Abstract
Join Tim Ng, Strategic Economic Advisor at the Treasury, for a conversation with the leading economist and wellbeing researcher, Professor John Helliwell. John and Tim will explore how the concept and measurement of subjective wellbeing can transform how we think about impact when developing and advising on policies to improve wellbeing. As part of this conversation, John will share his expertise on developments in wellbeing economics in policy, and real-world cases where an understanding of subjective wellbeing has led to successful policy. John will also discuss his work on the role that social cohesion has played in wellbeing outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. There will be an opportunity for questions from the audience.
About the presenter
John F. Helliwell is Professor Emeritus in the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia, and Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. From 2006 to 2017 he directed (with George Akerlof) CIFAR’s program in Social Interaction, Identity and Well-Being. His books include Globalization and Well-Being (UBC Press 2002), Well-Being for Public Policy (OUP, with Diener, Lucas and Schimmack, 2009), International Differences in Well-Being (OUP, edited with Diener and Kahneman, 2010), all ten editions, 2012-2022, of the World Happiness Report, and (with Jon Hall) Happiness on a Healthier Planet, in Myers & Frumkin, eds. Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves (Island Press, 2020). Recent papers include one with Lara Aknin and others in Lancet Public Health entitled “Policy Stringency and Mental Health during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A longitudinal analysis of data from 15 countries”.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Officer of the Order of Canada.
Video recording
Captions for this video are available by clicking on the CC icon.
Transcript
Tim Ng (00:00:15):
[speaking in te reo Māori] E ngā iwi, e ngā mana, e ngā hoa mahi, tēnā koutou katoa. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou, kua hui mai nei i tēnei rā, e tautoko ana i te ako. Ngā mihi nui ki a Professor John Helliwell,
te kaikōrero o te rā. Tēnā koe, John. Nau mai, haere mai ki te Tai Ōhanga. Ko Tim Ng toku ingoa.
Tim Ng (00:00:27):
Welcome everyone. Welcome colleagues and friends from all over New Zealand and from Canada, and I hope from elsewhere also. I'm Tim Ng, a Strategic Economic Advisor here at the Treasury, and it's my great pleasure to be able to welcome you to this session and to host Professor John Helliwell for today's wellbeing seminar event. John hails from the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia, among many other affiliations, and I'm going to introduce him more fully shortly. But right up front, I do want to say how pleased I am to be able to talk with him today. Talk with you, John, today about subjective wellbeing, wellbeing more generally and public policy.
(00:01:18):
John and I have actually had several conversations on this topic over recent years, so I'm delighted to be able to continue that conversation with you today with more people able to listen and participate. Thank you once again for taking your time and for sharing your thoughts on this important topic.
(00:01:35):
So just before we begin, let me please explain for our audience a little bit more about why we're having this conversation. Back in April, the Secretary to the Treasury, Dr Caralee McLiesh, publicly launched the work programme for the Treasury's first Wellbeing Report, which will be published towards the end of this year. Wellbeing Report, Te Tai Waiora to in the Māori language, te reo Māori, will be a report on the state of wellbeing in New Zealand, how it has changed over the years, risks to wellbeing and sustainability of wellbeing.
(00:02:05):
This seminar series is part of that effort and part of the Treasury’s broader work programme on improving public policy to support wellbeing in New Zealand. New ideas and research evidence and the advice of experts like John are all critical for stimulating and provoking our thinking here at the Treasury.
(00:02:21):
I'm certain that we'll all get plenty of provocation and stimulation from what you have to say today, John. We've had the privilege at the Treasury to host some other great speakers so far from both New Zealand and overseas, and there are more seminars to come over the rest of this year and early 2023. I'll mention a couple of those at the end of the session and please look out for the flyers about those that will come out in due course.
(00:02:45):
Let me now turn a little bit more to about John. As well as Professor Emeritus in the Vancouver School of Economics, he is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He's a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an Officer of the Order of Canada. During his very long academic career, he's been a visiting professor at Harvard University, Oxford University, and many other distinguished institutions and has been a frequent advisor to the Canadian and other governments, including New Zealand's government.
(00:03:13):
John has visited New Zealand several times, including both islands, South Island and North Island since the seventies, I believe was the first time. And so it's great to be able to continue our relationship with you here today, John. John has written many books on the subject of wellbeing, including “Globalisation and wellbeing”, “Wellbeing for Public Policy” and “International Differences in Wellbeing”, and numerous journal articles.
(00:03:37):
He's a founding editor of the World Happiness Report and has edited all 10 reports that have been published so far and we'll talk about that a little bit today. I'm going to ask John mostly about the concept and measurement of subjective wellbeing and their uses in public policy. He's kindly agreed to share his thoughts on progress in the use of wellbeing economics and policy since the founding of the World Happiness Report 10 years ago. We'll also hear about his work on the role of social cohesion during the COVID 19 pandemic.
(00:04:06):
So in terms of how the session will run, I'm going to aim to cover my questions in the first half, which is about 40 minutes of the seminar, and then we'll have another 40 minutes or so in the second half for John to answer questions from people on the call. So if you have a question, please feel free to enter it into the chat box at any time. On our side of the Treasury, we'll collect up the questions and I'll put them to John in the second half of the seminar.
(00:04:29):
You can also, if you like, indicate which questions you like by using the like button and we'll do our best to cover the questions that have a lot of likes. So John, once again, welcome. Can we begin by sharing a little bit more of your biographical background with our viewers beyond my introduction. You have, as I said, a very long and distinguished career spanning many decades and topics. I believe much of your early work was an international macro, and then you did a fair bit on social capital as well. So how did you come to get involved in your work on subjective wellbeing?
Michelle Cornish (00:05:09):
John, can you just unmute yourself please? It's just the little... Oh, perfect.
Tim Ng (00:05:18):
Perfect. Thank you.
John Helliwell (00:05:19):
Lovely. I was working in the Canadian chair at Harvard for several years and it was a regular group that met to talk about research in progress, including... And that led to work on economic growth and democracy based on Sam Huntington's work. And Bob Putnam was in the process of publishing his book on Italy making modern democracy work. And so I started working with him on economic growth and social capital where the broadly speaking, social capital for him and it reappears in the modern wellbeing literature, measured the amount of trust people have with each other and the extent to which they share positive social connections.
(00:06:12):
And we got partly into that. And then both of us decided that these social capital measures were clearly important and they needed collecting more generally by national statistical agencies. So we worked together lobbying, if you like, the Canadian Statistical Agency and the US statistical agencies and the UK statistical agencies to gradually increase the data.
(00:06:41):
Well, of course we wanted to show that these data were important and all of the research that we and others had done added how much does social capital influence economic growth? Well, we said when you think about these, these are deeply human characteristics we're measuring and humans are deeply social people and there must be some other way of judging the importance of social capital.
(00:07:07):
So at one stage she said, "John, do you know that people are happier in states that have more social capital, this sort we're looking at?" I said, "What do you mean happier?" I had never used any of the happiness data before at that time towards the end of the last century. And I said, "In economics, we've been doing without such data for more than two centuries, assuming that we had to look at income and employment and things like that to measure the quality of life. If we can get a direct measure of the quality of life that will allow economics to go back to its roots where it really was about life as a whole and not just about how much people made and how they spent their money."
(00:07:47):
So I immediately declared myself, I got a fellowship to Oxford and appointed myself as Aristotle's research assistant and went back to the fundamentals and found data in the first case from the World Value Survey in order to test his propositions about what it meant to have a better life. Well, we sort of went on from that supported on the one hand through the Bhutanese and their Gross National Happiness movement, that I was involved with from its early days and in the Gallup World Poll, which I was also involved with from their early days. So these threads came together. You asked about the origin and it really came from looking for a better way to value social capital.
Tim Ng (00:08:34):
Oh, that's excellent. So social capital then turned into a formal measure for happiness. Maybe could you maybe explain for our listeners subjective wellbeing, there's now a reasonable consensus about how to measure that concept quantitatively for the purposes of studying its drives, et cetera. Would you mind just telling us that story a little bit?
John Helliwell (00:09:00):
Absolutely. When I first got into the field, well, I mean it was wonderful to enter a new field. That psychology for me was a new field at that time. I was so fortunate to be accepted as an active colleague by Ed Diener and Danny Kahneman and others who really had been at the forefront of this field for quite a long time. So it was a very steep learning curve.
(00:09:23):
One of the core propositions from Diener's work essentially and others were that there are three ways of looking at subjective wellbeing. Positive emotions, negative emotions and life evaluations. And so we started measuring those and they were part of the Gallup World poll, but it was pretty clear from the outset, reading Aristotle, but more than that, that the life evaluations have a central umbrella role. And as Aristotle said, yes, positive emotions are very important, but they're just part of the story.
(00:10:01):
Living a good and morally upright life is really important, but it's just part of the story. And to look at the whole story, you get people, he said, in a reflective moment and ask them about their lives as a whole. So, although we measure it, in the UK for example there are four variables being measured in their wellbeing suite of questions, happiness yesterday, anxiety yesterday, a sense of life purpose and overall life evaluations.
(00:10:32):
Well, quite clearly right from the very beginning of the World Happiness Report and before that, the life evaluations are the central measure and a life purpose is really important, but it's one of the drivers of a better life. Similarly, positive emotions are very important supports for it. And, indeed, we find things like having someone to count on directly affects your overall life evaluation, but it also affects your positive emotions. So, a lot of that affect essentially flowing through positive emotions to the umbrella measure.
Tim Ng (00:11:08):
So how do I put a number then on how I would evaluate my life? What is the question that gets asked in the surveys?
John Helliwell (00:11:15):
Well, we've done a certain amount of study of that, fortunately because multiple questions have been used in the same survey and we're able to triangulate. I use the same term life evaluations because all of the questions we consider are essentially that. But the main one recommended by the OECD and used in many national surveys is, "How satisfied are you with your life as a whole?" And the standard scale now is zero to 10. 11-point scales have some advantage, you got to fixed midpoint and so on so people have played with much shorter scales and typically there's more information in the longer scale, at least up to 11 points. My guess is it'll go on further with sliders and things like that at one time or another. The Gallup World Poll, in part through its connections with Gallup in early days have used the Cantril ladder.
(00:12:14):
Hadley Cantril invented it, and it's supposed to be a little more responsive to changing circumstances, but it asks you to think of your life as a ladder with the best possible life as a 10 and the worst possible life as a zero, how would you rate your life today? And then the European social survey, and this helps us to triangulate and explain things to people who think if it's a World Happiness Report, it's just about some flaky emotion of happiness, it's not really about a good life but that survey, the European social survey, also asks a question, "How happy are you with your life as a whole?" And that permits us to make the philosophical distinction what Marchesan has made and other philosophers have made between the emotion of happiness and being happy about something.
(00:13:11):
Because of course you say, and one of the old examples is, "Are you happy with the baggage retrieval system at Heathrow?" That's a judgement about how good something else is. And so, it turns out people are very good at listening to questions and putting them in their conversational context. As my Oxford philosophy tutor, Paul Grice really made famous, the notion of thinking of the conversational context is the way of finding out about meaning.
(00:13:42):
Well, if you ask people how happy they were yesterday, their answer will be quite different and determined by different things than if you ask them how happy they are with their life as a whole. Ask them about happiness of life in a whole, the answers are very similar to those from a life satisfaction question. Also similar to those you get from the Cantril ladder. Not identical, but if you actually use the three different versions of the question on the same... And there's no survey with all three and the same survey, but some surveys have two, and then you can mix and match and triangulate. They essentially produce the same answer. And so, we like to keep different kinds of questions in play just to make sure the science is robust, but basically the key results do not depend on which version of a life evaluation question you use. And happiness with life gives you very different answers and more important answers than how happy were you yesterday?
Tim Ng (00:14:46):
That’s good to know. So for developed countries, let's say, what would most people score? On the scale of one to 10, what would an unhappy person that was not satisfied with their life say typically, and what would somebody that was very satisfied say? What's the sort of-
John Helliwell (00:15:02):
Now, you said, developed countries, but the world happiness is about the world. So let me tell you first about the world. The mean is almost exactly five, which means in some sense people are interpreting Hadley's ladder correctly and they have a pretty shrewd idea of the best possible and the worst possible in where they are located. If you look at the developed countries, the average would be somewhere between six and seven. Some countries well above seven. The top 10 are always above seven.
Tim Ng (00:15:42):
Great. So, it certainly seems as though we've got what you're arguing to be as a reasonably robust measure that's measuring something important. And as I'm sure you'll explain, my understanding is that it is at least correlated, if not caused by other things that are important.
(00:16:03):
So maybe if you could talk a little bit, please about, why... Well, you're an advocate of using subjective wellbeing measures as a guide for policy, as one way of anchoring the purposes of policy and perhaps even measuring and evaluating the impacts of policy. Can you talk a little bit about that and why is it that you think this is a productive way to think about policy evaluation?
John Helliwell (00:16:31):
Well, in a way, it circles back to the beginning of our discussion. You said, "How did I get into it?" I got into it because subjective wellbeing tells you about life. And if you were anxious to know about what kind of social capital is good and what's bad and how much does it matter, then the subjective wellbeing data is precisely what you need to tell you.
(00:16:55):
And it'll tell you in relation to other things. We find, for example, that people who are willing to take a lower salary to work in a high trust environment. Of course, often they don't have to because a high trust environment is also one that on average is a more productive one and produces better jobs that are better for the customers as well as better for the workers. But since the data have supported the promise that I thought they might have when getting into this on a regular and continuing basis, it's then strengthened the argument for saying, the only thing that stops us from using subjective wellbeing information, and remember the key information that we get for policy making from this, is when we use other variables, all these things in the dashboards of the wellbeing economy or in the dashboards of the OECD, these are all very important things, the various star elements in the Bhutanese star of important things, they're all really important...
(00:18:03):
What we do with the science of wellbeing is say, "Well, let's look at how those various things are playing out in the society we are looking at." Whether it's a neighbourhood or a company or a nation, and say, "What's the relative importance of having this, that, or the other thing?" And often we sort of measure it in terms of its income equivalents, but you could measure it in terms of anything else. It's just telling you the relative importance of various features of life. Well, government policy is about enabling people to advance themselves in their interests in the most efficient way.
(00:18:42):
It's up to the government to have the roads and the railways and the legal systems that allow people to flourish. We know, for example, that one of the key variables that shows up ever since we looked at it, thank goodness this question was in the Gallup World Poll, " Do you have freedom to make your key life decisions?" Very strong variable everywhere.
(00:19:06):
So, if you then say, somebody might say, "If you take this seriously, it's a big brother situation." You say, "Well, if you take it seriously, it isn't a big brother situation because you won't want big brother situations to help people's wellbeing." They value their chance to build with others, framework and develop their own lives in a framework that is honest, is supportive, but is not directed by somebody else. So, from what we've learned, there's now a lot of information that permits policy makers to make shrewder decisions. I mean, you ask any government what its objective is and they've always said, "We were trying to make life better for people."
(00:19:51):
I don't want go on too long about this, but in part because there is an evidence that my colleague Richard Laird always emphasises this point, he says, "You know, countries where people are happy reelect the governments in question." And there is a certain amount of evidence that that's true and it's always been true in what they assumed in their speeches. The whole idea is, we're about to make life better for you. Well, we're now got some evidence as to whether in fact that's happening and that's humbling for all of us as policy advisors and as policy makers because you often don't know the whole story and some things you thought would be very good turn out not to be so good.
Tim Ng (00:20:35):
Well, let's take some examples of that, John. So often one will hear politicians say, "Yes, we want to make life better for people." And then the next breath they'll say, "So we're going to build houses over here," or, "We're going to have a bridge over that river," or, "We're going to invest in schools," or, "We will invest in safety and more cops on the streets." Can you give us an example where the use of subjective wellbeing in a kind of practical policy intervention or government programme has been particularly successful? How has it changed the way that the policy makers thought about delivering those types of things?
John Helliwell (00:21:14):
Let me give you one example that allowed me to make this case with more confidence. The Social Research and Demonstration Corporation in Canada is a nonprofit enterprise setup, in the first instance by governments, but independent of government and has now got customers who are coming from cities of provinces, nations, in order to do experimental work, looking at what makes sense. And so the programme that I'm going to talk about was one that took people who were on welfare or unemployment, gave them the same income they would've had on welfare or unemployment, but instead have them collaborate with the community leaders in their own community to undertake community services.
(00:22:10):
So yes, it was a job. It was a job with a function. Its aim was to build a better community. Of course it was to keep them in more interested and more valuable than they would've been probably if they were just receiving the benefits of the unemployment insurance. And they found the cost benefit analysis of the conventional sort was, after all this had gone on, roughly people ended up in the same jobs they had before with the same income and it was favourable, but it wasn't knocking it out of the park.
(00:22:47):
But then they measured the degree of social trust in these neighbourhoods and in these neighbourhoods where these communities were connected by people who were otherwise not engaged in the communal life, in the communal life and helping other people to connect, they were quite deliberately building social capital, and it turns out the actual measures of trust in these neighbourhoods rose significantly. And it's particularly in those places where the activities were of the sort where they were likely to influence the way in which people connected with each other and trusted each other. So, then we went back and used, or they went back - I was throwing in advice from the sides. It's their project - and used data from subjective wellbeing research to show the value of social trust to people's lives, and it's pretty big. And so it changed the whole cost benefit analysis. So, what they were learning by the subjective wellbeing data radically changed how they thought about that kind of policy. So, it converted something that was otherwise not much better than just conventional welfare policies into something that was quite a lot better.
Tim Ng (00:24:07):
That's fascinating. So, it's a specific intervention in a particular time in place with a particular population or a particular group of people in particular life circumstances if you like. How generalisable do you think are these lessons or was that sort of evidence? Do you think we now have enough evidence to say that approaches like that can be scaled? Can they be generalised to other cultures, other countries? What would be your view on that?
John Helliwell (00:24:43):
Nuanced. The world is a complicated place. The first thing I might mention is that we find these attempts to explain subjective wellbeing, and what's important to people in different cultures in different countries, remarkably consistent across countries and cultures so there's an essential humanity that is tapped into and answered by people's answers. The scalability and applicability of results that come from specific experiments as you know is complicated. Let me give you one other example where we've been looking at that. There's a whole lot of evidence from around the world that it's potentially a pretty costly programme to incarcerate older people in elder care facilities and to lock children into schools, and not allowing either the chance to meet with, educate and socialise the other. So, there was a particular experiment that was being run and has been run for several years in Saskatoon where it takes a grade six class and has it taught for the whole year in an elder care facility.
(00:26:06):
Now, we've been studying that with the collaboration of the teachers and the elder care people for now two or three years, and even during COVID, this was all being done with video calls and so on. And you could just see the extent to which the lives of these individual students and elders and staff members, and even the people who work in the cafeteria were changed by the enlivening that was got by bringing that social context and making it real. These weren't outside services provided to people. It was just bringing people together in a context where they had the freedom and the opportunity to help each other and to meet each other and to support each other.
(00:26:50):
So, the next question, which is your question, how scalable is this? So that's one of the next research questions we're looking at because it's so obviously a good thing, it's been known about for years. Why isn't everybody else lining up and doing it? Why do we keep responding to anything that happens by locking the doors, not opening the doors? Well, you will well know from your policy making experience, if something goes wrong, somebody gets blamed, and so it's quite typical to have risk committees everywhere now. We want to do everything we can to avoid anything going wrong. Well, of course, what that automatically does is stop anything important going right because what you do is shut doors.
(00:27:35):
So, you ask the people, and I've met with operators of elder care facilities and said, "Why aren't your experiments with running daycare centres there in the summer? And how did you make that happen? Did you have to break any rules?" Well, she said, "You bet we did." So, you have to have the capacity to break rules that were designed with sort of okay principles in mind, but in neither case, for the schools or for the elder care, were they really thinking about the happiness of the people involved, whether they be the teachers or the inmates.
(00:28:10):
So then in the Global Happiness Policy Report, we ask quite explicitly about your scalability question. And it turns out the culture of fear and avoiding of risk is enormously costly. So, what that means is you have to have a lot of good evidence in order to break down that, "Oh, that's too complicated. We have all these rules and so on. All these kids, something could happen, right? An elder could trip over a kid running in the corridor." Well, of course, the elder could. The elder would be much less likely to trip being incarcerated in a wheelchair in front of a television set, but that's not the life they want to have. It's not the life we should be giving them.
(00:28:57):
You see the example. You have to show people the examples, make them obvious enough that they're willing to take the extra step to try something. Because what we do know is that these kind of social connections that are got easily at no extra cost by this grade six class being taught in an elder care facility are life changing for those people. Well, why aren't we doing it more? In the end, I haven't got a full answer to that but I think there are threads of it in what I've said.
Tim Ng (00:29:33):
Well, let's turn to the World Happiness Report because I think it is... For those who haven't read it, I'd commend it to you. It's on the website, 10 editions, and I think it has quite a macro view if you like. We've talked about micro examples where subjective wellbeing has been used to guide the design and evaluation of particular programmes, but in the World Happiness Report, you have looked across for 10 years at different countries’ experience, whether it's data gathering on wellbeing, the dashboard development, the incorporation of wellbeing analysis into different government policy processes. What have been the main changes you've seen over the past 10 years and what are the good ones that you've seen that we should be encouraged by? And where do you think things should go next for governments?
John Helliwell (00:30:35):
Let me start with the changes we've seen over the 10 years because I think they all open doors for governments to do more. Because if you think of it from the government point of view, they want to have enough data, enough science, enough public support pushing them in this direction and rewarding them if they go there. If they're too far ahead of public opinion, then anything goes wrong, they're going to get in trouble. And if people are generally not on board, then something will go wrong or will be seen to go wrong and they'll get in trouble. And it's true of a lot of the innovations. Unless they're broadly supported, they become riskier and eventually often become too risky for a government to adopt.
(00:31:23):
What the important thing, quite surprising to us, was the extent to which people were really hungering for some measure of the quality of life in their community and in other communities that was broader than just what was purchased and made, and going much beyond the no doubt important but not life central conventional economic measures. Because it became an element of discussion in the broader public of many, many countries. Because we know roughly from them, I think we have 20 million repeat visitors coming back to the site and they're in all the countries of the world. It's not something that's focused on the countries that are supposed to be interested in happiness and so on, it's right across the world.
(00:32:17):
And what it's also done, because it is absolutely true, when people first go to the report, they go and see where their country is and where their comparator countries are, and only later do they start asking, but of course we've now had 10 years later so almost everybody is at this stage now, they're saying, "Well what is it that is importantly different in the countries that have high scores and the countries that have low scores? And what is there we should be emulating or copying?" Well, what's happened is that consistently, the five Nordic countries have been in the top 10 right from the beginning. They've got other peers, Switzerland and Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Australia turn up in the top 10 but the Nordic countries have always been there, and that has made a lot of people... I mean, they're actually getting happiness tourists coming to all of those countries to see what's going on there and they're sometimes policy making tourists, but sometimes, they're just ordinary people wanting to sample life in a happy country. And they get in all the usual discussions, why aren't you laughing in the streets in Helsinki? And of course, the Helsinki experts who are themselves puzzled by all this top ranking, they're able to say, "Well, after all, here's a picture of our five- and four-year-old children walking to school in the middle of Helsinki and that's normal." And that should be normal. It is abnormal in the world as a whole, but it's fundamental to a feeling that you're living in a better society.
(00:34:03):
So these ideas of what it means to have a civilised society where people care about each other and say, well, it's really not about a social safety net, although that's part of any good story. That's not what it’s coming from. It's coming from the essential caring of people for each other. And so that's changed the norms that people are using when they're saying, what kind of schools should we have? What kind of prisons should we have? What kind of neighbourhoods should we be going? And there's a rural urban divide, and then so people are now saying, how can we make life in big cities a little bit more like life in the better small towns, where somebody you don't know, a stranger, is just a friend you haven't met yet? And that kind of change. What can we do, as individuals, not just as governments but individuals to make that happen?
Tim Ng (00:34:58):
So we have come back in a sense to social cohesion and social capital, so let's talk about that a little bit. I'm sure people will well remember, as I certainly do, the acute COVID phase and massive disruption to everything. Now, the World Happiness Report, the latest edition I think and the previous one maybe as well, talked about social capital, trust in other people, trust in institutions as, in a quantitative way, important, if you like, explanators of a different experience in COVID in different countries. Would you like to talk a little bit about that? What's the result there as an example?
John Helliwell (00:35:47):
There are several elements to that research. One is that in comparing a whole range of countries, we found that COVID deaths were lower in countries where people trusted each other and trusted in their government, regardless of the official strategy that was adopted. Countries did much better if their official strategy was to simply eliminate the virus. Now, I'm talking about the results for 2020 and 2021. It's a different game in 2022 with Omicron and vaccines. But in those years, it was quite explicit, so we divided the world into the eliminators and the non-eliminators. Of course, Australia and New Zealand were among the eliminators. In fact, the broad sample was the Western Pacific region of the WHO. Within the Nordic countries, we split them between Sweden and the other Nordics and found a similar difference who were near eliminators, and that deaths were much lower.
(00:36:50):
Now, here of course, Sweden versus the other Nordics, they're all high trust societies and so it's quite clear that COVID success wasn't just about high trust, it also required making the right policy decisions. And the Swedish essentially took a view that in the end, if you compare their performance with the other Nordic countries, didn't gain them anything. In the long run, they had more stringency than the other Nordic countries, they had way more deaths than the other Nordic countries. They had no more economic growth and no more personal freedoms on average. They were forced into a situation that ended up being worse than the eliminators. Well, that's part of the story, so policy mattered and trust mattered.
(00:37:38):
One of the surprises in the first report, 2020 result, everyone was expecting subjective wellbeing to have fallen off a cliff because everyone was emphasising what had been lost by people staying home and all the things that they did, working from home and so on. Well, as people now know much better, it's true and it's the way it should be that all the help services were inundated with calls because people were calling. But the point is so were the services, and they're not so often formal, of people helping each other. So, for example, the UK put out a request for volunteers to help each other deliver medicines and food and so on. Their phone lines rang off the hook, or whatever the right expression is. In a few days, they had more volunteers than they could use. Well, we already know from lots of previous study of disasters of various sorts, when people get a chance to help others, when they get a chance to see how their neighbours are in turn helping each other, it makes them feel a lot better about themselves and about their lives.
(00:38:54):
And then part of that is because we know from all our wallet dropping experiments that people like to live in a society where their wallet will be returned if it was lost. But in general, people are much too pessimistic about that. So that means that how people reacted to their neighbours and saw other people helping other people, they were surprised, they were pleasantly surprised at that. So not only did they have more contact with their elder parents or grandparents or whatever by electronic means than they had actually had through visits before that, but they were enjoying that. So you'll often find the group that did best demographically were in fact the people over 65, and they were in fact getting more contact from their loved ones than they were before that, and of course it's ended up changing things one way and another. And not that I'm suggesting people in elder care were appropriately treated in most countries. They were irresponsibly treated in many countries, not deliberately, but because people hadn't thought about handling wellbeing and disease in those circumstances.
(00:40:14):
But is that enough on the COVID? I think there's one thing that we talked about before which was in the 2022 report where we were very surprised in the 2021 data, which is now the second year of COVID, that all over the world, in every region, there was a big upsurge in pro-social activities, the most important being the helping of strangers. And some of the micro evidence of that is people who are not commuting long distances to work and trading road rage are busy greeting their neighbours in the street when they're out on their walks and indeed helping them. And so there's been a big increase in... And you can imagine in big cities, that's especially valuable because otherwise, often, the neighbourhoods are not really neighbourhoods at all.
Tim Ng (00:41:10):
Yeah, that's fascinating. There's tonnes more we could probably talk about in terms of COVID. Well, maybe one final thing on COVID, and I suppose this topic of social cohesion and social media... Actually, this predates COVID in a way, the trends that I'm going to allude to, and that's the rise of social media trolling and toxic social media and so on. How much of a threat to the results that we've seen, the positive results we've seen on the importance of connectedness is that? So now, we are able to be more connected through social media and we are seeing some toxic behaviours as a result of that. I know this is extremely speculative, we don't have the evidence in yet, but what's your view on what's going to prevail? Are we going to keep getting better at recognising the importance of social cohesion and social capital or is this a threat that's a real big problem?
John Helliwell (00:42:19):
We don't know, but quite clearly, social media, and we had a chapter on this in a previous World Happiness Report, how destructive it was to the self-image, especially of adolescent females through a whole range of shaming and boasting and a whole range of issues, and so the image was getting stronger and stronger that the social media were forces for evil, not forces for good. Well, if you ask yourself how life could have survived in the workplace, in the family, in the neighbourhoods, in the actual provision of goods and services without the social media, it was just very lucky that in fact all those mechanisms were either developed or made available. And one of our early analyses said, "At last, the social media have become social media rather than antisocial media." And it showed the possibilities for using these technologies to actually create wellbeing and to distribute it, because of course, the ability to share information and caring and good ideas is infinitely greater with these multiple chains of connection.
(00:43:41):
And so, to have these good uses and examples so obviously out there probably helped people to develop a nuanced view about it. So, it's not whether you have a telephone or not but how you use it? It's not whether you have the ability to form a narrow group within the global interest sphere, but how you use that? And we're also getting, of course, it's one of the good things about this report, the conventional media have a sort of if it bleeds, it leads strategy, so bad news gets told much more frequently than good news. Well, we're coming in much more neutrally because we just have these views about how people, how happy they are with their lives as a whole. And we're finding out, of course, there's a lot more good news than bad news and people are too pessimistic, so that's something that probably will continue out of COVID for long, we don't know, and of course, there are other things going on at the same time.
Tim Ng (00:44:54):
Thank you for that, John. Let's finish this segment with just a little look to the future. What are you working on now in this area and what are you excited about over the next couple of years, let's say around the World Happiness Report work that's continuing, other research that's going on that you're connected to?
John Helliwell (00:45:12):
Well, one thing, and this is boasting, we've been very gratified at the extent to which what might have been regarded as a pretty flaky publication, it is now the case that we can ask almost anybody to write a chapter for us and they're happy to do it, because they know there's an audience out there of interested people. And they're able to take their scientific research and get it out of the technical journals before an audience of many million. And most of them are doing the research because they want it to be useful, and so to provide that, so it means we're able to keep and build an intellectual structure that enables the report to be part of the evolving science of wellbeing. That's very gratifying, and it also means we can be a little more ambitious about what our expectations are. We only had world leaders in genetics of happiness write a chapter in the most recent one where we've had several high-level contributions from the scientific leaders on how you can use Twitter and other forms of immediately available information to dig deeper into the... Because of course, in the long run we're going to have to find better ways than voluntary surveys or in additional ways to find out how good lives are with people. We're going to have to map them in any number of other ways. We've got Tim Besley and Torsten Persson key leaders in the political science of public institutions doing a chapter in the forthcoming report on what are the links between government capacity and happiness.
(00:47:18):
So, all of those, and of course you still have to dig deeper and deeper and we're trying to raise ambitions of national governments, so that having the relevant statistics in the main social surveys, in fact, the investigations should be thought of as absolutely normal, indeed required. Initially, as you well know, some statistical agency said, "Oh, subjective measures, we can't do that. We only look at exactly how many people are walking the streets." Well, of course we know that never was true, that people were unemployed if they said they were looking for work and didn't have it. So, subjective measures have always been used. The point is they didn't understand and they were kissing off the possibility that these subjective measures were really valid.
(00:48:08):
Well, after all these years, it's now 20 years of this research, that tide has changed. Statistical agencies are looking to do more and they will do more if their governments ask them to do so and the governments will ask them to do so if there's a general public interest. There's this circular flow of ideas and influence and knowledge that we keep it moving in the right direction and nothing but good will follow.
Tim Ng (00:48:38):
Excellent. Well, thank you very much. That's really positive way to finish the formal segment and very inspiring too. Let me turn to the questions. Thank you for all the participants who have entered questions in the chat box. I'm going to go back to the beginning and see if I can get some themes out of this. We have some stuff on, I guess, the statistical properties of subjective wellbeing. There's a question here, and I'm going to group them together. Is this happiness measure by which I'm taking to mean the subjective wellbeing measure, is it cardinal or ordinal? Then there's a question, how well correlated is national happiness with GDP? And one on the distribution, if you like. Yeah, actually, why don't we start with the first two just on the cardinal and ordinal and the correlations with GDP.
John Helliwell (00:49:49):
Well, it's formally an ordinal measure. It's a step on a ladder, and then it becomes cardinal if you can attach a similar quantitative importance to a move from one step to the other. There are ways of, and it's been quite standard now for 15 years, for people to use probate estimation as a way of then treating it as an ordinal measure and then seeing how different the answers are than if you assume it is cardinal, which is simpler because then you get a nice interpretation that is continuous up the scale. If you do the right transformations, for example, in put income, not in dollars but in the logarithm of income, so to get that nonlinearity and there's some other nonlinearities you put in. But if you do, then you find the measure. You get the results you get from the probate analysis and the ordinary lease squares analysis essentially the same.
(00:50:55):
For ordinary people, as we all are, what this says is we treat them as cardinal without important loss of information. That's not a worry. I mean people still, and bless them, they still re-estimate and re-estimate just to make sure that's still true in the case they're looking at and so on that they're not interpreting too much. Once you get out, people are now starting to look, not just these following five variables are independent. They're saying, "Well maybe these things are related." The value of community, your wellbeing, may depend on your age. Well it does. A lot of these things that we typically, for simplicity, just assume separate cardinal impacts from each of these variables. You say, "Well, no." When you really dig down into it and get better data, you'll find for different population subgroups, different age groups, different genders and different ways of life, some of these effects are going to be different and that's where the growth in the science will be happening.
Tim Ng (00:52:01):
That's very reassuring indeed. Let me move to, so there's a question asked by Hamed, which I think Arthur has answered. Arthur Grimes has answered to Hamed's satisfaction. So, thank you for that Arthur. I'll leave that question there. One from Rodney, which has been liked by four people. We'll certainly ask that one Question is, are there cultural or societal or national differences and the drivers of subjective wellbeing? What's the evidence on that? How significant are these differences with it?
John Helliwell (00:52:36):
It's a splendid question, I'm reminded that when I was back studying social capital, one of the definitions of social capital was that it was a cultural phenomenon. Then we say, if you got more social capital it's different culturally. There's a sense in which every society's going to be different from other societies and we're looking for measures that in fact make them look more similar. It turns out, some of these basic trust measures do that. I think I already mentioned that the drivers are very similar in all countries. We had a chapter in the most recent World Happiness Report supported by a Japanese Foundation. The argument was they were trying to understand why the East Asian countries ranked lower than other developed countries, other countries at similar stages of development. They said, "That's because these are weird questions." They either come from Western educated, industrial rich democracies and they're all centric to countries where everything is individualistic, et cetera, et cetera, and so it would be a different world here.
(00:53:58):
They got finance from the foundation to ask an extra set of questions, which embodied Eastern values. One of them was, "Do you focus your life on others or on yourself and family?" Another one was, "Are you at peace with your life?" There were two or three of such questions. Then we found out that in fact having those, those were all good things. To have them was important everywhere in the world. The intriguing thing was, the countries that had the most of these Eastern values were in fact the Nordic countries and not the East Asian countries and that they were universally important. We hadn't measured some of these before and they were important, but the most important finding was that they were important everywhere. The Eastern philosophers were right to say these were important, but they weren't of a form that made these other measures incorrect because once you take them into account there, they're lower on their own values, if you like, as well.
(00:55:19):
You can see why, right? If you look deeply into South Korean life, they're unhappy with their lives for reasons that don't have anything much to do with Eastern values. They're giving up their peace, they're giving up their connection with others. That's a separate set of issues. Now there's one more element to that, I think. One of the elements was, is there quite a lot of homogeneity and effects across the world? As what is there left for cultural differences? We've had two chapters, I think, on Latin America because it's kind of special. If you sort of look at a global model and then look at regional departures from that, there is, and you then say it's the regional departure because life is different there in ways we just haven't measured with our variables. Or is it a cultural orientation that means all the same things but don't mean the same to them?
(00:56:15):
My view of the evidence thus far is that the same things matter, that they have more of them, of some things than other countries. There was a nice chapter by Mariano Rojas where he looked about Latin American happiness and this things that Latin Americas do more of. Multi-generational family living, more greetings in the streets, more open friendship and so on. Bicyclists have gone all around the world said they're much more likely to be taken home and looked after in Latin America than in other places. That kind of open connection, it makes people happier. That's in itself, if it's actually more prevalent there, would explain this half a point margin in Latin America. He dug deeper into this by getting hold of some surveys that inquired more deeply into the structure of social life, because the Gallup World Poll questions are quite limited in this structure.
(00:57:20):
Just, you have someone? Yes or no, to count on in times of trouble. Well they'd gone quite more deeply into the structure of family. It turns out Latin American people have extended families because they love them, not because they're forced into them by economic circumstances. Of course, that's going to make them happier homes than if they were forced into them. Every time you get something where a common model doesn't fit everywhere, you're going to be looking at ways in which people think of things and you look for differences in the way they are. That for the Nordic countries, people are trying to say, "Well now, what is it about those cultures that make people more likely to return wallets and make them correspondingly happier?" Of, course you got to start getting some lessons pretty quickly.
Tim Ng (00:58:13):
Well said. Thank you. Okay, so let's move on to... Here's a good one, I think. This is a different dimension that we haven't talked about so much. It's from Ross who asks, "Are there differences between evaluating answers to life satisfaction questions to someone in their 30s and those in their 70s?"
John Helliwell (00:58:36):
Now differences in answering, there are age differences and there's quite a literature on the U shape in age. Does it exist or not? How big is it? You might imagine from where I start, I'd say that's a funny sort and there was even some research saying it's true even in baboons. I haven't looked at, these are baboons in zoos, right? I haven't looked at how bad life is for different ages of baboons in a zoo, but it's not something that makes me think there's something fundamental about the wellbeing responses based on your chronological age. We did quite a few studies of happiness at different ages and what it responds to. Indeed, most of the U-shape is eliminated if you account for the differing prevalence and the differing importance. This gets back to Ross's question more directly. The feeling, a sense of belonging to your local community matters more to the old and to the middle aged.
(00:59:46):
Well you can see why, right? Because for people at an older age, the community is their life. It becomes their workplace, there's place based it's more important. While workplace trust and wellbeing is obviously more important for people who have jobs. The midlife crunch, which is where people have not enough time and too much to do, it's more prevalent in the middle ages, but it's much less prevalent for people who feel they have a work-life balance. You don't get the U shapes with people that think they have work-life balance. If they think of their immediate work supervisor as a partner rather than a boss, a great part of that U shape goes on. In other words, you improve the social context for a person of the age they are in the circumstances they are than they have a better life.
(01:00:37):
Of course, middle aged people are more likely to be in a job, young people are more likely to be in education. The countries with better education systems have higher young wellbeing than old countries that look after people in a more socially responsible way, improving their lives have a bigger rise at the end. If people are thrown off a cliff when they retire, then those are the countries where there's a continuing drop. Answer is, yes, there are big differences by age in life satisfaction, but it really does depend on the circumstances in which they live, in ways that are derivable pretty directly from universally based evidence.
Tim Ng (01:01:24):
Correct. Thank you for that. It's just made me reflect a little bit on how you ask baboon about them to evaluate their lives and whether you actually get them to climb physically a tangible ladder and stop on a particular run, but that's really a different story. Let me turn to a question from Christie, which is about a policy related question and he asks, can we identify in a modelling or econometric sense the causal implications of government policies for wellbeing ex-ante? In other words, I think, can you reasonably predict the impact ex-ante? Or can you only evaluate policy interventions ex-post on something like subjective wellbeing?
John Helliwell (01:02:06):
You can only get the evidence about a particular policy ex-post, after the fact. But if the evidence is broadly enough based, and the new policy you're thinking about is a little bit like a cookie cutter example. In other words, we were talking earlier about this putting of an elementary school class into an elder care facility. I don't need to know a huge amount about the nature of the facility and the nature of the teacher and the nature of the class to predict that'll work in some other place and also improve the lives. A little bit depends on how much relevant experience you have as to how confident you are in the ex-ante predictions. There are so many ways of what we call win-win policy choices where there's no real resources involved. It's just doing things in a different way.
(01:03:02):
Making people, as they said in the model of the Singapore prison system reforms, changing them from prisoners to being captains of their own lives. That's just an approach that gives people the responsibility and the opportunity to prove things for themselves that does produce better lives. You can, I think, fairly confidently predict that, that will apply in other circumstances. One of the reasons I liked the Singapore prison example was because in many countries the prison system is a cesspit of the public service. It's not a nice place to work, it's not a nice place to be a boarder, and it's not nice for the families that are left behind. In Singapore, they changed the lives of all those parties and it was one of those win-win circumstances because recidivism went way down and the employability of the people coming out was much higher and people who previously came back as repeat offenders were back as volunteers to help the current residents.
(01:04:08):
That kind of thing is a really important set of examples where you'd say, "Well, I can't be sure that's going to work everywhere." You better try it on. The thing about schools and prisons and other things is, you can have nice semi-controlled experiments where you have one group where you're testing this and another where you don't. That minimises the risks of the new policy and it increases the information you gain from trying something and it allows you to do experimentation with moderate acquisition of risk, which as we've noted before, is a big stopper for a new policy. The experimental approach, and I think that's appropriate answer to the question, you can't be sure, ex-ante. Make your experiments small and keep track of them so you're adding to the relevance of the past for allowing you to predict the future.
Tim Ng (01:05:06):
Excellent. Thank you. Question from Debasis, which I think is a really interesting one. It's been at the back of my mind actually on this stuff. He's asking, how can we control for the happy feeling impact on this subjective wellbeing measure due to media or government propaganda, for example, North Korea. I think that there's a broader question in there which may I suggest... Which is about conditioning of subjective wellbeing or life evaluation for that matter on, I don't know, sort of habituation to cultural discourse about how good things are. In North Korea, the government keeps telling you how good things are. That it's better than everywhere else in the world. You may start to believe that and then answer your subjective wellbeing questions, life evaluation questions in a way that... well, is it still a genuine response in a situation like that? Should we [inaudible 01:06:11]...
John Helliwell (01:06:11):
Genuine response, but it reflects the circumstances. I mean, we've talked quite a bit about what you think about whether your wallet will be returned. It's affected a little by your own experience, but it's affected mainly by what you read and here in the media. Well, if those media are controlled by our government, then they're going to be important providers of the information base that affects your answer. You could then say, "Well if in fact I didn't have that controlled media, I might feel rather differently about my life." Anyway, we haven't got the latest polls back from Ukraine and Russia, but during the previous post-Crimea period, it was quite striking, the difference. People do respond to what they hear and how they're reacting. It's a complicated scene, there's a more technical question here, which is when you're asking a question in a survey, does it depend on the circumstances of the survey and the other content of the survey?
(01:07:21):
You might ask what they had for breakfast? All of those things have some impact. That's why it's really important to have many surveys and you want to do them in as uniform a way as you can, but to the extent they're different. StatCan is now doing some work on answers that have come from Covid time surveys, from Covid specific surveys versus the general health survey versus other things. Looking at the general social survey cycles differently, the time use cycle for example, gives an average value of life evaluations is about a third of a point lower than the non-time use specialty.
(01:08:06):
And our inferences is you focus on people's competition for their time and the extent to which they're failing to get a work-life balance, you get a lower life evaluation report. Another interesting contrast is the criminal victimisation survey rounds, they give a higher average life evaluation. Our hypothesis for that is that they ask questions, "Were you in fact subject to any of these bad things?" Of course, most people weren't. They then say, "Well, I was pretty lucky this is happening to me." They're not drawn down by answering of questions about bad things because they weren't happening to them. Anyway, the important point is yes people, the context in which a question is asked is going to depend on the information they have at hand and the triggers they have in their minds and in their questionnaires. And it all increases the value of trying to collect other kinds of information about how their lives are going, and not be saying everything depends on this. It would be political suicide and it wouldn't make intellectual sense to say everything depends on the answer to a life evaluation question in a particular survey of a particular source. Life is much more complicated than that. And so, you have to have a certain humility as a scientist and a breadth to say, "We want more information about the quality of life."
(01:09:46):
The questioner's concern that the circumstances of the information system are going to give you a false reading, it's going to give you a different reading, and whether it's false and what it's false in comparison to, really requires more unpacking. It may be true, you can live in a fool's paradise and be happy, or in fact, you may not know. As you may remember, Amartya Sen, in early days, and may still be, quite sceptical of the use subjective wellbeing through what he called the happy peasant paradox, that people were laughing and smiling in these African countries he'd visit and he said, "Therefore they'll tell you they're happy, but they don't have my measures of capacity and capabilities."
(01:10:35):
Well, it turns out the actual measures we get are much lower in those countries than elsewhere, and that whether they have Sen's capabilities are strong determinants of their answers. So, they give answers, they give Sen-like answers to their questions, and they have every reason. Just because they have low levels of education doesn't mean they don't... They seem to have quite a broad conception about what life is and what it could be like.
Tim Ng (01:11:08):
I mean, to your point earlier in the response to some of those questions about cultural differences and circumstance differences, it's great to hear about the different research results on the effects of framing versus trying to unpick the effects of circumstances versus preferences and things like that. So this is all part of that, I guess, isn't it? Let me move to a question on policies that aren't primarily social policies. This is a question from Matthew, and he asks, "Can subjective wellbeing be used to evaluate policies that are not primarily social policies, like Three Waters?" Which is in New Zealand. That is about the governance arrangements for the provision of water services, drinking water, storm water, waste water. So it's very much a regulatory... Well, certainly the instrument is regulatory, but there's quite a large debate in New Zealand at the moment about other aspects of that particular set of policy reforms. And then the other example is Resource Management reform. So, planning rules, environmental regulations and things like that. So what would you see as the role of subjective wellbeing in helping to think about those types of policy problems?
John Helliwell (01:12:28):
The most, 90% of the policy relevant decisions are not in a bag that's now called social policy. They have to do with how you design and deliver and administer all the other policies, and which handling of a water system is a classic example. There have been studies of developing cooperative management of watersheds, for example, ways without rules or regulations, but with collaboration, as to how you do that. And the same things that deliver happiness for people, deliver better mechanisms. So, the extent to which people know each other, trust each other and collaborate in the design of the frameworks... This is not top-down water management. This is bottom-up handling of a shared resource. People work together to clean up a watershed, they're going to think differently about everything else, about each other, and they meet people they otherwise wouldn't have met and so on.
(01:13:34):
So you get more efficient results at the micro level, the handling of the water system, but the extent to which these mechanisms used are ones that enable people to be active agents in the design of better systems for themselves than others, they're not just happier, but you get much better results. I've had discussions when talking about these things with Danish entrepreneurs. I just happened to be giving a talk at the annual business summit where they were giving prizes for the best innovating companies. And it was quite clear, I got to talk to some of these best innovators, they were all ones where the administrative structure was flat, where everybody got to talk to... The pay structure was also much flatter.
(01:14:24):
And they shared ideas and they covered each other's backs and they cared about each other. And it was, "our project," it was, "our innovation." So everybody felt, even if it was just a question of where that screw hole should be, they were not shy about bringing their ideas forward and developing a better shared solution. Well, that increases the actual wellbeing of the workers, but it of course makes the provision of the service much better. It's probably true in spades for those bits of the administrative structure that are left to the government to do, designing of roads, water systems, a whole range of things.
(01:15:05):
And governments have just not even started to think about how to do that in a way that increases the wellbeing of the people right there, quite independent of whether it's three inch pipes or four inch pipes or whose houses get linked up. It's a question about finding together something that gives better lives for everybody. We're a long way from that, because you could imagine, you've got to break... My example I used at the elder care facility, I gave you some feeling for the administrative structures that have to be broken down, but it's equally true in the design of sewage systems or storm water systems or you name it. Housing is very important in this.
Tim Ng (01:15:49):
Yeah. Thank you. Question from Chelsea now. This is an interesting one. "I understand there's a distinction between life satisfaction and people's sense of purpose. So from a policy perspective, to what ends might we use data that tell us about eudaemonia?" And you might want to explain in a couple of sentences what we mean by eudaemonia.
John Helliwell (01:16:13):
It's, I think I mentioned at the beginning, a purpose of life, which is a typical question that's called a question about eudaemonia. The word eudaemonia has been picked up and used too narrowly. It's been used, I think, by a lot of researchers who think of it as a description of people acting in a moral way for others, so regardless of whether it affects their happiness or not, so life purpose as example, and various kind of measures of moral quality. And what Aristotle really said, I think, was that the good life depends on those, so these so-called eudaemonic variables. Eudaemonia to me is the happiness as a whole, and these good life variables are critically important, but they're on the right-hand side of the explanation. They're not what we're trying to explore.
(01:17:16):
Of course, you want to know what it takes to develop a sense of life purpose and think about education in those terms and so on, but it's part of what goes into the making of a high quality of life. So there are important variables, all these eudaemonic variables. I don't call them eudaemonic variables, because to me, eudaemonia is happiness as a whole. And Aristotle was quite explicit. He said a virtuous life is critically important but it's not a whole of life, and these other practical parts and just sheer having fun are part of life too. And the overall life is going to depend on virtue, for sure. And to neglect it is neglecting a good part of what'll draw us out of bad situations. Because what's normally discussed is virtue in religious and philosophical traditions. It's all good to have. You don't want it to replace fun and there are good ways of developing it without it becoming a sad or over-rigid structure.
Tim Ng (01:18:24):
Thank you. Question from Tim now and we are going to move towards trust and trustworthiness and social capital type issues. He asks, "In countries like the US where trust has fallen a lot, has trustworthiness, as measured by the wallet experiment and others, held up. For example, are we just looking at a realignment of perceptions with reality, or have declines in trust led to or been led by declines in trustworthiness? And then following up, if it's just misperception, what do we know about why people are underestimating how trustworthy other people are?"
John Helliwell (01:19:07):
I'll start with the last question, which in my view is the most interesting part of Tim's question, because what we do know is that everywhere, and the United States included, people are too pessimistic about whether their wallet would be returned. And so, if they're less likely now to think it would be returned, they're getting worse. They're not adjusting to reality, they're adjusting away from reality. And my guess is that the actual levels of wallet return... Unfortunately we haven't had these experiments over across the decades, so we don't know whether they've been going up or down. And I'm sure there are some places one and some places the other. What can I say? I wanted to... What was his last?
Tim Ng (01:20:06):
The last question was, "What do we know about why people are underestimating how trustworthy others are?"
John Helliwell (01:20:13):
Yes. Thank you, Tim. I said how interesting it was and I forgot it. We don't know very much. We're only recently discovering this imbalance between actual trustworthiness and trust. The wallet question is one of the very few where there's actually a way of telling the difference between trust and trustworthiness. And it was brought in at the behest of some of my sceptical colleagues, who said, "How do we know what this trust question measured? You've got to have it in a very specific context." Well, we were lucky enough to choose a specific context where you could actually measure trustworthiness and trust and see whether they were over-trusting or not.
(01:21:01):
And it's critically important, because if I come along and say, "Trust your neighbour, think of the stranger as a friend you haven't met yet," and really they're about to be knifed by this friend they haven't met yet, then you come along as a person who simply is wearing rose-coloured spectacles and they're going to get run over. If the world itself in fact is much more trustworthy than people think it is, then you're in a real win-win situation to get them to adjust their trust measures towards reality. Because if you think other people are trustworthy, you're going to act differently towards them. You're going to open up more towards them, which itself will feed back and produce a higher level of mutual information, mutual positive interactions, and higher trust.
(01:21:53):
So answering that part of Tim's question, find out what makes people so pessimistic about the other people and then trying to open up the information system as a way that removes that pessimism. We've already talked, and I've already mentioned what I think the primary culprit is. The primary culprit is what people see in the media. It's not just social media and polarised information sources. It's just the fact that journalism in general has been built on the idea that people want to see negative things and they don't want to see positive things. I think there are a number of networks that have tried to actually do something about that and found, in fact, people are glad to hear... But they have to be realistic, right?
(01:22:44):
And it's wonderful thing about natural disasters is that that gives you an experiment. And so earthquakes happening in different parts of Italy, for example, the consequences for wellbeing and for earthquake repair are quite different. And you get these disasters in places with fairly high levels of social trust where people do come out and help each other. People actually happier as a consequence. And part of the reason for that must be because they had previously underestimated the extent to which they would help each other, and they see everybody coming out to help each other and say, "Goodness, isn't this nice?" And make them more likely to do it themselves.
(01:23:24):
So, that's what makes Tim's question such an important one. We want to find out... We want to build a base of information that supports a level of trust that's not too high, not too low, but just right. And then try and of course make the environment more trustworthy.
Tim Ng (01:23:41):
Excellent. I'm going to give you one more question, John, from the audience. I know you've been talking a long time, and thank you. It's been a long session. But the final question is a more, I suppose, high level question. And I'm going to combine here a question from Tim and a question from Bettina, which is that while New Zealand's national life satisfaction statistics are flat or declining, despite good economic growth, is this something you see in other developed countries, and what do you think are the best options to improve the statistics? Life satisfaction statistics, I assume. And Bettina's asking a related question, I think, which is about, "Can work on subjective wellbeing explain the Easterlin paradox?"
John Helliwell (01:24:41):
I mean, basically the Easterlin paradox has wellbeing depend more on relative income than absolute income, and there is a fair amount of evidence supporting that proposition, which doesn't seem to be as obvious in the case of happiness as it is in the case of income. There are specific examples, for example, of a Swiss study showing that people were less happy in those regions where there were more Lamborghinis on the street. This is sort of the demonstration effect. And you find it's more prevalent, there's some research suggesting it's more prevalent in those places where material standards of life are obvious. So you look at the countries that have higher standards of general levels of wellbeing, they're typically ones where people don't show their material wealth, they don't boast about themselves at all, and they certainly don't boast by having a demonstration of others.
(01:25:47):
So there's that twist on the Easterlin paradox. The actual timing of changes in economic growth and changes in wellbeing in a particular country, the particular time period, because the samples are not monstrous typically, and there's much going on at life at all, be a mistake to try and infer too much too quickly about that. It's kind of natural, right? If one indicator's down, you want to say, "Well, what are the other indicators that are up and down?" That's a pretty complicated scene and the dynamics are... We were doing some of that in the COVID times with surveys every two weeks in 15 countries and got some interesting stuff out of it. But the life evaluations themselves were very stable, and that's to be expected. So you don't want to read too much in that, because people accumulate evidence before they change their overall life evaluation.
Tim Ng (01:26:55):
Yes, you would hope they would. Yeah. Well look, John, I'm going to draw things to a close now. And to the audience, thank you very much for the questions. Apologies, I didn't get to absolutely everybody. I know there are some that asked a question that I didn't get to, but as I said, I did try to cover the ones that had the most likes and also covered the territory of our earlier conversation on the first stuff, John. But what I would like to do to close is just thank you once again for a fascinating discussion, for a fascinating conversation with me and for answering the questions with our participants. I know it's been a long time to talk. So thank you for that. Your expertise and experience once again is really stimulating, really valuable. I certainly got a lot out of it and I'm sure the audience did too. To everyone, please look out for the upcoming events in our Wellbeing Seminar series. As I mentioned, we have some more great overseas speakers coming, such as Romlie Mokak in October. John, please.
John Helliwell (01:28:09):
I wanted at least to have one final word.
Tim Ng (01:28:12):
Oh, of course.
John Helliwell (01:28:13):
Thanks and congratulations to New Zealand and the Treasury for taking wellbeing as seriously and practically as you have done, not just in COVID, but before and beyond. You've been a beacon for those of us in other countries working in the field. So, thank you very much.
Tim Ng (01:28:33):
John, thank you. That's very kind of you. We're always, in New Zealand... I speak for the rest of New Zealand and say that we're always willing to be a laboratory for the rest of the world and it's great to have people interested in our case. Let me just finish with my advertisement for Romlie Mokak, who is the Australian Productivity Commission's first Indigenous Policy Evaluation Commissioner. He’s coming as part of this series in October, he'll be doing a session. And then in November we have Nobel Laureate in Economics, Professor Joe Stiglitz, who among many other things, many people will know, was one of the authors of the Stiglitz/Sen/Fitoussi Commission's Report on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress back in 2009, which of course was and still is highly influential in wellbeing policy, including in New Zealand.
(01:29:26):
So let me finish our seminar today formally. Once again, thank you, John. It has been terrific to have your time and expertise. Farewell to all of you. And what I'd like to do is finish with a whakatauki, which is a Maori language proverb. And this whakatauki that I'm going to read to you says that discussion, learning, understanding, and knowledge underpin the wellbeing of all people.
[speaking in te reo Māori] Mā te kōrero, ka mōhio. Mā te mōhio, ka mārama. Mā te mārama, ka mātau. Mā te mātau, ka ora te iwi. Haumi e, hui e, tāiki e!
Thank you once again, John, and everyone for participating today.
[speaking in te reo Māori 01:30:09] Mā te wā.
Wellbeing Report seminar series
At Te Tai Ōhanga – The Treasury, we are developing the first Wellbeing Report - Te Tai Waiora that will be published in November 2022.
This online seminar is part of a Wellbeing Report programme of Guest lectures running in 2022 and 2023.