should put together a scientific document that collects all that's known around the world about studies in well-being. And so he and Richard Laird, who'd been a key worker in that field through his 2005 book on happiness lessons from a new science, and we edited this report which was then presented at the meeting in April 2012. It surprised us a bit and we had a big meeting of thinkers in the field before that UN meeting. So we were getting lots of feedback positive feedback, but it flew off the shelves at the meeting and we had a thousand copies and they were all gone before the meeting really got underway and people in the UN said it was the biggest attended meeting they could remember, had several overflow rooms being filled, even though the main hall was a thousand people, so clearly there was something in the air.
People want to think more broadly and differently about life and about how you address it. And the reception was so demanding that, in fact, we said we really have to produce another. We were being asked to produce another. So a year and a half later, we did one more, year and a half later, one more after that, and then, because there had by then been an UN International Day of Happiness, March 20th, someone said well, you should be doing this every year, and from 2016 on, that's the way it's been. And we're now on our 13th and my wife would say enough is enough, but we still do it.