April 8, 2024 • 37 mins
The US is sliding down the world happiness rankings - but it's the unhappiness of young people that's really dragging down the average. What has happened to make Gen Z so sad? And what can be done to turn the situation around?
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve (director of Oxford University’s Wellbeing Research Centre) has been analyzing the figures for the World Happiness Report. He offers advice to young people and parents, and looks at what happy young Lithuanians can teach the rest of the world.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. When the team behind the annual World Happiness Report
finds that Finns are happier than Danes, or that Canadians
are happier than Americans, those broad results hide a ton
of nuance. We've been unpacking some of the reports more
interesting details in our last few episodes, but today we're
(00:37):
going to tackle one of the most striking findings in
this year's report. What's been happening to young people's happiness
over the last few years. And the picture is pretty complicated.
The good news is that youth happiness has been rising
in certain parts of the world. But the bad news
is that some of the wealthy nations out there have
seen worrying declines, and that includes the young people where
(00:58):
I live in North America. But the big question is
why and what can be done to halt this awful slide.
If anyone can help us figure it all out, it's
Yon Emmanuel Denev Hey Lauri.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
I'm a professor of economics and behavioral science at the
University of Oxford, where I also lead the Wellbeing Research Center.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
He's also one of the co authors of the World
Happiness Report and the lead author of the chapter that
focused specifically on gen Z.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
This year's report, we focus in on the age categories,
and my team and I we've really worked hard on
childhoodlessoned well being and so the way we define child
and adlesson it is up for debate, but we've essentially
put it as between ten and twenty four, so late adolescence,
because there's still some neurological development happening at these later
stages of late adolescents. And so it also was convenient
(01:45):
because that's where the data sort of starts. The earliest
subjective wellbeing data starts around age ten thanks to the
Children's World's data set, and then we do have the
Gallop whirldpoll and that runs from about fifteen years of
age all the way to twenty four. So it was
also a convenient to some extent to make sure that
we have these age cutoffs.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
And so usually the World Happiness Report is often focused
on adult well being. Why is it important to look
at well being in children and adolescents?
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Oh, I was absolutely adamant on the editorial board to
start thinking more seriously about child adlesson well being is,
as you say, the world happen and support which does
the World's rankings of what the happiest populations are, but
they were really eighteen plus and so at some point,
and we obviously all knew with COVID putting a spotlight
on child mental health that we had to take child
and ad last and wellbeing way more seriously. But there's
(02:31):
always been a lack of data, and the Gallobral Pole,
our workhorse, if you will, for the rankings only starts
really from late adolescens onwards. So it was a massive effort,
and we waited in a way for the PISA data.
The OECD releases the PISA data, but that only happens
once every four years or so, and so that combined
with two other data sets, Children's Worlds and HPSC, allowed
us to start piecing together the global map of child
(02:52):
and a lesson and Wellbeing. But to your question of
why it matters, child and lesson and well being matters
so much because it's the best predictor of how you
will be doing as an adult d and so mental
health as a child or and as an adolescent is
the best predictor of life outcomes and quality of life
for life satisfaction as an adult. And one particular study
that I care much about not just because I'm a
(03:13):
quothor on it. It's about ten years ago and the
Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, Andrew Roswell and I
published a paper where we show that adolescent well being
and we were able to get data from the American
National Lujournal Study of Adolescent Health, and we found that
at different ages around adolescents, their well being at those
ages was most predictive of the same individual's earnings as
(03:34):
they were growing up. What we found is that ages
I think twelve, fifteen, nineteen and twenty one. It's a
panel study, so it's the same fifteen thousand American youth
that have been tracked over time. This was started in
the early nineties and they continued to be followed with
surveys all the way into their thirties. So we have
what their well being when they're adolescents, and we have
their sort of adult outcomes, including how much they're earning
(03:56):
age thirty and above. And what we found was that
their levels of well being adolescents was a massive predictor
of how they would be doing later in life, even
as measures through their earnings. Now one could say, well,
maybe it's because happy or from richer families and socio
economic status is higher for these youngsters, but we were
able to control for that in a nifty way, if
(04:16):
I may say so, which is in that sample of
American youth of about fifteen thousand, they were about three thousand siblings.
So what we did is introduce what we call sibling
fixed effects or family fixed effects, where we would start
looking at the differences between the siblings well being and
seeing how explanatory that is of the differences in the
future earnings of these siblings. So, say, Laura, you and
(04:38):
I are sister and brother, not unfeasible, and we would
be looking at your well being, my well being, looking
at the differences between them, and then see whether that
can explain differences in our later earnings and labor market outcomes,
if you will, when we're thirty and above and low
and behold it did.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
And so it's kind of like, if you know, if
you and I were brother and sister, but I was
less happy, maybe I was more depressed, even though we
grew up in the same house, probably went to the
same schools and so on, I'd be less happy as
an adult and I'd be earning less as an adult.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Too precisely, and it's quite significant. So this is all data,
but it was thousands of already back in those days
when the study was run.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
So we really need to understand like kid mental health,
because it's having these important predicted outcomes. But my understanding
was always that the story was that overall kids tended
to be happier than adults. So walk me through the
kind of typical patterns like happiness. Researchers have seen it
about what happens to age across the life course. What
we kind of used to think happened.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Well typically and we still find it mostly to be
the case around the world. Is what you will know
better than anyone else is the U shape relationship between
age and well being. So essentially we start at quite
high in terms of our well being. We're happy as kids,
We're happy happy as we can be as kids, and
in fact then the report this to me was insight
for me, is just how happy kids really are. So
(05:49):
if you look at the earliest ages that we have
data for in life satisfaction, they start like at nine
out of ten as an average in some countries in
terms of life satisfaction. So we start really happy, and
then we slide down the U curve towards the midlife crisis,
which typically late thirties early forties, with the pressures of
life coming through, mortgage to be paid off, small kids
to be dealing with, and the prime of your careers
(06:09):
and the pressures of that, and then you sort of
like things brighten up again.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Kids leave.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
You have the benefit of having kids, but without the
negativity around having to deal with it day in day out.
Your expectations become more realistic and you start climbing up
the other side of the U shape between age and
well being that has broken down in certain societies. So
the big insight coming through in this year's World Happy
Sport with a focus on age is that in North America,
the US in particular, needless to say, and to a
(06:36):
lasser extent in Western Europe and Britain, you find that
the first element of the U shape is no longer there.
It's completely flattened, and in the US it's even reversed.
Where youth in this case is below thirty or below
twenty five, depending on which data set you look at,
they start lower in terms of their self rated quality
of life, their well being lower than the adults and
that's really disconcerting, and that trend has started what is
(06:59):
it ten to fifteen years ago, but sort of in
twenty eighteen, it's sort of flipped where you see that
the youngsters in America below twenty five in this case
are less happy than the adults.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
That's nowhere else to be seen.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
And this is something that really affected me a lot.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
Right.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
This is one of the reasons that I started my
happiness class at Yale is that, you know, I was
looking at college students who I remember back when I
was in college in the nineties. I remember them being
they weren't happy all the time, but not the rates
of depression and anxiety that we're seeing in our current students,
and I just felt like there was an enormous shift there.
It sounds like, at least with the North American data
that's being born out and the report.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Absolutely so what your famous experience there is born out
in the data has never seen before in this way,
and that trend that you picked up way back when
you launched your famous class has continued and actually exacerbated
during COVID that hasn't recovered since either for the first
time in the world happening support We've done this test
to see if you were to split the population youth, older,
(07:58):
and everyone in between. If you were to do a
ranking just on youth populations around the world, the US
would drop to sixty third.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
Sixty third, sixty third.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
We're usually in the top twenty.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yeah, actually like in the top end of the top
twenty normally is the population as a whole. But because
of youth falling off a cliff in terms of their
well being, the general population in the US has now
dropped from i think place fifteen to place twenty third,
and that's wholly driven by youth not reporting their life's
going well.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
And the problem is, it's probably not just the youth
of today, right, given what we talked about earlier, where
youth mental health is actually predicting something about what those
young people are going to be experiencing later on. Not
investing in the youth of today being sixty third means
or likely to be sixty third, you know, into adulthood
and into many decades to come.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
That is absolutely true.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
So not only is there an urgent need to do
something because you can, but also because you have to, because,
as you say, the predictive power of child and adolescent
wellbeing and mental health will track throughout people's life course,
and that doesn't bode well for the future.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
So I think one of the big puzzles though, is that, yes,
this is the trend that we're seeing in North America,
this is the kind of thing that I saw in
my college students in the US. But my understanding is
this doesn't seem to be the trend that we're seeing
around the world.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
Correct.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Absolutely, So this is one of the other big insights
coming out from the World Happiness Support and where really
put the word world into the World Happening Support because
of this is we piece data together from the global South,
for example, and unlike North America and Western Europe, to
some extent, you find in places like Sub Saharan Africa
you find that youth has actually increased their self rate
a well being, so they find that the culity lives
(09:35):
is higher these days than it was before. And that's
in a way good news. It shows that this is
not a universal thing. It shows that this can be
reversed as a negative trend in North America and the
US in particular, and I think that's really important to
understand that globally there are massive regional differences.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
And so talk about what could be causing these differences,
because this isn't just kind of, you know, a subtle pattern,
like we're just seeing these extreme differences in how unhappy
North America and to some extent Australia and New Zealand
teens are, but how much happier you know, folks are
in the global South and even in in Europe. So like,
what's going wrong in North America?
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Well, before we dig into North America, I think the
reason why you have sort of a convergence really it's
not like youth in Sub Sahara, Africa is happier than
youth in say Belgium where I'm from, or the United Kingdom.
It's that they're sort of catching up and Western Europe
and North America coming down. So there's, if you will,
a global convergence to some extent, and we've got an
amazing figure in the World Happen Sport Chapter three that
(10:34):
kind of where you see that quite clearly, we see
North America, Western Europe come down, Central Eastern Europe come up,
sub so Aheran Africa come up, and some regions in
Asia come up as well. And I think that global
convergence is probably a result of the global inequalities reducing.
So we always talk about inequality rising, and that's certainly
the case within countries and especially in North America and
(10:56):
Western Europe and Australia New Zealand, but globally you see
actually a reduction between countries in wealth and income, and
I think that's partially also behind this convergence that we
see in well being and in youth well being in particular.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
So in some ways it's awesome that the youth of
these parts of the world are kind of getting happier
over time, But when we look at North America, what
factors are causing you know, North American kids and kids
in Australia and New Zealand to feel so unhappy these days.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
So I don't think there's one smoking gun, if you will,
that you can point to, but there's a lot going
on that it's not going in the right direction. And
so we can point to the inequalities within society in
the United States, for example, rising, which then obviously have
to downstream consequence on people's mental health and wellbeing and
opportunities for youth from less privileged backgrounds. We can talk
(11:45):
about polarization, politics teering people apart, social fabric being in
the US being torn apart, communities being torn apart, within families,
youth and older generations, or between youth, brothers and sisters,
those discussions falling apart, and then I think there's no
way around that. We also need to look at technology.
You kind of get around the fact also that the
slide in youth well being coincience with the coming up
(12:08):
of social media and how people use social media, so
that can have positives and negatives, but if people use
it passively, people who are young and vulnerable, and what
they use in terms of social media and for how long.
And so we had the privilege of speaking with Vec
Murphy the USR surge in general. Recently he noted data
that people now spent on average in the United States
about four and a half hours a day on social media.
(12:31):
And that's not even accounting for work on your computer
or Google or whatever.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
It's really just social media.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
So with the US falling to sixty third position, if
you were to just look at youth to blow thirty,
that is really a shame. And I would challenge everybody
in the United States, the society is government leaders to
not punch below its way by this much. Because the
objective dimensions that you have in placed, wealth, health, and
(12:57):
much else, you should be doing a lot better for you.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
What can we do for our young people and what
can they do for themselves? John has plenty of suggestions
right after the If social media, driven by the big
tech firms that dominate our economy is to blame for
the unhappiness we see in young people across North America,
(13:24):
Western Europe and as far away as Australia, there's probably
not much we can do about it, right well, Oxford
professor Joan Emmanuel Jenev billed out a bit more hope.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Technologies have come around. They tend to help and be helpful,
but with certain boundaries in place that evolve over time
as we better understand the impact of these technologies. So
an obvious one that we owe to Vivicmurphy, the US
serge in general, is he made the parallel between cars,
and at first cars were driving around in the streets
with huge numbers of traffic fatalities as a result because
(13:58):
of the cars weren't safe enough. We weren't wearing our seatbelts.
So over time we realize that this is a good
technology but needs specific limitations in place, and then they
were slowly but gradually put in place, and now we're
all benefiting from mobility in a relatively safe way as
a result of this coevolution between technology and social norms.
And the same could be done here with social media.
(14:19):
I think this can be a cocreation where everybody benefits
from these new technologies, but with certain guardrails in place.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
And so the idea is that as a society, as parents,
as people, we can sort of advocate for those guardrails.
We can, you know, push the government to say, hey,
what does the seat belt look like for Facebook, for
TikTok or something like that, What is maybe a speed
limit look like for maybe the amount of time you're
on these kinds of things and so on. Like, if
we push for that, then we can get maybe the
benefits of technology would like less of the limitation precisely.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
And so we need to think carefully about how we
harness the positives of social media and make sure that
these virtual connections ultimately lead to physical connections amongst people.
Because we also heard from the US Surgeon General that
in his tour around these colleges, who's talking about a
change of culture where kids in high schools come up
(15:12):
to them and say, look, but we don't have a
culture anymore of speaking to each other, and let that
sink in for a moment. That's pretty bad. And it
also makes sense because if you now walk into a
lunch cafeteria in a high school, people will be behind
their screens and so it's much harder to stroke up
a conversation between each other and bond as human beings
(15:32):
and not just through virtual means. So we need to
think very carefully as a society to harness the good
elements of technology and make sure that social media puts
the social frankly and social media.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
You know, this is something that I saw like rit
large when I was working with students at Yale. I
remember one kind of moment where I was thinking, like, Wow,
the youth are really struggling with their social connection and
they're turning to technology to like solve it. We had
this kind of competition on campus for like a new app, right,
you know, like they're all these schools kind of do
these like tech competitions, And one of the potential apps
(16:05):
that won the competition that I was looking at at
Yale was this app that was called Let's Get a Meal,
And the idea is like you go to the dining
hall and you're scared to talk to people, but you
go in Let's get a Meal, which is kind of
like Tinder for the dining hall, and you say, you know,
I could want to get a meal with somebody who
would want to get a meal with me, And you
sort of swipe and find like, oh, I'll eat with
that person. And like the older folks who are judging
(16:27):
this competition like me, were like, wait, but it's the
dining hall. Why don't you just like sit down with someone.
It's like one hundred students that you all should really
know because they're like in your same dorm, Like just
talk to somebody. But the students really felt like they
needed a tool, a technological tool, to like connect and
just talk with somebody in their lunch cafeteria.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
I think that speaks to what Vivik Merthy you as
certain general toll is that that culture has changed. It's
now not easy to sort of reach out to other
people in the cafeteria in person. We need to bring
it back into people's comfort zone to be able and
willing and actually be able to reach out to human
beings in person and not necessarily neat the technology enabling
(17:08):
of that when people are literally sitting in the cafeteria.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
But this idea raises a certain hypothesis, which is that
the way that technology is affecting social connection is in
some sense worse for youth in North America and Australia
and New Zealand versus in Europe and in Africa.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Do we know that that's the case, We need to mean,
it's an empirical question, you're asking, So we need to
find out data of how much time they spend and
obviously in the US we now know it's about four
and a half hours a day. My guesstimate is that
will be slightly less in the Global South or Central
and Eastern Europe. Then the question is also not just
how much time they spend on the social media, but
(17:47):
also what kind of social media and then how people
are using it. Is a passive use or is it
an active use, which is also very different. So passive
use is not to be recommended, but active use of
social media, where we actively reach out to people, actively
talk about yourself and connect with others, can be beneficial
for people's well being and mental health. So it's hard
to say there is something this is quirky, but we
(18:10):
ran an extra analysis to try and understand this. And
North America obviously is the US and Canada. The Canada
is split between the Francophones Quebecua and the English or
Native English Canadians, which are then obviously closer with the
US counterparts who look at sort of US slash Canadian
English spoken medium and there's something really striking there that
(18:31):
could point us in the direction a thought, which is
Quebecqui youth have seen a drop but by no means
as large as the English spoken Canadian youth, and that
was not obviously in line with the American youth. And
so John Halliwell, my wonderful colleague and really the heart
and soul of the Royal Happiness Report, has noted that
(18:52):
and sees it as suggestive of the fact that the
English slash American media is perhaps more dominated by negative
news or calls that out in more conflictual ways then say,
the more international global Francophone way of news access. And
so this may not be social media, but more how
(19:13):
news is presented to youth in the world, in the
Francophone world, it might be less conflectual, less negative, speaking,
less to our negativity biases in terms of news than
it is in the English spoken the world in North America.
So there's an interesting hint there of something going on
that will not explain everything, but it's quite striking, we thought, and.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
It fits with the thing that you were saying earlier,
which is, you know that many of the changes in
the US are about political polarization, and if you have
a news media that's kind of biased towards pulling that out,
and we have youth have phones in their pockets that
are dinging every time some politicians says something mean or
you know that negativity bias can get strugg over.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
It can get overwhelming and dominates, and it's really sad
that then it doesn't allow any space for positive news.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
And if you think about, you know, just like the
way college was, news was back when I was in college.
You know, it was just so different then, right. I
could pull up a newspaper and read something terrible, but
then I would put the newspaper down and I could
go to the library and hang out with my friends.
And again it wasn't like diinging with a notification in
my pocket. About something terrible that was happening in the world.
And when I just think about the kind of anxiety
(20:16):
that can come from that theft of my attention and
that constant negative information, like it just must feel so
different for the youth of today.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
It certainly does.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
And the algorithms behind social media are obviously optimized to
get our attention. And as you know, well, we're hardwired
to be more attentive to negative things that are potential
threats or issues that are alarming, rather than positive news,
and so the algorithm tries to seek our attention and
then obviously does it by pinging us with negative news
because they know that we'll get our attention more easily
(20:48):
than positive news. So here too, maybe we should start
nudging or providing frameworks in place to maybe balance us
out a bit more.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Or we can do this ourselves.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
We can undertake these automatic notifications, I'm sure than typically
negative news. We can perhaps subscribe to more positive news sources.
And I think I've actually heard there's a sort of
a new journal that is meant to be mostly trying
to balance out towards pulsitive news.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
Maybe we can subscribe to that. We'll find out about.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
When dogs are being found, we'll find out about the
World Happiness Report and the good things that are happening,
not just the bad things, et cetera, et cetera, et
c to help us ourselves regain our sanity.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
In that way.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
So let's say you're a parent listening to this, maybe
even a parent in North America for example, watching these
trends and just feeling really worried. You are there particular
strategies or practices you could suggest for parents for how
they could reverse the trend, maybe not in their whole country,
but maybe in their own community or in their own family.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Well, I think as parents who are really concerned and
probably rightly so, what they need to do is, I
think try and understand their kids first foremost, because their
kids are good kids, but they're in a tough, complex
situation and not because of them, because of society around
them making it very difficult. So the social media that
tries to really attract all of their attention, and there's
(22:01):
everything possible with the most brilliant designers and software engineers
designing algorithms to really try and keep them hook to
the screens. There's AI automation that is making the future
of work cloak both interesting but also difficult and complex.
I mean, as a youth today, think about choices you
need to make for say studies. You might be saying, oh,
(22:22):
I'd love to be a lawyer and start legal studies.
But by the end of view four or five years
of law school, everything you've learned could be obsolete because
they chat GPT in some legal version of it. So
there's so many uncertainties that kids live with today and
so many technologies trying to get their attention. So I
think the first thing that parents need to do really
(22:44):
is to try and understand the complexity with which they live.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
And I love this advice because, you know, honestly, even
with my yal students, sometimes I get people who react
of like, oh, what's their problem, you know, those snowflakes,
Like they really can't handle it. But I think when
you look carefully at the actual societal struggles that young
people are facing today, like it makes sense that you're
freaked out and feeling anxious about what's happening in the
world of work. It makes sense that you're freaked out
and anxious about political polarizing and inequality. We see, you know,
(23:11):
at least in the United States, and so I love
this idea that what parents need to start with is
just to recognize, like, it's tough out there for young
people today, it's.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Very tough out there, and so they need to start
with listening to their own children rather than trying to
bust them around and put these hard limits in place,
and understand the pressures they're under. And if they do that,
then I think they'll understand, for example, that there's lots
of peer pressure. So for example, if you say to
your child you cannot have an iPhone or an iPad,
or you can't go onto this particular app then your
(23:39):
child may actually be missing out on important things happening
in their.
Speaker 3 (23:43):
Own school community.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
And this then leads to a second thought that parents
could perhaps do is to coordinate with other parents or
their local school to see, hey, if there are specific
peer pressures or some people have access to something and
others do not, and that puts sort of inequalities in
place that are really harmful, then can there be a
(24:05):
coordinate approach amongst the parents of kids that are friends
or in the same class, or can they work at
the school boards to say, like, hey, can we have
a norm or a reference point or something that we
would recommend as a school or the parents of a
whole club of school friends.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
And I think this is really important because it really
is not trying to intervene on, say, your kids particular
social media use or the fact that they're on TikTok
all the time. It's actually working in their community to
try to get these norms changed around, which makes it
easier for the individual to end up engaging in practices
that might be healthier for people's happiness exactly. And some
of the folks listening to the Happiness Lab right now
(24:43):
might themselves be in the category of folks that you
put in there. You know, what is it ten to
twenty five is your definition of youth? If there's a
teenager listening right now, what advice might you have for
them as an individual for how to kind of fight
some of these trends.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
I think the first thing is to understand again that
you are living in a complex situation, that your attention
is being fought over, and that you should not let
yourself be had. If you will buy the brilliant software
engineers of these social media platforms, take agency over your
own time. Follow Laurie's principles.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Around listen to the rest of the happiness lab, observe
exactly and.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Apply these principles about setting your own boundaries and not
letting yourself be consumed by the big social media platforms.
And by all means, try and re establish a culture
of connection. And I know it's changed, there's no longer
a culture of speaking to each other, but make efforts
to get out of your comfort zone and do so.
(25:41):
And if I may want very specific practical piece of
advice is one thing we've seen in the wellbeing science
is that it's ultimately all about social connection and when
you do good things for other people pro social behaviors
as we call it in the industry, but really benevolent
acts like volunteering, donating small amounts, helping strangers in need,
(26:02):
talking to strangers. That doesn't just help the people on
the receiving end, but we've now shown over and over
again in large studies with causal inference that this also
helps yourself. And so by all means, try and do
good things for other people, and you will see it
shouldn't be the goal line and of itself, but you'll
see that will help improve your own well being too.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
And So one of the reasons I've loved dear chapter
on the World Happiness Report is that it kind of
calls out the trends that I was seeing in North America.
But I think it also provides us with a lot
of hope, right, Like, it isn't just the case that
youth mental health is going down all over the world.
If anything, what we're seeing is like there are possibilities
for improving things. They involve changes, and they involve both
(26:47):
societal changes like maybe making things more equal, and also
individual changes like engaging in more social connection. But there's
hope there. The trend isn't just like, you know, a
downward slope forever. We can all take agency and change
these things exactly.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
And you mentioned social connection, and I think that's probably
the real key, and again putting social in social media
and connecting in person. And it's a bit silly to
say it's a bit, but if you think about moving
from ill being to well being, it doesn't take much.
It takes moving from I to E and you move
ill being to well being. And that's just not just
(27:20):
a symbolically or figuratively, but that's for real. And the
more I've studied well being, and I know you've done
the same, Laurie. It's always about ultimately social capital, the
social fabric of society, your own quality social connections. So yes,
by all means, do social media, but make sure it's
with people that you actually connect with in a way
(27:40):
that works for your well being and in real life
and in real life. Actually, I'm not reminded your calling down.
Nick Christakis and James Fowler way back they did some
of the first studies of social media around Facebook, and
they looked at sort of connections on Facebook and numbers
of connections, and then they really cleverly look that are
these connections that are sort of quite remote or quite close.
(28:02):
And the way they did this is by looking at
the pictures you're posting. Are the people you were tagging
actual people that you were meeting also live and so
that sort of became a proxy for qualitative social connections
rather than sort of more distant connections that are more
virtual in nature. And they found a big difference between
having actual ties with people being tagged together with you
(28:24):
in photos circling in social media, then having lots of
other friends that weren't actually part of your actual physical
surroundings and environment, and so that I think is a
big hint.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
It's an old study, but it was ahead of.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Its time, and so so far we've been talking about
kind of what's gone wrong in North America. But I
love the World Happiness Report youths data because it's really
showing that something actually much more positive is happening in
the global South and in Europe, and so I want
to talk about the positive trends in those countries. You know,
what do we think is changing that's actually making people
happier in those parts of the world.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
So I think what's happening in say subseri, in Africa,
parts of Asia, and especially Central and Eastern Europe. Because
by the way, you should know that if you were
to do a ranking of countries just based on youth
in the world happen sport rather than just the general
population of countries, it'd be Lithuania on top for the
below thirties. And that's really striking. So the Central and
Eastern European countries have really come to the fore on
(29:18):
that front. That's with driving obviously their general rise and
the rankings as well into the top twenty really and
so that's exciting and we should look at those cases
in a bit like off a positive psychology approach, we're
rather than focusing in on what's going wrong in America
with youth, maybe we can learn something from what's going
right in say Lithuania, or in other parts of the world.
(29:39):
And so in particular Subsiharan Africa, we see that youth
below twenty five in this case is rising. Adults are
rising as well, but the delta difference between youth and
adults is increasing, So youth are proportionally getting happier and
that's exciting. And it's obviously the exactly opposite, the mirror
image of what's happening in the United States. Why and
so why I don't know is the honest answer, But
(30:02):
I think it will have to do with something we
touched upon earlier, which is the global convergence in terms
of income, so globalization. Of being an economist, we do
think about the economics of trade, global trade, globalization, and
it's probably behind much of the inequality within countries, but
it has effectively reduced inequality between countries, and so it
(30:25):
has lifted lots of people out of poverty. And for example,
China having become the blasto now but about ten twenty
years ago, because of globalization, became sort of the factory
of the world. While it brought a lot of wealth,
half a billion people rose out of poverty, and it's
the same across Africa, parts of Asia, et cetera.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
It's probably most striking.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
In the context of Central and Eastern Europe because you'll remember,
in the early two thousands the Central and Eastern European
countries joined the EU, and that meant a lot of
wealth transfer from Western Europe to Eastern Europe. So I
think Romania, Lithuania, and the other Baltic nations, et cetera.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Poland probably a lot of hope among the youth. Right
we were thinking about their job prospects in a different
way now.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
So suddenly from being a Polish youth in Poland looking
for jobs there, the whole EU open up to you
as essentially a way of travel and job opportunities. And
then these wealth transfers through the European Union's funds and subsidies,
if you will, from the western, richer countries in Europe
to the not so rich Eastern European countries also meant
(31:29):
a certain degree of convergence in economic GDP per capital levels.
What's interesting here is that in Eastern Europe there has
always been a foundation of redistribution for good or bad reasons.
They were in the orbit of communism or socialism. So
that meant that there's always been sort of a DNA
of redistributing wealth to some extent, which isn't there in
other countries. So the reason why I'm emphasizing this is
(31:51):
one of the reasons why the Kandonavian countries do so
well is because they're wealthy, but more importantly, they redistribute
their wealth and there's an equality there which and also
feeds into the welfare state. There's other wealthy countries out there,
the United States amongst others, the US amongst others, where
there's a lot of wealth. So gdpeper a capital, the
average wealth is huge, but it's not equally distributed. So
that then also feeds into well being in equalities.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
And so totally, particularly well being in young people right
who are looking at the next generation and their economic
prospects and so on.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Exactly and are not seeing the same prospects or not
as looking forward to the future as previous generations were.
Just to finish the thought, so what could be driving
say central in Eastern Europe is not just sort of
a wealth transfer convergence between West and Eastern Europe in
terms of wealth, but then also the foundations were in
place in Eastern Europe to build a welfare state and
(32:41):
redistribute this to a large extent so that everybody sort
of benefits from the rising tide, if you will, And
I think that will probably be the fuel, the main
driver behind I think my youth well being in this
place is starting to pick up. In addition to the
prospect of having way more job opportunities opening up through
the EU.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
In addition to the sort of positive changes that we're
seeing in the global South and in Europe, we're also
seeing some countries that are pushing to make child happiness
and national priority. So tell me about some of the
successes that we've seen in those countries that really pay
attention to this in particular and push for improved child wellbeing.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
So I know for a fact that in Japan they
have a whole new program around child health and wellbeing,
and they take this very seriously, and part because they're
moving towards well being more generally, but they've also really
gotten the importance of youth wellbeing today pays dividends over
time in the later lives of these youngsters. You see
(33:39):
that the focus then goes into schooling, the education system,
what can we do there, And so you find in
places like Japan, but also China and South Korea and
many other places, we're all sort of teaching to the test,
the SATs in the United States, the GCSS and the
A levels here in the United Kingdom. And that's also
raising questions because if that's the only basis of sort
(34:00):
of success is to do well on these tests. And
so you see new programs being developed around say Healthy
Minds is one of the programs that Lord Layard that
they heard or mentor has really introduced in the United Kingdom,
showing and teaching people life skills in addition to stem science, technology, engineering, math.
And what we find is that introducing life skills makes
(34:21):
for happier, more balanced human beings. It's pretty crazy to
think that we'd only focus in on the science elements,
or perhaps English literature and others and not teach people
to live good lives, especially in the era of social
media where people need to be given a sense of
what's happening on that front. A good example here on
the policy front is actually is Manchester, so they have
(34:44):
the whole school system round. Manchester is part of a
program called be Well where they are introducing essentially life
skill courses and tracking thousands and thousands students across many
dozens of schools to see what the impact is on
their well being and ultimately also their performance on these testcores.
Is to see that if you feel better, feel more
balanced as youth, as a student, is that also improve
(35:07):
actually your performance. The big question here is can we
have it both? Can we have great performance on our
tests and SATs and GCSS while being and leading happier lives.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
I think that's so important. I mean, it's one of
the reasons that I started my class at Yale. But
I agree completely, Like you know, those are twenty one
year old. You know, if we could just start that earlier,
when kids are ten, eleven, twelve, I think it would
make such a difference.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Anybody with young kids.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Mine are too young for this, but anybody I know
who has kids that are now in high school know
the impact of say high school, primary and secondary school
is huge and perhaps more influentially than the parents have
influence on their kids. We need to work really with
the schools and the curriculum to make sure people get
life skills and learn how to lead fulfilling lives.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
As you know, I'd love to see the fundamentals of
happiness science taught to kids in more schools around the world.
I mean, we do so much to educate young people
about math and literature. Why aren't we also teaching young
people the happiness skills they'll need later in life. Why
aren't we ensuring that they know more about how to
prioritize friendships, sleep, gratitude, and doing good for others. If
(36:13):
you're a teen, or if you know a teen, you
should check out the new version of my happiness course
that's just for young people. It's called The Science of
well Being for Teens, and you can access the course
for free at Corsera dot org. That's Coursera, the word
course ra dot org. And again the free class is
called The Science of well Being for Teens. We're leaving
(36:34):
the World Happiness Report behind for now, but we still
have some happiness science treats in store for you. On
the day the report was released, the United Nations International
Day of Happiness, I had the good fortune to attend
the World Happiness Summit in London. Welcome to the WAHASU
Live version of the Happiness Lab, where I got to
speak to a medical doctor also happens to be one
(36:55):
of Europe's top wellness podcasters. To introduce my guest, doctor
Rungan Chatterjee, the host of the Feel Better, Live More podcast. Today,
we're going to be talking about why medical doctors need
to pay even more attention to happiness. Well, how's the audience.
Are you all interested in medical doctors paying more attention
to happiness? And you'll get to hear more of my
(37:16):
awesome conversation with doctor Rungin Chatterjee Next time on the
Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin. When the team behind the annual World Happiness Report
finds that Finns are happier than Danes, or that Canadians
are happier than Americans, those broad results hide a ton
of nuance. We've been unpacking some of the reports more
interesting details in our last few episodes, but today we're
(00:37):
going to tackle one of the most striking findings in
this year's report. What's been happening to young people's happiness
over the last few years. And the picture is pretty complicated.
The good news is that youth happiness has been rising
in certain parts of the world. But the bad news
is that some of the wealthy nations out there have
seen worrying declines, and that includes the young people where
(00:58):
I live in North America. But the big question is
why and what can be done to halt this awful slide.
If anyone can help us figure it all out, it's
Yon Emmanuel Denev Hey Lauri.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
I'm a professor of economics and behavioral science at the
University of Oxford, where I also lead the Wellbeing Research Center.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
He's also one of the co authors of the World
Happiness Report and the lead author of the chapter that
focused specifically on gen Z.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
This year's report, we focus in on the age categories,
and my team and I we've really worked hard on
childhoodlessoned well being and so the way we define child
and adlesson it is up for debate, but we've essentially
put it as between ten and twenty four, so late adolescence,
because there's still some neurological development happening at these later
stages of late adolescents. And so it also was convenient
(01:45):
because that's where the data sort of starts. The earliest
subjective wellbeing data starts around age ten thanks to the
Children's World's data set, and then we do have the
Gallop whirldpoll and that runs from about fifteen years of
age all the way to twenty four. So it was
also a convenient to some extent to make sure that
we have these age cutoffs.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
And so usually the World Happiness Report is often focused
on adult well being. Why is it important to look
at well being in children and adolescents?
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Oh, I was absolutely adamant on the editorial board to
start thinking more seriously about child adlesson well being is,
as you say, the world happen and support which does
the World's rankings of what the happiest populations are, but
they were really eighteen plus and so at some point,
and we obviously all knew with COVID putting a spotlight
on child mental health that we had to take child
and ad last and wellbeing way more seriously. But there's
(02:31):
always been a lack of data, and the Gallobral Pole,
our workhorse, if you will, for the rankings only starts
really from late adolescens onwards. So it was a massive effort,
and we waited in a way for the PISA data.
The OECD releases the PISA data, but that only happens
once every four years or so, and so that combined
with two other data sets, Children's Worlds and HPSC, allowed
us to start piecing together the global map of child
(02:52):
and a lesson and Wellbeing. But to your question of
why it matters, child and lesson and well being matters
so much because it's the best predictor of how you
will be doing as an adult d and so mental
health as a child or and as an adolescent is
the best predictor of life outcomes and quality of life
for life satisfaction as an adult. And one particular study
that I care much about not just because I'm a
(03:13):
quothor on it. It's about ten years ago and the
Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, Andrew Roswell and I
published a paper where we show that adolescent well being
and we were able to get data from the American
National Lujournal Study of Adolescent Health, and we found that
at different ages around adolescents, their well being at those
ages was most predictive of the same individual's earnings as
(03:34):
they were growing up. What we found is that ages
I think twelve, fifteen, nineteen and twenty one. It's a
panel study, so it's the same fifteen thousand American youth
that have been tracked over time. This was started in
the early nineties and they continued to be followed with
surveys all the way into their thirties. So we have
what their well being when they're adolescents, and we have
their sort of adult outcomes, including how much they're earning
(03:56):
age thirty and above. And what we found was that
their levels of well being adolescents was a massive predictor
of how they would be doing later in life, even
as measures through their earnings. Now one could say, well,
maybe it's because happy or from richer families and socio
economic status is higher for these youngsters, but we were
able to control for that in a nifty way, if
(04:16):
I may say so, which is in that sample of
American youth of about fifteen thousand, they were about three thousand siblings.
So what we did is introduce what we call sibling
fixed effects or family fixed effects, where we would start
looking at the differences between the siblings well being and
seeing how explanatory that is of the differences in the
future earnings of these siblings. So, say, Laura, you and
(04:38):
I are sister and brother, not unfeasible, and we would
be looking at your well being, my well being, looking
at the differences between them, and then see whether that
can explain differences in our later earnings and labor market outcomes,
if you will, when we're thirty and above and low
and behold it did.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
And so it's kind of like, if you know, if
you and I were brother and sister, but I was
less happy, maybe I was more depressed, even though we
grew up in the same house, probably went to the
same schools and so on, I'd be less happy as
an adult and I'd be earning less as an adult.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Too precisely, and it's quite significant. So this is all data,
but it was thousands of already back in those days
when the study was run.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
So we really need to understand like kid mental health,
because it's having these important predicted outcomes. But my understanding
was always that the story was that overall kids tended
to be happier than adults. So walk me through the
kind of typical patterns like happiness. Researchers have seen it
about what happens to age across the life course. What
we kind of used to think happened.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Well typically and we still find it mostly to be
the case around the world. Is what you will know
better than anyone else is the U shape relationship between
age and well being. So essentially we start at quite
high in terms of our well being. We're happy as kids,
We're happy happy as we can be as kids, and
in fact then the report this to me was insight
for me, is just how happy kids really are. So
(05:49):
if you look at the earliest ages that we have
data for in life satisfaction, they start like at nine
out of ten as an average in some countries in
terms of life satisfaction. So we start really happy, and
then we slide down the U curve towards the midlife crisis,
which typically late thirties early forties, with the pressures of
life coming through, mortgage to be paid off, small kids
to be dealing with, and the prime of your careers
(06:09):
and the pressures of that, and then you sort of
like things brighten up again.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Kids leave.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
You have the benefit of having kids, but without the
negativity around having to deal with it day in day out.
Your expectations become more realistic and you start climbing up
the other side of the U shape between age and
well being that has broken down in certain societies. So
the big insight coming through in this year's World Happy
Sport with a focus on age is that in North America,
the US in particular, needless to say, and to a
(06:36):
lasser extent in Western Europe and Britain, you find that
the first element of the U shape is no longer there.
It's completely flattened, and in the US it's even reversed.
Where youth in this case is below thirty or below
twenty five, depending on which data set you look at,
they start lower in terms of their self rated quality
of life, their well being lower than the adults and
that's really disconcerting, and that trend has started what is
(06:59):
it ten to fifteen years ago, but sort of in
twenty eighteen, it's sort of flipped where you see that
the youngsters in America below twenty five in this case
are less happy than the adults.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
That's nowhere else to be seen.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
And this is something that really affected me a lot.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
Right.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
This is one of the reasons that I started my
happiness class at Yale is that, you know, I was
looking at college students who I remember back when I
was in college in the nineties. I remember them being
they weren't happy all the time, but not the rates
of depression and anxiety that we're seeing in our current students,
and I just felt like there was an enormous shift there.
It sounds like, at least with the North American data
that's being born out and the report.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Absolutely so what your famous experience there is born out
in the data has never seen before in this way,
and that trend that you picked up way back when
you launched your famous class has continued and actually exacerbated
during COVID that hasn't recovered since either for the first
time in the world happening support We've done this test
to see if you were to split the population youth, older,
(07:58):
and everyone in between. If you were to do a
ranking just on youth populations around the world, the US
would drop to sixty third.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
Sixty third, sixty third.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
We're usually in the top twenty.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Yeah, actually like in the top end of the top
twenty normally is the population as a whole. But because
of youth falling off a cliff in terms of their
well being, the general population in the US has now
dropped from i think place fifteen to place twenty third,
and that's wholly driven by youth not reporting their life's
going well.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
And the problem is, it's probably not just the youth
of today, right, given what we talked about earlier, where
youth mental health is actually predicting something about what those
young people are going to be experiencing later on. Not
investing in the youth of today being sixty third means
or likely to be sixty third, you know, into adulthood
and into many decades to come.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
That is absolutely true.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
So not only is there an urgent need to do
something because you can, but also because you have to, because,
as you say, the predictive power of child and adolescent
wellbeing and mental health will track throughout people's life course,
and that doesn't bode well for the future.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
So I think one of the big puzzles though, is that, yes,
this is the trend that we're seeing in North America,
this is the kind of thing that I saw in
my college students in the US. But my understanding is
this doesn't seem to be the trend that we're seeing
around the world.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
Correct.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Absolutely, So this is one of the other big insights
coming out from the World Happiness Support and where really
put the word world into the World Happening Support because
of this is we piece data together from the global South,
for example, and unlike North America and Western Europe, to
some extent, you find in places like Sub Saharan Africa
you find that youth has actually increased their self rate
a well being, so they find that the culity lives
(09:35):
is higher these days than it was before. And that's
in a way good news. It shows that this is
not a universal thing. It shows that this can be
reversed as a negative trend in North America and the
US in particular, and I think that's really important to
understand that globally there are massive regional differences.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
And so talk about what could be causing these differences,
because this isn't just kind of, you know, a subtle pattern,
like we're just seeing these extreme differences in how unhappy
North America and to some extent Australia and New Zealand
teens are, but how much happier you know, folks are
in the global South and even in in Europe. So like,
what's going wrong in North America?
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Well, before we dig into North America, I think the
reason why you have sort of a convergence really it's
not like youth in Sub Sahara, Africa is happier than
youth in say Belgium where I'm from, or the United Kingdom.
It's that they're sort of catching up and Western Europe
and North America coming down. So there's, if you will,
a global convergence to some extent, and we've got an
amazing figure in the World Happen Sport Chapter three that
(10:34):
kind of where you see that quite clearly, we see
North America, Western Europe come down, Central Eastern Europe come up,
sub so Aheran Africa come up, and some regions in
Asia come up as well. And I think that global
convergence is probably a result of the global inequalities reducing.
So we always talk about inequality rising, and that's certainly
the case within countries and especially in North America and
(10:56):
Western Europe and Australia New Zealand, but globally you see
actually a reduction between countries in wealth and income, and
I think that's partially also behind this convergence that we
see in well being and in youth well being in particular.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
So in some ways it's awesome that the youth of
these parts of the world are kind of getting happier
over time, But when we look at North America, what
factors are causing you know, North American kids and kids
in Australia and New Zealand to feel so unhappy these days.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
So I don't think there's one smoking gun, if you will,
that you can point to, but there's a lot going
on that it's not going in the right direction. And
so we can point to the inequalities within society in
the United States, for example, rising, which then obviously have
to downstream consequence on people's mental health and wellbeing and
opportunities for youth from less privileged backgrounds. We can talk
(11:45):
about polarization, politics teering people apart, social fabric being in
the US being torn apart, communities being torn apart, within families,
youth and older generations, or between youth, brothers and sisters,
those discussions falling apart, and then I think there's no
way around that. We also need to look at technology.
You kind of get around the fact also that the
slide in youth well being coincience with the coming up
(12:08):
of social media and how people use social media, so
that can have positives and negatives, but if people use
it passively, people who are young and vulnerable, and what
they use in terms of social media and for how long.
And so we had the privilege of speaking with Vec
Murphy the USR surge in general. Recently he noted data
that people now spent on average in the United States
about four and a half hours a day on social media.
(12:31):
And that's not even accounting for work on your computer
or Google or whatever.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
It's really just social media.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
So with the US falling to sixty third position, if
you were to just look at youth to blow thirty,
that is really a shame. And I would challenge everybody
in the United States, the society is government leaders to
not punch below its way by this much. Because the
objective dimensions that you have in placed, wealth, health, and
(12:57):
much else, you should be doing a lot better for you.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
What can we do for our young people and what
can they do for themselves? John has plenty of suggestions
right after the If social media, driven by the big
tech firms that dominate our economy is to blame for
the unhappiness we see in young people across North America,
(13:24):
Western Europe and as far away as Australia, there's probably
not much we can do about it, right well, Oxford
professor Joan Emmanuel Jenev billed out a bit more hope.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Technologies have come around. They tend to help and be helpful,
but with certain boundaries in place that evolve over time
as we better understand the impact of these technologies. So
an obvious one that we owe to Vivicmurphy, the US
serge in general, is he made the parallel between cars,
and at first cars were driving around in the streets
with huge numbers of traffic fatalities as a result because
(13:58):
of the cars weren't safe enough. We weren't wearing our seatbelts.
So over time we realize that this is a good
technology but needs specific limitations in place, and then they
were slowly but gradually put in place, and now we're
all benefiting from mobility in a relatively safe way as
a result of this coevolution between technology and social norms.
And the same could be done here with social media.
(14:19):
I think this can be a cocreation where everybody benefits
from these new technologies, but with certain guardrails in place.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
And so the idea is that as a society, as parents,
as people, we can sort of advocate for those guardrails.
We can, you know, push the government to say, hey,
what does the seat belt look like for Facebook, for
TikTok or something like that, What is maybe a speed
limit look like for maybe the amount of time you're
on these kinds of things and so on. Like, if
we push for that, then we can get maybe the
benefits of technology would like less of the limitation precisely.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
And so we need to think carefully about how we
harness the positives of social media and make sure that
these virtual connections ultimately lead to physical connections amongst people.
Because we also heard from the US Surgeon General that
in his tour around these colleges, who's talking about a
change of culture where kids in high schools come up
(15:12):
to them and say, look, but we don't have a
culture anymore of speaking to each other, and let that
sink in for a moment. That's pretty bad. And it
also makes sense because if you now walk into a
lunch cafeteria in a high school, people will be behind
their screens and so it's much harder to stroke up
a conversation between each other and bond as human beings
(15:32):
and not just through virtual means. So we need to
think very carefully as a society to harness the good
elements of technology and make sure that social media puts
the social frankly and social media.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
You know, this is something that I saw like rit
large when I was working with students at Yale. I
remember one kind of moment where I was thinking, like, Wow,
the youth are really struggling with their social connection and
they're turning to technology to like solve it. We had
this kind of competition on campus for like a new app, right,
you know, like they're all these schools kind of do
these like tech competitions, And one of the potential apps
(16:05):
that won the competition that I was looking at at
Yale was this app that was called Let's Get a Meal,
And the idea is like you go to the dining
hall and you're scared to talk to people, but you
go in Let's get a Meal, which is kind of
like Tinder for the dining hall, and you say, you know,
I could want to get a meal with somebody who
would want to get a meal with me, And you
sort of swipe and find like, oh, I'll eat with
that person. And like the older folks who are judging
(16:27):
this competition like me, were like, wait, but it's the
dining hall. Why don't you just like sit down with someone.
It's like one hundred students that you all should really
know because they're like in your same dorm, Like just
talk to somebody. But the students really felt like they
needed a tool, a technological tool, to like connect and
just talk with somebody in their lunch cafeteria.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
I think that speaks to what Vivik Merthy you as
certain general toll is that that culture has changed. It's
now not easy to sort of reach out to other
people in the cafeteria in person. We need to bring
it back into people's comfort zone to be able and
willing and actually be able to reach out to human
beings in person and not necessarily neat the technology enabling
(17:08):
of that when people are literally sitting in the cafeteria.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
But this idea raises a certain hypothesis, which is that
the way that technology is affecting social connection is in
some sense worse for youth in North America and Australia
and New Zealand versus in Europe and in Africa.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Do we know that that's the case, We need to mean,
it's an empirical question, you're asking, So we need to
find out data of how much time they spend and
obviously in the US we now know it's about four
and a half hours a day. My guesstimate is that
will be slightly less in the Global South or Central
and Eastern Europe. Then the question is also not just
how much time they spend on the social media, but
(17:47):
also what kind of social media and then how people
are using it. Is a passive use or is it
an active use, which is also very different. So passive
use is not to be recommended, but active use of
social media, where we actively reach out to people, actively
talk about yourself and connect with others, can be beneficial
for people's well being and mental health. So it's hard
to say there is something this is quirky, but we
(18:10):
ran an extra analysis to try and understand this. And
North America obviously is the US and Canada. The Canada
is split between the Francophones Quebecua and the English or
Native English Canadians, which are then obviously closer with the
US counterparts who look at sort of US slash Canadian
English spoken medium and there's something really striking there that
(18:31):
could point us in the direction a thought, which is
Quebecqui youth have seen a drop but by no means
as large as the English spoken Canadian youth, and that
was not obviously in line with the American youth. And
so John Halliwell, my wonderful colleague and really the heart
and soul of the Royal Happiness Report, has noted that
(18:52):
and sees it as suggestive of the fact that the
English slash American media is perhaps more dominated by negative
news or calls that out in more conflictual ways then say,
the more international global Francophone way of news access. And
so this may not be social media, but more how
(19:13):
news is presented to youth in the world, in the
Francophone world, it might be less conflectual, less negative, speaking,
less to our negativity biases in terms of news than
it is in the English spoken the world in North America.
So there's an interesting hint there of something going on
that will not explain everything, but it's quite striking, we thought, and.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
It fits with the thing that you were saying earlier,
which is, you know that many of the changes in
the US are about political polarization, and if you have
a news media that's kind of biased towards pulling that out,
and we have youth have phones in their pockets that
are dinging every time some politicians says something mean or
you know that negativity bias can get strugg over.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
It can get overwhelming and dominates, and it's really sad
that then it doesn't allow any space for positive news.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
And if you think about, you know, just like the
way college was, news was back when I was in college.
You know, it was just so different then, right. I
could pull up a newspaper and read something terrible, but
then I would put the newspaper down and I could
go to the library and hang out with my friends.
And again it wasn't like diinging with a notification in
my pocket. About something terrible that was happening in the world.
And when I just think about the kind of anxiety
(20:16):
that can come from that theft of my attention and
that constant negative information, like it just must feel so
different for the youth of today.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
It certainly does.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
And the algorithms behind social media are obviously optimized to
get our attention. And as you know, well, we're hardwired
to be more attentive to negative things that are potential
threats or issues that are alarming, rather than positive news,
and so the algorithm tries to seek our attention and
then obviously does it by pinging us with negative news
because they know that we'll get our attention more easily
(20:48):
than positive news. So here too, maybe we should start
nudging or providing frameworks in place to maybe balance us
out a bit more.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Or we can do this ourselves.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
We can undertake these automatic notifications, I'm sure than typically
negative news. We can perhaps subscribe to more positive news sources.
And I think I've actually heard there's a sort of
a new journal that is meant to be mostly trying
to balance out towards pulsitive news.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
Maybe we can subscribe to that. We'll find out about.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
When dogs are being found, we'll find out about the
World Happiness Report and the good things that are happening,
not just the bad things, et cetera, et cetera, et
c to help us ourselves regain our sanity.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
In that way.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
So let's say you're a parent listening to this, maybe
even a parent in North America for example, watching these
trends and just feeling really worried. You are there particular
strategies or practices you could suggest for parents for how
they could reverse the trend, maybe not in their whole country,
but maybe in their own community or in their own family.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Well, I think as parents who are really concerned and
probably rightly so, what they need to do is, I
think try and understand their kids first foremost, because their
kids are good kids, but they're in a tough, complex
situation and not because of them, because of society around
them making it very difficult. So the social media that
tries to really attract all of their attention, and there's
(22:01):
everything possible with the most brilliant designers and software engineers
designing algorithms to really try and keep them hook to
the screens. There's AI automation that is making the future
of work cloak both interesting but also difficult and complex.
I mean, as a youth today, think about choices you
need to make for say studies. You might be saying, oh,
(22:22):
I'd love to be a lawyer and start legal studies.
But by the end of view four or five years
of law school, everything you've learned could be obsolete because
they chat GPT in some legal version of it. So
there's so many uncertainties that kids live with today and
so many technologies trying to get their attention. So I
think the first thing that parents need to do really
(22:44):
is to try and understand the complexity with which they live.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
And I love this advice because, you know, honestly, even
with my yal students, sometimes I get people who react
of like, oh, what's their problem, you know, those snowflakes,
Like they really can't handle it. But I think when
you look carefully at the actual societal struggles that young
people are facing today, like it makes sense that you're
freaked out and feeling anxious about what's happening in the
world of work. It makes sense that you're freaked out
and anxious about political polarizing and inequality. We see, you know,
(23:11):
at least in the United States, and so I love
this idea that what parents need to start with is
just to recognize, like, it's tough out there for young
people today, it's.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Very tough out there, and so they need to start
with listening to their own children rather than trying to
bust them around and put these hard limits in place,
and understand the pressures they're under. And if they do that,
then I think they'll understand, for example, that there's lots
of peer pressure. So for example, if you say to
your child you cannot have an iPhone or an iPad,
or you can't go onto this particular app then your
(23:39):
child may actually be missing out on important things happening
in their.
Speaker 3 (23:43):
Own school community.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
And this then leads to a second thought that parents
could perhaps do is to coordinate with other parents or
their local school to see, hey, if there are specific
peer pressures or some people have access to something and
others do not, and that puts sort of inequalities in
place that are really harmful, then can there be a
(24:05):
coordinate approach amongst the parents of kids that are friends
or in the same class, or can they work at
the school boards to say, like, hey, can we have
a norm or a reference point or something that we
would recommend as a school or the parents of a
whole club of school friends.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
And I think this is really important because it really
is not trying to intervene on, say, your kids particular
social media use or the fact that they're on TikTok
all the time. It's actually working in their community to
try to get these norms changed around, which makes it
easier for the individual to end up engaging in practices
that might be healthier for people's happiness exactly. And some
of the folks listening to the Happiness Lab right now
(24:43):
might themselves be in the category of folks that you
put in there. You know, what is it ten to
twenty five is your definition of youth? If there's a
teenager listening right now, what advice might you have for
them as an individual for how to kind of fight
some of these trends.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
I think the first thing is to understand again that
you are living in a complex situation, that your attention
is being fought over, and that you should not let
yourself be had. If you will buy the brilliant software
engineers of these social media platforms, take agency over your
own time. Follow Laurie's principles.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Around listen to the rest of the happiness lab, observe
exactly and.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Apply these principles about setting your own boundaries and not
letting yourself be consumed by the big social media platforms.
And by all means, try and re establish a culture
of connection. And I know it's changed, there's no longer
a culture of speaking to each other, but make efforts
to get out of your comfort zone and do so.
(25:41):
And if I may want very specific practical piece of
advice is one thing we've seen in the wellbeing science
is that it's ultimately all about social connection and when
you do good things for other people pro social behaviors
as we call it in the industry, but really benevolent
acts like volunteering, donating small amounts, helping strangers in need,
(26:02):
talking to strangers. That doesn't just help the people on
the receiving end, but we've now shown over and over
again in large studies with causal inference that this also
helps yourself. And so by all means, try and do
good things for other people, and you will see it
shouldn't be the goal line and of itself, but you'll
see that will help improve your own well being too.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
And So one of the reasons I've loved dear chapter
on the World Happiness Report is that it kind of
calls out the trends that I was seeing in North America.
But I think it also provides us with a lot
of hope, right, Like, it isn't just the case that
youth mental health is going down all over the world.
If anything, what we're seeing is like there are possibilities
for improving things. They involve changes, and they involve both
(26:47):
societal changes like maybe making things more equal, and also
individual changes like engaging in more social connection. But there's
hope there. The trend isn't just like, you know, a
downward slope forever. We can all take agency and change
these things exactly.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
And you mentioned social connection, and I think that's probably
the real key, and again putting social in social media
and connecting in person. And it's a bit silly to
say it's a bit, but if you think about moving
from ill being to well being, it doesn't take much.
It takes moving from I to E and you move
ill being to well being. And that's just not just
(27:20):
a symbolically or figuratively, but that's for real. And the
more I've studied well being, and I know you've done
the same, Laurie. It's always about ultimately social capital, the
social fabric of society, your own quality social connections. So yes,
by all means, do social media, but make sure it's
with people that you actually connect with in a way
(27:40):
that works for your well being and in real life
and in real life. Actually, I'm not reminded your calling down.
Nick Christakis and James Fowler way back they did some
of the first studies of social media around Facebook, and
they looked at sort of connections on Facebook and numbers
of connections, and then they really cleverly look that are
these connections that are sort of quite remote or quite close.
(28:02):
And the way they did this is by looking at
the pictures you're posting. Are the people you were tagging
actual people that you were meeting also live and so
that sort of became a proxy for qualitative social connections
rather than sort of more distant connections that are more
virtual in nature. And they found a big difference between
having actual ties with people being tagged together with you
(28:24):
in photos circling in social media, then having lots of
other friends that weren't actually part of your actual physical
surroundings and environment, and so that I think is a
big hint.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
It's an old study, but it was ahead of.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Its time, and so so far we've been talking about
kind of what's gone wrong in North America. But I
love the World Happiness Report youths data because it's really
showing that something actually much more positive is happening in
the global South and in Europe, and so I want
to talk about the positive trends in those countries. You know,
what do we think is changing that's actually making people
happier in those parts of the world.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
So I think what's happening in say subseri, in Africa,
parts of Asia, and especially Central and Eastern Europe. Because
by the way, you should know that if you were
to do a ranking of countries just based on youth
in the world happen sport rather than just the general
population of countries, it'd be Lithuania on top for the
below thirties. And that's really striking. So the Central and
Eastern European countries have really come to the fore on
(29:18):
that front. That's with driving obviously their general rise and
the rankings as well into the top twenty really and
so that's exciting and we should look at those cases
in a bit like off a positive psychology approach, we're
rather than focusing in on what's going wrong in America
with youth, maybe we can learn something from what's going
right in say Lithuania, or in other parts of the world.
(29:39):
And so in particular Subsiharan Africa, we see that youth
below twenty five in this case is rising. Adults are
rising as well, but the delta difference between youth and
adults is increasing, So youth are proportionally getting happier and
that's exciting. And it's obviously the exactly opposite, the mirror
image of what's happening in the United States. Why and
so why I don't know is the honest answer, But
(30:02):
I think it will have to do with something we
touched upon earlier, which is the global convergence in terms
of income, so globalization. Of being an economist, we do
think about the economics of trade, global trade, globalization, and
it's probably behind much of the inequality within countries, but
it has effectively reduced inequality between countries, and so it
(30:25):
has lifted lots of people out of poverty. And for example,
China having become the blasto now but about ten twenty
years ago, because of globalization, became sort of the factory
of the world. While it brought a lot of wealth,
half a billion people rose out of poverty, and it's
the same across Africa, parts of Asia, et cetera.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
It's probably most striking.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
In the context of Central and Eastern Europe because you'll remember,
in the early two thousands the Central and Eastern European
countries joined the EU, and that meant a lot of
wealth transfer from Western Europe to Eastern Europe. So I
think Romania, Lithuania, and the other Baltic nations, et cetera.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Poland probably a lot of hope among the youth. Right
we were thinking about their job prospects in a different
way now.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
So suddenly from being a Polish youth in Poland looking
for jobs there, the whole EU open up to you
as essentially a way of travel and job opportunities. And
then these wealth transfers through the European Union's funds and subsidies,
if you will, from the western, richer countries in Europe
to the not so rich Eastern European countries also meant
(31:29):
a certain degree of convergence in economic GDP per capital levels.
What's interesting here is that in Eastern Europe there has
always been a foundation of redistribution for good or bad reasons.
They were in the orbit of communism or socialism. So
that meant that there's always been sort of a DNA
of redistributing wealth to some extent, which isn't there in
other countries. So the reason why I'm emphasizing this is
(31:51):
one of the reasons why the Kandonavian countries do so
well is because they're wealthy, but more importantly, they redistribute
their wealth and there's an equality there which and also
feeds into the welfare state. There's other wealthy countries out there,
the United States amongst others, the US amongst others, where
there's a lot of wealth. So gdpeper a capital, the
average wealth is huge, but it's not equally distributed. So
that then also feeds into well being in equalities.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
And so totally, particularly well being in young people right
who are looking at the next generation and their economic
prospects and so on.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Exactly and are not seeing the same prospects or not
as looking forward to the future as previous generations were.
Just to finish the thought, so what could be driving
say central in Eastern Europe is not just sort of
a wealth transfer convergence between West and Eastern Europe in
terms of wealth, but then also the foundations were in
place in Eastern Europe to build a welfare state and
(32:41):
redistribute this to a large extent so that everybody sort
of benefits from the rising tide, if you will, And
I think that will probably be the fuel, the main
driver behind I think my youth well being in this
place is starting to pick up. In addition to the
prospect of having way more job opportunities opening up through
the EU.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
In addition to the sort of positive changes that we're
seeing in the global South and in Europe, we're also
seeing some countries that are pushing to make child happiness
and national priority. So tell me about some of the
successes that we've seen in those countries that really pay
attention to this in particular and push for improved child wellbeing.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
So I know for a fact that in Japan they
have a whole new program around child health and wellbeing,
and they take this very seriously, and part because they're
moving towards well being more generally, but they've also really
gotten the importance of youth wellbeing today pays dividends over
time in the later lives of these youngsters. You see
(33:39):
that the focus then goes into schooling, the education system,
what can we do there, And so you find in
places like Japan, but also China and South Korea and
many other places, we're all sort of teaching to the test,
the SATs in the United States, the GCSS and the
A levels here in the United Kingdom. And that's also
raising questions because if that's the only basis of sort
(34:00):
of success is to do well on these tests. And
so you see new programs being developed around say Healthy
Minds is one of the programs that Lord Layard that
they heard or mentor has really introduced in the United Kingdom,
showing and teaching people life skills in addition to stem science, technology, engineering, math.
And what we find is that introducing life skills makes
(34:21):
for happier, more balanced human beings. It's pretty crazy to
think that we'd only focus in on the science elements,
or perhaps English literature and others and not teach people
to live good lives, especially in the era of social
media where people need to be given a sense of
what's happening on that front. A good example here on
the policy front is actually is Manchester, so they have
(34:44):
the whole school system round. Manchester is part of a
program called be Well where they are introducing essentially life
skill courses and tracking thousands and thousands students across many
dozens of schools to see what the impact is on
their well being and ultimately also their performance on these testcores.
Is to see that if you feel better, feel more
balanced as youth, as a student, is that also improve
(35:07):
actually your performance. The big question here is can we
have it both? Can we have great performance on our
tests and SATs and GCSS while being and leading happier lives.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
I think that's so important. I mean, it's one of
the reasons that I started my class at Yale. But
I agree completely, Like you know, those are twenty one
year old. You know, if we could just start that earlier,
when kids are ten, eleven, twelve, I think it would
make such a difference.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Anybody with young kids.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Mine are too young for this, but anybody I know
who has kids that are now in high school know
the impact of say high school, primary and secondary school
is huge and perhaps more influentially than the parents have
influence on their kids. We need to work really with
the schools and the curriculum to make sure people get
life skills and learn how to lead fulfilling lives.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
As you know, I'd love to see the fundamentals of
happiness science taught to kids in more schools around the world.
I mean, we do so much to educate young people
about math and literature. Why aren't we also teaching young
people the happiness skills they'll need later in life. Why
aren't we ensuring that they know more about how to
prioritize friendships, sleep, gratitude, and doing good for others. If
(36:13):
you're a teen, or if you know a teen, you
should check out the new version of my happiness course
that's just for young people. It's called The Science of
well Being for Teens, and you can access the course
for free at Corsera dot org. That's Coursera, the word
course ra dot org. And again the free class is
called The Science of well Being for Teens. We're leaving
(36:34):
the World Happiness Report behind for now, but we still
have some happiness science treats in store for you. On
the day the report was released, the United Nations International
Day of Happiness, I had the good fortune to attend
the World Happiness Summit in London. Welcome to the WAHASU
Live version of the Happiness Lab, where I got to
speak to a medical doctor also happens to be one
(36:55):
of Europe's top wellness podcasters. To introduce my guest, doctor
Rungan Chatterjee, the host of the Feel Better, Live More podcast. Today,
we're going to be talking about why medical doctors need
to pay even more attention to happiness. Well, how's the audience.
Are you all interested in medical doctors paying more attention
to happiness? And you'll get to hear more of my
(37:16):
awesome conversation with doctor Rungin Chatterjee Next time on the
Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos
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