November 20, 2023 • 31 mins
We're distrustful, unequal and isolated. That's according to the figures showing a decline in happy community feeling since the 1960s. But can we do anything to regain the healthier communal lives enjoyed by many of our parents, grandparents or great-grandparents?
We talk to a hopeful trio - an economist, a political scientist and a US senator - about how we can reduce social isolation, temper political division and prioritize the kind of mixing and meeting that makes neighbors into friends.
Further reading:
Robert Putnam Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.
Lord Richard Layard Can We Be Happier? Evidence and Ethics and Wellbeing: Science and Policy (co-authored by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve).
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. It's a heinous act, and we're all victims. It's
a terrible menace to society, one that's eroded our trust
and made our futures less bright. Given the shadow at
casts on so many aspects of our daily lives, you'd
(00:35):
think there'd be a federal task force assigned to investigate
the threat, kicking indoors to stop the ongoing assault. Sadly
that's not happening, but one dogged detective has been on
the case for decades.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Who done it? Who killed social capital?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Political scientist Robert Putnam thinks social capital is the glue
that holds a happy society together, But the bonds of
trust and friendship he knew growing up in the clubs, leagues,
and unions of the nineteen fifties have died.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Was it suburbanization? Was it women are going to work?
Was it we're all too busy? I mean a lot
of hypotheses.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
There were other suspects on the scene too. Television had
begun keeping us at home rather than out in the world,
mixing with our neighbors.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
Just listening on a keybole.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
And these days our tablets and smartphones have lulled us
into believing we can get all the social interaction we
need online. Robert grew up when TV was a rarity
and iPads were the stuff of science fiction. Back then,
in Port Clinton, Ohio, residents hung out in person all
the time.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
He was a tiny town. The richest person in my
class lived three or four blocks. Were forest kidded by class.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
In the last episode, we explored Robert's research on the
importance of so called third places. We saw that spending
time with people in teams, clubs, and other venues outside
of our homes and workplaces not only makes us happier,
but can also boost the trust we have in our
fellow citizens. Building this kind of social capital even helps
society work better. It benefits everyone in a community. It
(02:07):
was exactly this positive cycle that Robert enjoyed as a kid.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
I grew up when America was the maximum of we
society that we've ever seen, and my whole life has
been gone downhill. We become more and more in I society,
and I really wish that weren't true. I wish I
could figure out a way to reverse that, or at
least pause it.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
These days, we assume the pursuit of happiness comes down
to the individual we tend to focus on things like
self care and me time. I want to stay home
and watch a movie alone at my convenience, or I'm
going to skip that meeting because I deserve some personal downtime.
Robert's work has shown that focusing on the we can
offer huge benefits for our well being. But as we'll
(02:51):
see in this episode, doing that more effectively may require
a huge change, not just to how we behave as individuals,
but also to how we run our cities and communities.
Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to
be had, But what if our minds are wrong, What
if our minds are lying to us, leading us away
(03:13):
from all really make us happy. The good news is
that understanding the science of the money can point us
all back in the right direction. You're listening to the
Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
If you graf many majors of not only in social capital,
but economic equality and political comedy, getting along and so on,
they all go down since the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Robert was born back in nineteen forty one, and he
feels very lucky to have grown up in what he
considers a golden age of social capital a period of
so much weed time. Every day Robert's dad ate breakfast
at the same local spot with the same fellow diners.
Robert spent his formative teen years on a Port Clinton
bowling team whose members came from many diverse communities and neighborhoods.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
I'm constantly at risk of seeing that town walls and
seeing our youth through golden paye. So I spent a
lot of time actually trying to be sure I have
the facts right.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
And the facts are pretty shocking. Many of our third places,
those spots other than home or work, where we can
mix and form friendships, are in terminal decline. By neglecting
our clubs and associations and neighborhood hangouts. Over the last
sixty years, it seems that we've really beaten social capital down,
almost to the point of extinction. But it turns out
this pessimistic view isn't the whole picture. Robert realized he
(04:39):
didn't really know what was happening to social capital before
his childhood in the nineteen fifties, so he decided to
look at the earlier records. What was social capital like
in World War Two, during the Great Depression, or even
before World War One, and.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
If you do that, you can see it's all one big,
inverted you curve.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
One side of that curve tells us what we already know,
that social capital now is low, But the opposite side
of the graph revealed something somewhat surprising. America had experienced
a similar slump in social capit in the late eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
America was in a pickle back in the eighteen eighties.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
We were very unequal.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
We were very divided politically, we were very polarized. We
were very disconnected from one another.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Robert wanted to quantify just how much America in the
eighteen hundreds was an I society rather than a WE society.
So he turned to an online database that had digitized
a bunch of written material from different time periods.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
It's got cookbooks and detective stories and children's books and
everything you would see if you went into a bookstore,
and therefore it's a good measure of what ordinary people
are reading and writing about.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Searching this archive can tell you when different ideas were fashionable,
when particular historical figures were in vogue. But Robert wanted
to measure something more subtle. He needed a specific search
term to test what ordinary people were reading and writing
about their sense of community.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
What if we.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Compared the ratio of the first person plural to the
first person singular.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
Robert decided to compare our use of the word I
to the use of the word we, and back in
the eighteen eighties, the first person singular went out by
a landslide.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
We were very much in an eye mood.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
We were very much focused on what was good for
us individually rather than what was good for all of
us together.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
That era, after the Civil War and reconstruction, became known
as the Gilded Age. It was a time of rapid
and often disconcerting technological change, a period of bitter arguments
about immigration, democracy, and social justice.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
In Vanning public philosophy at that time, it was something
called social Darwinism natural selection.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Better if if we don't help poor people.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Because I'll just speed up the process of development of
the human race.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
This ethos allowed a small group of elite men, the
so called robber barons, to amass fast wealth while workers
enjoyed little security from the fruits of their labor. And
the philosophy back then was that if workers didn't like that, well,
they should start their own business. Empire from the top
to the bottom of Gilded Age society. The eye was
celebrated over the WII.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Read in truth and claw bad, to help poor people good, to.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Be as selfish as possible. Yeah, I'm guessing that some
of this may sound depressingly familiar. I mean, arguments about
social justice and inequality. A one percent of people thriving
while much of the other ninety nine percent is still struggling.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
America in eighteen ninety looked a lot like America right now,
extremely polarized, extremely unequal, extremely self centered, and extremely socially isolated.
And then something happened around nineteen ten, and all those
graphs began to go in the right direction.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
The first sign of this change was in that written
archive Robert analyzed. After nineteen hundred, the ratio of eye
to we words began to shift. More and more writers
began talking about the collective good rather than the individual.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
They essentially said, what we've inherited from our parents is
a society that's really out of lack. Even if we're
ourselves doing fine, we have other loeases other people.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
This urged argues led people to start banding together in
clubs and associations. In teams and in unions. Americans got
more involved in charities and civic bodies, and in politics.
Citizens began pressuring their elected officials to use the Wii
rather than the eye to shape policies.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Things in America were getting better and better.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
We were economically growing, we were equal, we were taking
care of each other, we were attending pgaight meetings, we
were focused on the Wii. We were like this amazing country.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Robert calls this change the upswing. It's a phenomenon that
he thinks should give us a lot of hope about
the fate of society and social capital today. The upswing
reveals that our great great grandparents faced pretty much the
same problems we have today, and they were able to
make the cultural changes needed to successfully switch course and
rebuild social capital.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
You know, it does not have to be this way,
and for most young people today that is news.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
In the last episode, we talked about the importance of
individual dual action in improving social capital. We extolled the
virtues of becoming a joiner, of going to third places
and meeting your neighbors to build the bonds of community
and trust that make us all happier. But Robert's study
of the upswing shows that's only part of the solution.
We also need a cultural shift. Our entire society has
(09:28):
to focus on the WII rather than the eye, and
that means we need people at the top to start
taking social capitals seriously and to back it with policies
and money, which kind of sounds like a huge hurdle.
The Happiness lab will be right back. If you're looking
(09:52):
for a true hero of the WI society, you need
to look further back in time than the nineteen fifties
and way before the Gilded Age of the eighteen eighties.
In fact, you need to go all the way back
to the days of the American Revolution, because just as
America was being founded with a declaration to give citizens
the right to p sue happiness, a British philosopher was
thinking deeply about what the pursuit of happiness actually meant,
(10:14):
and Jeremy Bentham came down firmly on the moral case
for collective well being. The greatest happiness. He wrote, of
the greatest number, that is the measure of right and wrong.
Speaker 5 (10:24):
I thought that was absolutely mind blowing.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
As a young student, economist Lord Richard Laird loved Jeremy
Bentham's work.
Speaker 5 (10:32):
The way we would judge our society is by the
happiness of the people. The way we would want the
government to bathe is to maximize well being of the people.
What are we here to do to produce the most
happiness that we can in the world.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Now, you might not be used to hearing a veteran
economist like Lord Laird talking about concepts like happiness and
maximizing well being. When economists use words like maximizing, they're
usually focused on money and shareholder value and country wealth
as measured by GDP. It's not that economists are blind
to the need to make people happier. They just love
numbers and data. And until recently, psychologists like me couldn't
(11:07):
give them any of those numbers or day because we
hadn't yet come up with good ways to measure people's happiness.
Speaker 5 (11:12):
And what could you say, well, more or less, all
you could say is how much they could buy, And
so how much they could buy became the criteria many
people thought was equivalent to well being, and that has
sorted of been very unfortunate.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Unfortunate because it's just not true. As I say over
and over on this podcast. Lots of research shows that
how much money people have is not a proxy for
how happy they are. You can be a blissfully happy
billionaire or a downright miserable one. But as the saying goes,
if you're armed with a hammer, everything starts to look
like a nail. And until recently, economists were only armed
(11:48):
with GDP, so they began to assume that increasing our
wealth was the best path to happiness. The problem is
that policymakers and leaders tend to listen to economists, so
we wound up with government policies that confuse money and
well being.
Speaker 5 (12:02):
This is a terrible culture.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Take Lord Laird's home country of England. He's watched politicians
use econo arguments to remove funding from the places where
ordinary people meet and form social capital.
Speaker 5 (12:14):
Children's centers, which have been largely abolished by the present government,
were very successful in bringing together mothers with young children.
Youth centers very important and there's plenty of evidence that
when they get close down as they have been, that's
not good for crime. And then old people's centers or
mixtage censers, where people regularly get together in the natural
(12:35):
kind of way.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Governments usually want to reduce debt and promote economic growth.
So they conclude that, however nice it might be to
let parents and teens and elders meet up and become friends,
it's a luxury the country can't afford. But Lord Layard
is a pioneer of a different field known as happiness economics,
and that field see the benefits of these investments very
very differently. Lord Laird argues that concentrating solely on economic
(12:59):
growth fails Jeremy Bentham's test of right and wrong. It
doesn't bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number.
Speaker 5 (13:05):
The things which were being measured are the things external,
and you can see somebody's income, you can't see how
they're feeling. And we have to move to a culture
where we take the life as experienced and the in
their life more seriously.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Fortunately for Lloyd Laird and other proponents of happiness economics,
psychologists have now worked out how to establish if people
are happy. We simply ask them. Researchers now have lots
of different survey tools for measuring if people are satisfied
both in their lives and with their lives, and to
find out what factors influence their answers and of.
Speaker 5 (13:40):
Course, the results are incredibly important and so different from
what many politicians think matter to people.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
No one, it turns out, talks about things like GDP
people are much more likely to mention loneliness, a topic
that few economists or politicians have focused on, but that
we now know has a huge effect on our health.
It's estimated to be the equivalent of smoking fifteen cigarettes
a day. That damage could be reduced if government's invested
in the right problem.
Speaker 5 (14:07):
There's money that needs to be spent, but it's not
a huge amount of money.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Lord Laird argues for things like tax incentives to encourage
the growth of third places. He thinks governments should prioritize
building plazas and parks where people can connect.
Speaker 5 (14:20):
Power planning it's very very important in determining whither are
spaces where people naturally come together and talk to each
other and can walk around and say it some shots
and so on, or whether it's a kind of motorized
social desert. These are real decisions that town planners can make.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
You may well look around your town and see little
evidence that urban planners have given much thought of bringing
folks together. But just as Robert Putnam saw an upswing
in community spirit after the Gilded Age. Lord Laird's senses
a growing interest in happiness economics in many nations.
Speaker 5 (14:53):
And we're now in a really interesting situation in Britain
where wellbeing is coming up to the floor because the
party which will probably elect to the next election is
committed to making well being an equal goal with GDP
for its government.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
And note that Lord Laird isn't advocating spending public money frivolously.
All those usual hard headed financial savings goals are built
into happiness economics too.
Speaker 5 (15:18):
Our criterion for public policy is that we should be
spending money owned policies which create the most well being
per dollar spent. Now, my dollar spent it means not
in a dollar spent at the beginning of the process,
but minus a dollars saved as reults of spending the
initial dollar coat effectiveness. This is a sort of wellbeing
(15:41):
mantra when it comes to public policy.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
That's right. Public investment in improving well being can actually
save government's money. Take loneliness again. A dollar spent giving
a lonely person access to a third place could save
the money that would need to be spent if that
person gets sick as a result of their social isolation.
And as we heard in our last episode, investing in
clubs and third places like sports teams, community pools, choirs
(16:05):
and residents associations can reduce crimes and help towns run
more efficiently.
Speaker 5 (16:10):
We need to make this case full investing in things
which are really critical for people's well being and will
actually many of them save the state a lot of money.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Lord Laird has been around even longer than Robert Putnam.
He was born in the nineteen thirties. I assumed he'd
be even more depressed by the current state of social
capital and the lack of trust. But I was really
heartened to hear him talk so optimistically about where policy
is going. And then I caught myself. Lord Laird's views
are well respected in Europe and particularly the Scandinavian countries
(16:43):
that so often top the charts of the happiest places
on Earth. But what about the United States? Despite our
incredibly high GDP, we barely hit the middle of some
of those well being metrics. Are the leaders of my
country ever going to wake up to happiness economics? Hey,
Senator Murphy, thanks so much for taking the time.
Speaker 4 (17:00):
Yeah, absolutely really glad to do it. Thanks for having
me be part of this.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
When I first saw the new national strategy, I was
so excited. And when I realized it was my senator,
and I was like, yes, it's so exciting. The Happiness
Lab will be right back. When Harvard political scientist Robert
(17:25):
Putnam first published his findings about the decline of social capital,
it sparked a huge national debate.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Please be seated every while, let's go.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Even President Clinton wanted in.
Speaker 5 (17:35):
I'd like to call on Professor Robert Putnam.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Now, within one week, I was invited to Camp David
David for goodness sex. This is not the normal experience
of any academic bowling alone.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Worth it for the title alone.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
I was only a grad student back then, but I
also caught the Putnam bug. I started talking endlessly with
friends about Robert's ideas. We even dreamt up our own
outrageous plan to rebuild social capital. We'd move to some
tiny coastal town and build a local cinema, but that
never came to fruition.
Speaker 6 (18:07):
Today, our fellowship, our way of life, our very freedom
came under attack, and a series of deliberate and deadly
terrorist acts.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
The events of nine to eleven diverted the conversations that
I and so many people were having about social capital.
The play of third places suddenly didn't seem so important.
Speaker 6 (18:27):
The victims were in airplanes or in their offices, secretaries,
businessmen and women, military and federal workers, moms and dads,
friends and neighbors.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Only later would scholars argue that it was the exact
right time to start boosting trust and social capital. Since
nine to eleven, the decline in social capital has become
even steeper. Surveys reveal that trust in government is at
a sixty year low. Since twenty eighteen, our faith in journalists,
police officers, and even school principles has dropped. And young adults,
(19:00):
those with even less experience with the sorts of third
places that Robert enjoyed as a kid, are now the
least willing to trust their fellow citizens. That has spurred
some people to take action.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
There's no doubt that my rather sudden interest in this
topic of social connection is not coincidental to being a
parent of teenagers.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
I want you to meet someone who's tackling our decline
in social capital head on.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
So I'm Chris Murphy, and I am a United States
Senator from Connecticut.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Senator Murphy has introduced the National Strategy for Social Connection Act,
a bill that would create an office within the White
House charged with reducing loneliness and boosting social capital. The
senator hopes it will give future generations the opportunity to
build the sorts of third places that he took for
granted back in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 4 (19:45):
I had a real sense of place growing up. I
grew up in a pretty quintessentially suburban community right outside
of Hartford. It had specific restaurants that you'd go to
see friends and neighbors. We had rituals that would involve
doing the same set of things and going to the
same set of places on Saturday mornings and Sunday mornings.
(20:08):
There was a a routine to life in Weathersfield that
was very much angered in that place, and it was
a routine that you couldn't easily replicate somewhere else because
of the things we were doing in Weathersfield were unique
to Weathersfield.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Some of the ritual Senator Murphy remembers may sound kind
of corny to modern ears, like heading to the store
with his grandparents and being treated by the owner to
a cheese slice while the adults chit chatted.
Speaker 4 (20:32):
It was part of my weekend routine, going to the
local grocery store, getting a free slice of American cheese
and feeling like really connected to that guy and to
that store and to that business community who you know,
were so wonderfully attentive to my needs that they would
give me a slice of cheese.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
But local stores like this are getting harder to find.
Senator Murphy worries that lawmakers have failed to see the
social consequences of the shopping and delivery apps that we
all find so convenient.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
When online commerce and social media came along, government decided
to convince itself that the market, the private sector, could
deliver the good and withhold the bad. And that's not
what happened. Unregulated online commerce ended up wiping out our
local economies, our downtowns, and so that experience I had
(21:23):
growing up of having a relationship with your local grocer
or your local deli manager that was really important to
your sense of place and identity, that doesn't exist any longer.
Those local grocery stores are gone, but.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Is missing out on free cheese slices enough of a
reason to create a whole new office in the heart
of the United States government and to demand the sorts
of policies that Robert Putnam, Lord Laird and even Jeremy
Bentham might approve of.
Speaker 4 (21:49):
I think it's always dangerous to get involved in blind nostalgia,
and there are things about growing up in the seventies
that are not fantastic and not awesome. But I do
feel like I am struggling as a parent to deliver
valuable connection to my kids, who are now teenager and
a preteen in the way that I had it, and
(22:09):
I think that's part of what has driven me to
really care about this issue of connection. But the second
reason is this, I also just am responsible for the
people I represent, and I just don't feel like they're
as healthy or as fulfilled as they need to be.
And I feel this constant lingering anxiety amongst the people
(22:30):
that I represent in a way that I don't remember
even when I started out in politics twenty years ago.
And so I really have been engaged in the last
couple of years in the search to try to figure
out why people are as unhappy as they are, Why
are they more anxious, Why has our conversation become more dysfunctional,
and I'm convinced that part of that is that people
(22:50):
aren't feeling is connected to each other. And there's got
to be a political solution for that because there's a
political consequence.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
And in keeping with the insights of happiness economics, Senator
Murphy argues that a dollar spent on well being today
is likely to see more dollars saved down the line.
Speaker 4 (23:05):
The biggest driver of the federal deficit is healthcare costs,
and so if you are a good steward of the
taxpayer dollar, then you have to care about why we're
spending so much more money in this country than anywhere
else on healthcare. And what the Certain General tells us
unequivocally is that there is a health care cost to
loneliness and isolation. That people who are lonely are logically
(23:28):
going to be more likely to suffer from something like
depression or dementia, but also from heart disease, and so
there's just a dollar sign costs isolation.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
Senator Murphy also thinks these social capital improvements will reduce crime.
He sees a direct link between social isolation and road
rage and even an increasing phenomenon of the modern age air.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
Rage TSA administrator was in my office the other day.
We were talking about the biggest problems he faces, and
at the top of his list was violence on planes
and at TSA checkpoints. He describes a hair trigger violence
amongst passengers who travel through our airports and travel on
(24:09):
airlines that he's never seen in his entire career. And
we feel that in our daily lives, that people just
seem quicker to violent outbursts or quicker to verbal assaults
on peers than they were before. And I think that
is one of the consequences of a country that is
(24:29):
just sort of searching for connection and meaning. And when
you're searching in that way, maybe your first emotion is sadness.
But often for a lot of people, anger is right there,
not far behind. And you see that play out in
a whole bunch of forums in our society today.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
But isolation doesn't just cause the kind of anger that
erupts when you're rushing to make your flight. Senator Murphy
also suspects that many of today's hate crimes, mass shootings,
and terrorist attacks ultimately stem from a lack of social capital.
Speaker 4 (24:59):
But I think there's no doubt that people's isolation and
people's loneliness ultimately moves them into unhealthy places politically, and
part of the reason that we have more extremism in
our political organization and communication, I think, is because a
lot of lonely, isolated people end up finding connection or
(25:22):
finding meaning through politics, and in particular through the extremes
of both the right and the left.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
These are weighty and depressing problems, but the solution Senator
Murphy has proposed sound kind of fun. Rather than pushing
for more cops or harsher punishments, he thinks that at
least some of the answers could come from things like
swimming together.
Speaker 4 (25:44):
There was this small, insignificant kerfuffle on social media over
the summer about public pools and the fact that we're
losing public pools and the ones we have we had
a hard time staffing this summer in part because of
funding shortages. But that caused some people on the neoliberal
right to say, wait a second, you know, why should
(26:06):
government be involved in our aquatic life to begin with?
But actually that's over the history of time been a
real great tradition of local government is to help create,
not have the sole responsibility to create, but to help create.
Some of those places little leagues, public pools, public parks,
(26:29):
dog parks where we can easily find other people who
share common interests. And as funding has run short for
those projects. As government frankly has had to push more
and more money into schools and healthcare, it's had less
money left over to do this stuff that it actually
did really well a generation ago, which is just to
(26:52):
create places and forums where people can come together.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
And Senator Murphy is also committed to policies that promote
the free time needed to connect as a community.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
What if we had a minimum wage that actually allowed
people to work only forty hours away week. What if
you had time in the evenings to join a social club,
a cooking class.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
But new funding and regulations aren't the only weapons Senator
Murphy plans to deploy against declining social capital.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
I think government often acts best when it doesn't mandate,
but where it disseminates best practices.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Just as a US issues guidelines for nutrition and physical activity,
Senator Murphy thinks governments need to set better norms when
it comes to social connection.
Speaker 4 (27:38):
I don't necessarily need a set of recommendations from the
government as to how many friends I have or how
many clubs I should join, but maybe they should be
operative on school districts. For instance, how does a school
district create a schedule and a calendar that creates opportunities
for parents to connect with each other and for students
to connect with each other. Maybe that's really important for
(28:01):
a school district, just like learning reading, writing, and mathematics is.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Even if you trust the happiness science, some of you
listening may find these ideas a little too liberal. You
may even wonder if policies like these would ever make
it through a partisan congress. I asked Senator Murphy that
very question.
Speaker 4 (28:19):
The loneliness epidemic really doesn't discriminate based upon your politics,
and so there's just as many people who consider themselves
on the right versus those who consider them themselves on
the left who are feeling like they're disconnected from their
community and isolated. Republicans talk just as much about the
health of our small towns and our downtowns as Democrats do,
(28:41):
breathing life back into small businesses and local business communities.
That really has nothing to do with left or right.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
I have to admit I was at first a little
skeptical about whether a proposed bill like the National Strategy
for Social Connection Act could gain support across the aisle.
Producing this Happiness Lab season about the importance of social
connection has convinced me that we need to make some
pretty fundamental changes to how we interact with one another.
But I was also worried about whether my country was
ready to make those changes. My conversation with Senator Murphy, though,
(29:11):
has made me a lot more hopeful that a new
upswing might be in store.
Speaker 4 (29:15):
We have met these truly existential threats in the past,
whether it was the sort of robber barons and the
consolidation of power and commerce one hundred years ago, and
we have adjusted as a nation. That's the magic is
that we have this ability to diagnose the threats that
(29:35):
are posed to democracy and then rally the country to
a solution. I think speaks to the genius of this country.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
This show concludes our special season on increasing Social Connection.
But this episode has also provided me with a bit
of closure too. As I mentioned before, I've spent the
last two decades worried about social capital and what we
can do to improve it. I can't tell you how
inspired I was reading Robert Putnam's research back in the
late nineties. Witnessing just how badly we've taken care of
(30:04):
our social capital since then has been devastating. Before making
this series, I'd sometimes get worried that social capital had
passed the point of no return and that we'd never
be able to get back to the connections our country
enjoyed back in the day. But after talking to all
the experts you got to me over the season, I'm
much much more hopeful these days. When I start to
feel despair, I think back to Robert Putnam's work and
(30:25):
a little insight he shared when we spoke, a saying
told to him by a dear and wise friend.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
Optimism, he said, is a passive virtue. Hope, he said,
is an active virtue. Hope says, I can see how
it could go in that direction, and I'm going to
work to make it.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
Go in that direction. That's what he means by an
active virtue.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
So now I don't know whether I'm optimistic about America
or the world.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Now, but I am hopeful.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
I can see how we could get there, and I'm
doing then damist by preaching to move us in that direction.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley.
Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing,
and mastering by Evan Viola. Jess Shane and Alice Vines
offered additional production support. Special thanks to my agent, Ben
Davis and all of the Pushkin crew. The Happiness Lab
is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Doctor
Laurie Santos
Pushkin. It's a heinous act, and we're all victims. It's
a terrible menace to society, one that's eroded our trust
and made our futures less bright. Given the shadow at
casts on so many aspects of our daily lives, you'd
(00:35):
think there'd be a federal task force assigned to investigate
the threat, kicking indoors to stop the ongoing assault. Sadly
that's not happening, but one dogged detective has been on
the case for decades.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Who done it? Who killed social capital?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Political scientist Robert Putnam thinks social capital is the glue
that holds a happy society together, But the bonds of
trust and friendship he knew growing up in the clubs, leagues,
and unions of the nineteen fifties have died.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Was it suburbanization? Was it women are going to work?
Was it we're all too busy? I mean a lot
of hypotheses.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
There were other suspects on the scene too. Television had
begun keeping us at home rather than out in the world,
mixing with our neighbors.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
Just listening on a keybole.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
And these days our tablets and smartphones have lulled us
into believing we can get all the social interaction we
need online. Robert grew up when TV was a rarity
and iPads were the stuff of science fiction. Back then,
in Port Clinton, Ohio, residents hung out in person all
the time.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
He was a tiny town. The richest person in my
class lived three or four blocks. Were forest kidded by class.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
In the last episode, we explored Robert's research on the
importance of so called third places. We saw that spending
time with people in teams, clubs, and other venues outside
of our homes and workplaces not only makes us happier,
but can also boost the trust we have in our
fellow citizens. Building this kind of social capital even helps
society work better. It benefits everyone in a community. It
(02:07):
was exactly this positive cycle that Robert enjoyed as a kid.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
I grew up when America was the maximum of we
society that we've ever seen, and my whole life has
been gone downhill. We become more and more in I society,
and I really wish that weren't true. I wish I
could figure out a way to reverse that, or at
least pause it.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
These days, we assume the pursuit of happiness comes down
to the individual we tend to focus on things like
self care and me time. I want to stay home
and watch a movie alone at my convenience, or I'm
going to skip that meeting because I deserve some personal downtime.
Robert's work has shown that focusing on the we can
offer huge benefits for our well being. But as we'll
(02:51):
see in this episode, doing that more effectively may require
a huge change, not just to how we behave as individuals,
but also to how we run our cities and communities.
Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to
be had, But what if our minds are wrong, What
if our minds are lying to us, leading us away
(03:13):
from all really make us happy. The good news is
that understanding the science of the money can point us
all back in the right direction. You're listening to the
Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
If you graf many majors of not only in social capital,
but economic equality and political comedy, getting along and so on,
they all go down since the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Robert was born back in nineteen forty one, and he
feels very lucky to have grown up in what he
considers a golden age of social capital a period of
so much weed time. Every day Robert's dad ate breakfast
at the same local spot with the same fellow diners.
Robert spent his formative teen years on a Port Clinton
bowling team whose members came from many diverse communities and neighborhoods.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
I'm constantly at risk of seeing that town walls and
seeing our youth through golden paye. So I spent a
lot of time actually trying to be sure I have
the facts right.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
And the facts are pretty shocking. Many of our third places,
those spots other than home or work, where we can
mix and form friendships, are in terminal decline. By neglecting
our clubs and associations and neighborhood hangouts. Over the last
sixty years, it seems that we've really beaten social capital down,
almost to the point of extinction. But it turns out
this pessimistic view isn't the whole picture. Robert realized he
(04:39):
didn't really know what was happening to social capital before
his childhood in the nineteen fifties, so he decided to
look at the earlier records. What was social capital like
in World War Two, during the Great Depression, or even
before World War One, and.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
If you do that, you can see it's all one big,
inverted you curve.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
One side of that curve tells us what we already know,
that social capital now is low, But the opposite side
of the graph revealed something somewhat surprising. America had experienced
a similar slump in social capit in the late eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
America was in a pickle back in the eighteen eighties.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
We were very unequal.
Speaker 3 (05:16):
We were very divided politically, we were very polarized. We
were very disconnected from one another.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Robert wanted to quantify just how much America in the
eighteen hundreds was an I society rather than a WE society.
So he turned to an online database that had digitized
a bunch of written material from different time periods.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
It's got cookbooks and detective stories and children's books and
everything you would see if you went into a bookstore,
and therefore it's a good measure of what ordinary people
are reading and writing about.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Searching this archive can tell you when different ideas were fashionable,
when particular historical figures were in vogue. But Robert wanted
to measure something more subtle. He needed a specific search
term to test what ordinary people were reading and writing
about their sense of community.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
What if we.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Compared the ratio of the first person plural to the
first person singular.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
Robert decided to compare our use of the word I
to the use of the word we, and back in
the eighteen eighties, the first person singular went out by
a landslide.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
We were very much in an eye mood.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
We were very much focused on what was good for
us individually rather than what was good for all of
us together.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
That era, after the Civil War and reconstruction, became known
as the Gilded Age. It was a time of rapid
and often disconcerting technological change, a period of bitter arguments
about immigration, democracy, and social justice.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
In Vanning public philosophy at that time, it was something
called social Darwinism natural selection.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Better if if we don't help poor people.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Because I'll just speed up the process of development of
the human race.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
This ethos allowed a small group of elite men, the
so called robber barons, to amass fast wealth while workers
enjoyed little security from the fruits of their labor. And
the philosophy back then was that if workers didn't like that, well,
they should start their own business. Empire from the top
to the bottom of Gilded Age society. The eye was
celebrated over the WII.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Read in truth and claw bad, to help poor people good, to.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Be as selfish as possible. Yeah, I'm guessing that some
of this may sound depressingly familiar. I mean, arguments about
social justice and inequality. A one percent of people thriving
while much of the other ninety nine percent is still struggling.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
America in eighteen ninety looked a lot like America right now,
extremely polarized, extremely unequal, extremely self centered, and extremely socially isolated.
And then something happened around nineteen ten, and all those
graphs began to go in the right direction.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
The first sign of this change was in that written
archive Robert analyzed. After nineteen hundred, the ratio of eye
to we words began to shift. More and more writers
began talking about the collective good rather than the individual.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
They essentially said, what we've inherited from our parents is
a society that's really out of lack. Even if we're
ourselves doing fine, we have other loeases other people.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
This urged argues led people to start banding together in
clubs and associations. In teams and in unions. Americans got
more involved in charities and civic bodies, and in politics.
Citizens began pressuring their elected officials to use the Wii
rather than the eye to shape policies.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Things in America were getting better and better.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
We were economically growing, we were equal, we were taking
care of each other, we were attending pgaight meetings, we
were focused on the Wii. We were like this amazing country.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Robert calls this change the upswing. It's a phenomenon that
he thinks should give us a lot of hope about
the fate of society and social capital today. The upswing
reveals that our great great grandparents faced pretty much the
same problems we have today, and they were able to
make the cultural changes needed to successfully switch course and
rebuild social capital.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
You know, it does not have to be this way,
and for most young people today that is news.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
In the last episode, we talked about the importance of
individual dual action in improving social capital. We extolled the
virtues of becoming a joiner, of going to third places
and meeting your neighbors to build the bonds of community
and trust that make us all happier. But Robert's study
of the upswing shows that's only part of the solution.
We also need a cultural shift. Our entire society has
(09:28):
to focus on the WII rather than the eye, and
that means we need people at the top to start
taking social capitals seriously and to back it with policies
and money, which kind of sounds like a huge hurdle.
The Happiness lab will be right back. If you're looking
(09:52):
for a true hero of the WI society, you need
to look further back in time than the nineteen fifties
and way before the Gilded Age of the eighteen eighties.
In fact, you need to go all the way back
to the days of the American Revolution, because just as
America was being founded with a declaration to give citizens
the right to p sue happiness, a British philosopher was
thinking deeply about what the pursuit of happiness actually meant,
(10:14):
and Jeremy Bentham came down firmly on the moral case
for collective well being. The greatest happiness. He wrote, of
the greatest number, that is the measure of right and wrong.
Speaker 5 (10:24):
I thought that was absolutely mind blowing.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
As a young student, economist Lord Richard Laird loved Jeremy
Bentham's work.
Speaker 5 (10:32):
The way we would judge our society is by the
happiness of the people. The way we would want the
government to bathe is to maximize well being of the people.
What are we here to do to produce the most
happiness that we can in the world.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Now, you might not be used to hearing a veteran
economist like Lord Laird talking about concepts like happiness and
maximizing well being. When economists use words like maximizing, they're
usually focused on money and shareholder value and country wealth
as measured by GDP. It's not that economists are blind
to the need to make people happier. They just love
numbers and data. And until recently, psychologists like me couldn't
(11:07):
give them any of those numbers or day because we
hadn't yet come up with good ways to measure people's happiness.
Speaker 5 (11:12):
And what could you say, well, more or less, all
you could say is how much they could buy, And
so how much they could buy became the criteria many
people thought was equivalent to well being, and that has
sorted of been very unfortunate.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Unfortunate because it's just not true. As I say over
and over on this podcast. Lots of research shows that
how much money people have is not a proxy for
how happy they are. You can be a blissfully happy
billionaire or a downright miserable one. But as the saying goes,
if you're armed with a hammer, everything starts to look
like a nail. And until recently, economists were only armed
(11:48):
with GDP, so they began to assume that increasing our
wealth was the best path to happiness. The problem is
that policymakers and leaders tend to listen to economists, so
we wound up with government policies that confuse money and
well being.
Speaker 5 (12:02):
This is a terrible culture.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Take Lord Laird's home country of England. He's watched politicians
use econo arguments to remove funding from the places where
ordinary people meet and form social capital.
Speaker 5 (12:14):
Children's centers, which have been largely abolished by the present government,
were very successful in bringing together mothers with young children.
Youth centers very important and there's plenty of evidence that
when they get close down as they have been, that's
not good for crime. And then old people's centers or
mixtage censers, where people regularly get together in the natural
(12:35):
kind of way.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Governments usually want to reduce debt and promote economic growth.
So they conclude that, however nice it might be to
let parents and teens and elders meet up and become friends,
it's a luxury the country can't afford. But Lord Layard
is a pioneer of a different field known as happiness economics,
and that field see the benefits of these investments very
very differently. Lord Laird argues that concentrating solely on economic
(12:59):
growth fails Jeremy Bentham's test of right and wrong. It
doesn't bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number.
Speaker 5 (13:05):
The things which were being measured are the things external,
and you can see somebody's income, you can't see how
they're feeling. And we have to move to a culture
where we take the life as experienced and the in
their life more seriously.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Fortunately for Lloyd Laird and other proponents of happiness economics,
psychologists have now worked out how to establish if people
are happy. We simply ask them. Researchers now have lots
of different survey tools for measuring if people are satisfied
both in their lives and with their lives, and to
find out what factors influence their answers and of.
Speaker 5 (13:40):
Course, the results are incredibly important and so different from
what many politicians think matter to people.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
No one, it turns out, talks about things like GDP
people are much more likely to mention loneliness, a topic
that few economists or politicians have focused on, but that
we now know has a huge effect on our health.
It's estimated to be the equivalent of smoking fifteen cigarettes
a day. That damage could be reduced if government's invested
in the right problem.
Speaker 5 (14:07):
There's money that needs to be spent, but it's not
a huge amount of money.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Lord Laird argues for things like tax incentives to encourage
the growth of third places. He thinks governments should prioritize
building plazas and parks where people can connect.
Speaker 5 (14:20):
Power planning it's very very important in determining whither are
spaces where people naturally come together and talk to each
other and can walk around and say it some shots
and so on, or whether it's a kind of motorized
social desert. These are real decisions that town planners can make.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
You may well look around your town and see little
evidence that urban planners have given much thought of bringing
folks together. But just as Robert Putnam saw an upswing
in community spirit after the Gilded Age. Lord Laird's senses
a growing interest in happiness economics in many nations.
Speaker 5 (14:53):
And we're now in a really interesting situation in Britain
where wellbeing is coming up to the floor because the
party which will probably elect to the next election is
committed to making well being an equal goal with GDP
for its government.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
And note that Lord Laird isn't advocating spending public money frivolously.
All those usual hard headed financial savings goals are built
into happiness economics too.
Speaker 5 (15:18):
Our criterion for public policy is that we should be
spending money owned policies which create the most well being
per dollar spent. Now, my dollar spent it means not
in a dollar spent at the beginning of the process,
but minus a dollars saved as reults of spending the
initial dollar coat effectiveness. This is a sort of wellbeing
(15:41):
mantra when it comes to public policy.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
That's right. Public investment in improving well being can actually
save government's money. Take loneliness again. A dollar spent giving
a lonely person access to a third place could save
the money that would need to be spent if that
person gets sick as a result of their social isolation.
And as we heard in our last episode, investing in
clubs and third places like sports teams, community pools, choirs
(16:05):
and residents associations can reduce crimes and help towns run
more efficiently.
Speaker 5 (16:10):
We need to make this case full investing in things
which are really critical for people's well being and will
actually many of them save the state a lot of money.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Lord Laird has been around even longer than Robert Putnam.
He was born in the nineteen thirties. I assumed he'd
be even more depressed by the current state of social
capital and the lack of trust. But I was really
heartened to hear him talk so optimistically about where policy
is going. And then I caught myself. Lord Laird's views
are well respected in Europe and particularly the Scandinavian countries
(16:43):
that so often top the charts of the happiest places
on Earth. But what about the United States? Despite our
incredibly high GDP, we barely hit the middle of some
of those well being metrics. Are the leaders of my
country ever going to wake up to happiness economics? Hey,
Senator Murphy, thanks so much for taking the time.
Speaker 4 (17:00):
Yeah, absolutely really glad to do it. Thanks for having
me be part of this.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
When I first saw the new national strategy, I was
so excited. And when I realized it was my senator,
and I was like, yes, it's so exciting. The Happiness
Lab will be right back. When Harvard political scientist Robert
(17:25):
Putnam first published his findings about the decline of social capital,
it sparked a huge national debate.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Please be seated every while, let's go.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Even President Clinton wanted in.
Speaker 5 (17:35):
I'd like to call on Professor Robert Putnam.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Now, within one week, I was invited to Camp David
David for goodness sex. This is not the normal experience
of any academic bowling alone.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Worth it for the title alone.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
I was only a grad student back then, but I
also caught the Putnam bug. I started talking endlessly with
friends about Robert's ideas. We even dreamt up our own
outrageous plan to rebuild social capital. We'd move to some
tiny coastal town and build a local cinema, but that
never came to fruition.
Speaker 6 (18:07):
Today, our fellowship, our way of life, our very freedom
came under attack, and a series of deliberate and deadly
terrorist acts.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
The events of nine to eleven diverted the conversations that
I and so many people were having about social capital.
The play of third places suddenly didn't seem so important.
Speaker 6 (18:27):
The victims were in airplanes or in their offices, secretaries,
businessmen and women, military and federal workers, moms and dads,
friends and neighbors.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Only later would scholars argue that it was the exact
right time to start boosting trust and social capital. Since
nine to eleven, the decline in social capital has become
even steeper. Surveys reveal that trust in government is at
a sixty year low. Since twenty eighteen, our faith in journalists,
police officers, and even school principles has dropped. And young adults,
(19:00):
those with even less experience with the sorts of third
places that Robert enjoyed as a kid, are now the
least willing to trust their fellow citizens. That has spurred
some people to take action.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
There's no doubt that my rather sudden interest in this
topic of social connection is not coincidental to being a
parent of teenagers.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
I want you to meet someone who's tackling our decline
in social capital head on.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
So I'm Chris Murphy, and I am a United States
Senator from Connecticut.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Senator Murphy has introduced the National Strategy for Social Connection Act,
a bill that would create an office within the White
House charged with reducing loneliness and boosting social capital. The
senator hopes it will give future generations the opportunity to
build the sorts of third places that he took for
granted back in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 4 (19:45):
I had a real sense of place growing up. I
grew up in a pretty quintessentially suburban community right outside
of Hartford. It had specific restaurants that you'd go to
see friends and neighbors. We had rituals that would involve
doing the same set of things and going to the
same set of places on Saturday mornings and Sunday mornings.
(20:08):
There was a a routine to life in Weathersfield that
was very much angered in that place, and it was
a routine that you couldn't easily replicate somewhere else because
of the things we were doing in Weathersfield were unique
to Weathersfield.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Some of the ritual Senator Murphy remembers may sound kind
of corny to modern ears, like heading to the store
with his grandparents and being treated by the owner to
a cheese slice while the adults chit chatted.
Speaker 4 (20:32):
It was part of my weekend routine, going to the
local grocery store, getting a free slice of American cheese
and feeling like really connected to that guy and to
that store and to that business community who you know,
were so wonderfully attentive to my needs that they would
give me a slice of cheese.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
But local stores like this are getting harder to find.
Senator Murphy worries that lawmakers have failed to see the
social consequences of the shopping and delivery apps that we
all find so convenient.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
When online commerce and social media came along, government decided
to convince itself that the market, the private sector, could
deliver the good and withhold the bad. And that's not
what happened. Unregulated online commerce ended up wiping out our
local economies, our downtowns, and so that experience I had
(21:23):
growing up of having a relationship with your local grocer
or your local deli manager that was really important to
your sense of place and identity, that doesn't exist any longer.
Those local grocery stores are gone, but.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
Is missing out on free cheese slices enough of a
reason to create a whole new office in the heart
of the United States government and to demand the sorts
of policies that Robert Putnam, Lord Laird and even Jeremy
Bentham might approve of.
Speaker 4 (21:49):
I think it's always dangerous to get involved in blind nostalgia,
and there are things about growing up in the seventies
that are not fantastic and not awesome. But I do
feel like I am struggling as a parent to deliver
valuable connection to my kids, who are now teenager and
a preteen in the way that I had it, and
(22:09):
I think that's part of what has driven me to
really care about this issue of connection. But the second
reason is this, I also just am responsible for the
people I represent, and I just don't feel like they're
as healthy or as fulfilled as they need to be.
And I feel this constant lingering anxiety amongst the people
(22:30):
that I represent in a way that I don't remember
even when I started out in politics twenty years ago.
And so I really have been engaged in the last
couple of years in the search to try to figure
out why people are as unhappy as they are, Why
are they more anxious, Why has our conversation become more dysfunctional,
and I'm convinced that part of that is that people
(22:50):
aren't feeling is connected to each other. And there's got
to be a political solution for that because there's a
political consequence.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
And in keeping with the insights of happiness economics, Senator
Murphy argues that a dollar spent on well being today
is likely to see more dollars saved down the line.
Speaker 4 (23:05):
The biggest driver of the federal deficit is healthcare costs,
and so if you are a good steward of the
taxpayer dollar, then you have to care about why we're
spending so much more money in this country than anywhere
else on healthcare. And what the Certain General tells us
unequivocally is that there is a health care cost to
loneliness and isolation. That people who are lonely are logically
(23:28):
going to be more likely to suffer from something like
depression or dementia, but also from heart disease, and so
there's just a dollar sign costs isolation.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
Senator Murphy also thinks these social capital improvements will reduce crime.
He sees a direct link between social isolation and road
rage and even an increasing phenomenon of the modern age air.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
Rage TSA administrator was in my office the other day.
We were talking about the biggest problems he faces, and
at the top of his list was violence on planes
and at TSA checkpoints. He describes a hair trigger violence
amongst passengers who travel through our airports and travel on
(24:09):
airlines that he's never seen in his entire career. And
we feel that in our daily lives, that people just
seem quicker to violent outbursts or quicker to verbal assaults
on peers than they were before. And I think that
is one of the consequences of a country that is
(24:29):
just sort of searching for connection and meaning. And when
you're searching in that way, maybe your first emotion is sadness.
But often for a lot of people, anger is right there,
not far behind. And you see that play out in
a whole bunch of forums in our society today.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
But isolation doesn't just cause the kind of anger that
erupts when you're rushing to make your flight. Senator Murphy
also suspects that many of today's hate crimes, mass shootings,
and terrorist attacks ultimately stem from a lack of social capital.
Speaker 4 (24:59):
But I think there's no doubt that people's isolation and
people's loneliness ultimately moves them into unhealthy places politically, and
part of the reason that we have more extremism in
our political organization and communication, I think, is because a
lot of lonely, isolated people end up finding connection or
(25:22):
finding meaning through politics, and in particular through the extremes
of both the right and the left.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
These are weighty and depressing problems, but the solution Senator
Murphy has proposed sound kind of fun. Rather than pushing
for more cops or harsher punishments, he thinks that at
least some of the answers could come from things like
swimming together.
Speaker 4 (25:44):
There was this small, insignificant kerfuffle on social media over
the summer about public pools and the fact that we're
losing public pools and the ones we have we had
a hard time staffing this summer in part because of
funding shortages. But that caused some people on the neoliberal
right to say, wait a second, you know, why should
(26:06):
government be involved in our aquatic life to begin with?
But actually that's over the history of time been a
real great tradition of local government is to help create,
not have the sole responsibility to create, but to help create.
Some of those places little leagues, public pools, public parks,
(26:29):
dog parks where we can easily find other people who
share common interests. And as funding has run short for
those projects. As government frankly has had to push more
and more money into schools and healthcare, it's had less
money left over to do this stuff that it actually
did really well a generation ago, which is just to
(26:52):
create places and forums where people can come together.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
And Senator Murphy is also committed to policies that promote
the free time needed to connect as a community.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
What if we had a minimum wage that actually allowed
people to work only forty hours away week. What if
you had time in the evenings to join a social club,
a cooking class.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
But new funding and regulations aren't the only weapons Senator
Murphy plans to deploy against declining social capital.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
I think government often acts best when it doesn't mandate,
but where it disseminates best practices.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Just as a US issues guidelines for nutrition and physical activity,
Senator Murphy thinks governments need to set better norms when
it comes to social connection.
Speaker 4 (27:38):
I don't necessarily need a set of recommendations from the
government as to how many friends I have or how
many clubs I should join, but maybe they should be
operative on school districts. For instance, how does a school
district create a schedule and a calendar that creates opportunities
for parents to connect with each other and for students
to connect with each other. Maybe that's really important for
(28:01):
a school district, just like learning reading, writing, and mathematics is.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Even if you trust the happiness science, some of you
listening may find these ideas a little too liberal. You
may even wonder if policies like these would ever make
it through a partisan congress. I asked Senator Murphy that
very question.
Speaker 4 (28:19):
The loneliness epidemic really doesn't discriminate based upon your politics,
and so there's just as many people who consider themselves
on the right versus those who consider them themselves on
the left who are feeling like they're disconnected from their
community and isolated. Republicans talk just as much about the
health of our small towns and our downtowns as Democrats do,
(28:41):
breathing life back into small businesses and local business communities.
That really has nothing to do with left or right.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
I have to admit I was at first a little
skeptical about whether a proposed bill like the National Strategy
for Social Connection Act could gain support across the aisle.
Producing this Happiness Lab season about the importance of social
connection has convinced me that we need to make some
pretty fundamental changes to how we interact with one another.
But I was also worried about whether my country was
ready to make those changes. My conversation with Senator Murphy, though,
(29:11):
has made me a lot more hopeful that a new
upswing might be in store.
Speaker 4 (29:15):
We have met these truly existential threats in the past,
whether it was the sort of robber barons and the
consolidation of power and commerce one hundred years ago, and
we have adjusted as a nation. That's the magic is
that we have this ability to diagnose the threats that
(29:35):
are posed to democracy and then rally the country to
a solution. I think speaks to the genius of this country.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
This show concludes our special season on increasing Social Connection.
But this episode has also provided me with a bit
of closure too. As I mentioned before, I've spent the
last two decades worried about social capital and what we
can do to improve it. I can't tell you how
inspired I was reading Robert Putnam's research back in the
late nineties. Witnessing just how badly we've taken care of
(30:04):
our social capital since then has been devastating. Before making
this series, I'd sometimes get worried that social capital had
passed the point of no return and that we'd never
be able to get back to the connections our country
enjoyed back in the day. But after talking to all
the experts you got to me over the season, I'm
much much more hopeful these days. When I start to
feel despair, I think back to Robert Putnam's work and
(30:25):
a little insight he shared when we spoke, a saying
told to him by a dear and wise friend.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
Optimism, he said, is a passive virtue. Hope, he said,
is an active virtue. Hope says, I can see how
it could go in that direction, and I'm going to
work to make it.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
Go in that direction. That's what he means by an
active virtue.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
So now I don't know whether I'm optimistic about America
or the world.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Now, but I am hopeful.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
I can see how we could get there, and I'm
doing then damist by preaching to move us in that direction.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley.
Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing,
and mastering by Evan Viola. Jess Shane and Alice Vines
offered additional production support. Special thanks to my agent, Ben
Davis and all of the Pushkin crew. The Happiness Lab
is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Doctor
Laurie Santos
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