 Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to everyone who's joined this continuing the conversation with the team at World Happiness, World Happiness Report Team and also the Happy Your Way Foundation. This is our inaugural continuing the conversation on happiness and happiness science and we welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us. Today we'll be talking about the, the one on ones of happiness and getting to know more about the world happiness and why and where the world happiness has come from. And it's 10 year history. And we will have the editors of the WHR asking, or you can ask a question to the editors of the WHR so please feel free to put your questions in the chat or tweet them to SCSN, and we'll be happy to see you all. And, you know, try to get to your questions. And we're first going to start with a founding editor, John Helliwell, and I will now turn the camera or the mic to John. Thank you everyone. Thank you Sharon and thanks to those of you who are in our close in discussion and the bigger group for your continuing interest in the World Happiness Report. The whole idea of the report when it first came out was to bring to the broader public views about how well people's lives are going all around the world with the idea of making that a focus of everyone's attention. I'll start, Sharon, with the first slide, which is showing the top and bottom 10 countries in the world in this year's evaluation so this gives me a chance to tell you what we measure and how we report it. And in Aristotle's advice, we value the quality of people's lives by asking them themselves to rate the quality of their life. And in this case, it's a zero to 10 scale with the best life as being a 10 and the worst possible life for you being a zero. Here's how people around the world rate their lives we've shown here only the 10 and bought top and bottom 10. And I want to make clear that what we're reporting here and what the rankings are based on is entirely what the average values over the three preceding years of what respondents in that country have said. And so it is none of our decision it is simply a democratic process of finding out how good people think their lives are. That's what we presented in the very first report in 2012, and we immediately got questions and rightly so. What is it that makes for happy lives so we then turned to give an explanation. The number of people have now been so impressed by the explanation that in fact the explanation becomes the story in a sense that people report as though our rankings were based on these factors. Let me show you what we did next slide, which was skipped by because you can't read it. This is just a replication of table 2.1 in every chapter to will skip to the next slide and see what it shows us. We then use those data from the slide we have six variables that explain about three quarters of the differences across countries, and the reason that we can then reply to people. How much of our score is coming from different parts of our life, and we can explain that we have income per capita we have healthy life expectancy we have social connections you have somebody rely on it. What are the factors of trouble, do you live in a generous society, do you live in a trustworthy society, and do you personally have a sense of freedom to make your key life decisions. And those factors vary a lot you can see from the colored bars that all of those factors are much higher in the top 10 countries than in the bottom 10 countries that purple bar across the right is a sum of two things. One is happiness which I think is this year 1.83, which is what your happiness would be if you had the world's lowest values of every one of those six variables so every other country is higher than the 1.83 but you'll see for the very bottom. Some of them are not much higher than that 1.83. I find that bar is 1.83 but it's not always 1.83 as you can see it's big numbers and small numbers. And then it's, we take away from that the extent to which our modeling does not actually explain the happiness in each country you see the bottom countries. Well, a lot of them there's a lot of unhappiness that's not explained by the model. And if you look at the names of the countries you'll see there are plenty of reasons for that. Turn to the next slide please, Shannon. We then in this year's report, we were looking back over the preceding 10 years to show how far the world how much the world has changed so we look at the preceding the first world's happiness report, and then to the latest, and we have. These are the top 10 countries in terms of increases in happiness over that period, and you'll see there's quite a concentration of them in the Balkans, and also in other parts of Eastern Europe there's one of the remarkable trends over this period has been a convergence between Eastern and Western Europe, in terms of the average life evaluations there's still a gap but it's nothing like what it was 10 years ago. The next slide shows the 10 biggest losers over that period. And these are in the actual scores this isn't our attempt to explain why those countries have done better or worse that's a separate project. And you can see they're all countries where a lot typically countries where a lot of things have gone wrong. All of this of course gives us grounds for thinking these measures are actually being realistic and what they tell you about the quality of life is turned to the next one please, Shannon. People ask us every year we focus on something and this year we were focusing on not just the rankings but the whole 10 year history and life under COVID. And then other things come up in the process and what came up in the process here we found a continuation of the result we found last year that life evaluations have been strikingly robust. And we did find, if you look at the right hand set of bars there, that's negative affect so that's the sum of worry and anger and sadness, and they were up significantly as we reported last year that's the blue bar for 2020. But you can see in 2021 they've dropped much closer to the baseline. Now then look at those left hand bars we were not expecting this last year we did find remember the blue bars are for 2020 and the red bars are for 2021 back in 2020. There was a significant increase in the helping of strangers on average around the world. But look what happened in 2021 it's twice as big. And in all the other components of we call benevolent acts volunteering donations and helping of strangers, the average we call pro social. And it's increased significantly driven by helping strangers in 2020, and it's way up in 2021 in the report itself we have regional graph showing that this increase has been throughout the world. Every region of the world has had this increase in 2021. I know that benevolent acts are very important. Next slide please. This is my last slide before we open it up for your broader discussions. It's a slide that is based on research that we reported in the previous year's report, but remains important here. I skipped over our trust modeling and our deaths modeling where we showed continuing evidence that the countries with high trust were also the ones that did better in their handling of COVID. Well, benevolent acts are what have jumped in 2021 we have some measures based on wallets. Funny question, but it's been asked and we think it's terribly important, because you can actually run experiments you can drop wallets in cities all over the world. And you can also run surveys of asking people how likely wallet return is. Well we have evidence from both there is a big study run of dropping wallets in 50 countries. And from the Gallup world poll we have expected wallet return in more or less all the countries of the world. Well this picture here shows you the Cantrell ladder scores remember those are the scores on which countries happiness evaluations are based. And then the purple bar is wallets actually returned it found by strangers per 10 lost so it's as high as seven and a half in the Nordic countries and it's about five and a half in Western Europe and it's about three and a half to four in all the rest of the countries of the world. And you can see how closely related though you are we found that people who think a wallet is likely to be returned found by a stranger have higher life evaluations by almost a full point on the ladder score. However, whoever that wallet may be found by, but look also compare the orange the purple one which is actual wallet returns and the green one is expected wallet returns so people are asked how likely they think their wallet is to be returned to found by a stranger. People think there's quite likely to be most countries found returned to found by a neighbor or a police officer, but not so much a stranger. You can see the expected wallet return explains the actual return very well, but it's much too low. And so that is something that people didn't expect this upsurge of benevolence it isn't reported with this will be our evidence is the first evidence that it's really been happening on a world on a global basis. But people don't see the benevolence that is around them and of course that makes them unhappier and it makes them less likely to be benevolent. So this is something we'll be exploring more in the future is how people perceive of the kindness around them as well as how they actually contribute to it. I'll pass it back now for questions please. Thank you very much john. This is the exciting part of the webinar where we can talk to everyone and have questions. And so I will will be joined also by Laura Ackman associate professor, and she will be answering questions and then we're also joined by Nadia and Brighton and Anita from SDSN youth to help and to help ask questions. And on the back end we also have Max Norton, who can also answer any technical questions that you have about the WHR. So please do join us in this conversation and I'll hand it over to Nadia. I'll start first with the first few questions that you may have so please go ahead. Hi, thank you and thank you for inviting me to this conversation I think that it is indeed brilliant study that has been conducted and my first question is very interactive because the concept of happiness is becoming more and more interesting so is it actually a trend and a study that tries to encompasses the well-being of the people and connected with also the context in social and economic situations so since it's the 10th anniversary. How did you see the development in the last 10 years in writing this report. That's very interesting. We sort of got into the report in the first instance as you know, in order to support the 2012 high level meeting at the UN and it was only because there was somewhat a surprising amount of interest that we were led to continue producing it each year. And we have continued to produce it each year to an increasingly broad and deep interest. So we were hoping that the world that when we think about beyond GDP you say well if you're not going to just concentrate on GDP, you have to have something else that can be a strong information base that tells people about life and gives them possibly something to think about making it. And we have been quite struck at how broad this interest has been. First of all people just wanted to know how does my country rank. And that was the primary thing and we said well of course that's just the way we get you in the store. Because what's really important is that people want to learn what does make for a happy life so that they don't care where they are now they're trying to improve lives for themselves and others in their country and others. Second thing it's done over this 10 years to a remarkable extent is that the Nordic countries have now been the go to places for people who are trying to study about what are the secrets of a better life. Why simply because they did rank at the top. And so, without the world happiness report, there never would have been that upsurge of people going off and saying how do they run their schools how do they run their hospitals. How do they organize their city administration, what do businesses look like in those countries all these things all these aspects with the late neighborhoods look like. And so now we know when we can come back and say well actually that is those are all places where the highest proportion of wallets are returned so this is these are societies where people care about each other. Well you can do that right at home in your own city in your own town these things can be built. There are consequences but I'm just telling just giving you some idea of this growing bread in and the questions we get from reporters and others are deeper and deeper every year people want to know, how does this affect life in my community, how does this, what can people like me do, how can I change life in my residence, or in my town to implement some of these findings. Thank you Nadia. Anita, do you have a question for john and Laura, and maybe max or anyone else on the team. And sure. Yes, I do have a question and thank you for inviting me today because I think this is something that's extremely central to the students that I walk with on a daily basis because we are a global. Network of young people who want to ensure that we have both unequal and happier world. And my question would be how can we encourage like people to work in happiness sense if they doubt the usefulness of well being sense especially due to recent world events and the increasing the unequal world that's given. Well, it's been a long standing feature of happiness research that happy people don't go to war. That in fact, peace and happiness are co determined, and that the societies in which people care for each other, you can look at the Nordic countries. It's true everywhere. They are among the leaders in accepting refugees and providing on unmatched aid to other countries not interested in power. So it isn't the power over others that gives you happiness or an obviously doesn't produce it for others. So, I think it's in times like these in times of stress and trouble that's where the quality of the social fabric and the well being it produces are of primary importance. It's when the earthquake strikes it's when disaster of various kinds whether human cost or or naturally caused to rise, and that's when you see the real quality of the society. And so it's then becomes even more important to study what creates that high quality society and then help people to rebuild it where it's been shattered or to or to improve it where it already exists. And it's also a feature of these results that people are simply happier living in more inclusive and more equal societies. So to reduce inequality and increase the breadth of the what's called the social identity the people we think of as us to include people in future generations and other countries and all kinds of other differences actually makes people happier. Obviously it helps the happiness of people were under the bigger umbrella, but it also happy increases the happiness of the people who produce it so I think the need for this kind of research is even greater in times of high stress and distress. I don't have too much to add I think that was a thorough answer but I agree I think. I think one of the main contributions of this report is is a shift away from the negative and toward the positive and how it kind of encourages us to think about not just what are the predictors of ill being but what are the predictors of well being as well and seeing how consistently and importantly the social fabric and things beyond just the financial contributions to one's well being matter for for most people's everyday happiness is really an important contribution. And so I think during times of stress, we need to focus on what's wrong but I think when we are able to kind of move beyond that I think the conversation. I think it leads us to kind of imagine and be optimistic and plan for how we can build better lives beyond the current stressors so I think obviously the importance of handling momentary. The stress that the world is under I think as a big concern and needs immediate attention but beyond that I think the report kind of offers us an optimistic look of thinking about how we can build better lives too. Brighton do you have a question for Laura or john or Sean or max. I could also ask questions that are coming in through Twitter as well, but Brighton please go ahead first and then I'll ask a question from Twitter. Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks, thanks john and thanks Lara as well for providing very in depth explanations and detailed behind happiness science. I'm also very keen to understand from your experience, whether a country's happiness depends primarily on individual lifestyles and habits, or they are also other, you know, broader structure of forces, perhaps hinging on public policy or the way government is run that contributes to human happiness and loving. Life is in our social connections that's where happiness exists well you can see how the answer to your question and then becomes not one, not the other, but both, because it's that these individual lives are played out within a broader social context of institutions, and of relations with others and indeed built infrastructure all kinds of things that end up affecting how easy and natural it is for people to connect positively with each other. It's the school system, the healthcare system, the prison system, everything, how they're run depends as a real influence on the kind of daily lives people lead. So you want them to be able to live in an environment where, as they walk down the street, somebody they don't know is simply a friend they haven't met yet, rather than a threat to their personal livelihood. And the answer is it's an interplay. A lot of the work in psychology and the first instance was based on people's individual life circumstances, and their emotional responses to those. When we go to the kind of data we collect and how we interpret it, we are looking at what's happening at the community level and the national level, where these, where you can't ignore these interplays and and where and where you can in fact also study them. So the answer is both critically important and indeed it's probably true going through the 10 years and that's why your question is such a good one. Through the 10 years there's been more and more emphasis in how we think, and how other people react to what are the implications of these findings for how we ought to be structuring and changing the structure of our public institutions and our private institutions and our businesses. Thank you. Thank you, John. I have a general question. I believe that's coming in from Twitter's is basically you know what are what are practical ways we can use the information in the world happiness report as it relates to us personally like what actions can we do. And a lot of it is also as we know social connections, you know, what kind of things we can do on the local level in our communities and what part do, or what role can we play in terms of encouraging governments or policymakers. They like what was the one message for each of those three questions that you would give what would you give for, you know, as somebody or personally or people who are just want to improve happiness or think about happiness in their own lives. What can we do for each other on a community level, and what kind of action can we take when it comes to telling our government like, you know, what can we do. If Laura can start of and john can add to that. Sure, I think this actually flows really nicely from the last question as well. Because there certainly are big structural changes that can help bring more social connection bring more generosity bring more trust to people's everyday lives. I think those structural changes are important but sometimes those can be slow perhaps frustratingly. So, and so thinking about ways in which, you know, we can personally and personally implement these changes and what a community can do offers a bit more of a sustainable solution. And so, as John alluded to earlier some of perhaps the strongest predictors of well being both in the report and in a large body of positive psychology research stem from really the social connections that people make and have to work together and promote in their, their lives and so on a very on a very explicit level what people can do is kind of make time and opportunity to kind of foster and build those social connections. The last two years on the surface have been really challenging for that but people have found very creative ways to remain connected, even while apart. At a very basic level kind of prioritizing relationships and the time we spend with other people, whether it be through, you know, community softball games or whether it be through zoom birthday parties, or some, you know, safe form of social connection. I think that's one of the opportunities, but also perhaps one of my personal favorites is through pro sociality which is john mentioned in this year's report, showed not only that these levels have increased but it's also one of the top predictors or one of the predictors of life evaluations over the past couple years. And so finding ways to kind of contribute to one's community or one's local environment or even the people the friends and family that are close in your life is a really meaningful way in which individuals can take action to promote their own happiness. And it might take a little creativity to think about how these opportunities can be built and scaled in communities. But I don't think we need to look all that far I've been seeing amazing community programs in my neighborhood but hearing about them afar. And just block parties over the last little while people have been trying to reconnect with their communities in ways that they haven't been able to see just people making new friends at newly opened dog parks and things of that sort. And even just care packages that I've noticed over the first few months of the pandemic. I joined a local website I think it's called next door where people would. It's just for local news announcements but I've noticed people saying you know my eight year old has has aged out of their Lego would anybody like a large Ziploc bag of Lego and people would just start dropping them off on the porch of neighbors, finding ways to kind of build connections and engage in small acts of generosity, which probably also builds trust and connection and communities on the stop there sorry John I didn't mean to leave you hanging. No problem the question is what can governments do about this. It turns out a lot of these things to create more social connections require some administrative support. You know, Laura and I have been working on a research project that tries to improve the lives of the young and the old both by having a school class taught in an elder care facility and it quite clearly improves the lives of all the people involved in Zoom invasions of these facilities that showed us that in states. So the next question we ask is why doesn't it happen everywhere and that then turns the light back on the, the people who run the services, and it turns out and you can see this all over the world that people who run public services are used to getting in trouble because somebody got hurt, or some bad act happened in that. And so what happens is they sort of close the whole thing down and make innovation very difficult so that elder people are locked up in safe spaces, but say they're safe and lonely and unproductive spaces, and the school kids are kept quite separate from other people. And everyone wins when you can get them teaching each other they're both the others potential best friends and teachers. So you could imagine the kinds of rules that have to be changed and doors that have to be open in an administrative way so in an increasingly institutionally risk averse world people are trying to keep people safe, and then to stop bad things the point is they're not being sufficiently open to letting good things happen. So to have innovation for happiness you have to be able to break rules or to make rules that in fact empower people one more point is that power structures are very important for happiness and for innovation. We find whether it's in schools or in enterprises or in governmental organizations the flatter more open structures are more innovative, and are happier places for the people who work there, and for the people with whom they work in the broader public. Those are big principles, but they have very day to day applications that you can imagine how they would work out. Alright, now there's another question from Nadia from SDSN youth. Please go ahead Nadia. Hi. And, well, actually I have a question connected to what both of you just said and it's about happiness is very difficult to measure. So it's not like a very specific data so how hard was it to find measurable happiness because it very much depends also on the local habits that you have so different culture and different region may have different values so how has this impact your study and the word happiness report and the second one is very linked so we see that happiness, the happiness of our neighbor, which is either an individual or a country influences the happiness of the other and that we have regions of countries that influence each other so how actually is important. The influence the aura that we can project either as individual or as countries to also enable others to get better to develop as well. Thank you. Two good and tough questions let me give you a first a word or two on the first one. We were impressed to find out how well Aristotle's predictions worked so that to measure happiness in the simplest way which we do which is just to have a life evaluation. In fact, encompassed a lot of the other things that are sometimes used and considered as separate definitions of happiness a sense of life purpose, a sense of flow, a sense of joy. They all come into play as determinants of this central umbrella measure. So we've continued to find that the short term measures respond to short term influences, life evaluations respond to the broader context, but as Aristotle said, your joy flows improve your life evaluation and makes you more open to good things happening and so on. So that's gradual increase in the relevance and power of the central life evaluation has been something we've gained more confidence in over the years. That world poll has been the best benchmark or best lab we've ever had for studying your question about cultural differences because they spend a lot of time cross translating questions to make sure and there are indeed some we've identified certain identifiable linguistic tricks in some language where even the best term evokes a slightly different response in one country than another. But it turns out that those by and large are of second order importance. In other words, when we take this basic equation that we use to explain international differences and differences among people, we applied separately to countries all over the world, the results are strikingly similar. This year we had a chapter in the report sponsored by a Japanese Foundation where they were saying a lot of all of positive psychology has been to Western centric it is not picked up on issues that are given much more important in traditionally cultures. And so they asked a suite of questions relating to balance in life and being at peace with life and a focus on self versus others. And we were some people were surprised we were not as surprised as some people that these turned out to be important all over the world. And they were more in evidence in fact in in the microguard them is sort of typically Western countries in the north they're highest, all three of those are highest in the Nordic regions. So although they may have rightly been given more importance in the Eastern cultures, they are trans cultural everybody has the same human needs and desires. And so when we actually show them to be important we show them to be important everywhere. One cultural difference that does show up in the data. And it continues to show up and we've had chapters trying to explain it over the years and I think successfully explaining it was there's a boost, especially in positive affect you know the sort of laughter enjoy immediate things but also in life evaluations in the Latin countries above what you'd expect given their values of those other six variables they're not at the top of the crop in the overall measure, but they're above what you predict given the corruption and other measures that they have levels of income and social connection and so on. And the answer is they have a broader and deeper set of familial and community social connections that are privileged there. So we have surveys that have asked how important is it to link generations and people that attach more importance to it not the American do it so that everywhere in COVID and even pre COVID people were in multi generational households, but it was often regarded as what they had to do because they couldn't afford something else. But in Latin America is what they do because they want to do it and and and whether it's partly through social custom, but it's partly just because they find it works that in fact it does make them happier and they do have a higher level of social connection that you get and there's still overs that to others so and you might say in some sense the wallet returning habits in the Nordic countries. We could learn from both in a sense right if you see something that's going on in another culture, more so than in yours, it can be copied you don't have to say it's something that has to be unique to them, it isn't. So we find the Latin American migrants to Canada, end up as happy as other Canadians plus a little Latin American boost because they have brought in their capacity to see people who are strangers in the street and treat them as friends they haven't met yet. And briefly to that, I'm not I think it's a really interesting question because I remember when I started studying happiness, I remember thinking it was a magical concept that this is something that would be easily assessed and interpreted and a focus of scientific information. But what I think is really fascinating about this research is that, although some people come in with a bit of skepticism that people can self report their own happiness I think one of the beauties is that we've learned over the science of happiness is that people can give some insightful and personally relevant and importantly subjective ratings of how they themselves are feeling. I could cite the question off the top of his head I don't know if I can perfectly but the cantral latter is a really fantastic measure that's the central item used to evaluate life evaluations for the world rankings as our primary outcome measure because it doesn't suppose values on what people should be using to rate their life overall it asked them simply on this scale from zero to 10, how they rate their satisfaction with their life from its worst possible to its best possible and so it's not supposing that you should be having this much money this much time this much etc. It's asking people to evaluate their life against their own personal standard. And in a way that's a very transferable question to everybody around the world. And so when it's asked consistently of hundreds of thousands of people around the globe we can get these amazing perceptions of how people rate them their lives, which then and and shun and max and high fang are able to kind of consider and distill to these national averages over three years and see how countries stack so. Yeah, I think it seems like this very foreign concept that we're able to, to capture this life evaluation that people can subjectively report their own happiness but in a way it's beautiful and simple and that people are asked, you know, a number of people are able to offer a single meaningful response on kind of this primary outcome that is that is relevant and personal to them. Thank you both. Thank you, John and now Anita has a question. Yes, I do. My question is in the last 10 years of the world happiness report other countries that have backed the trend, or have gone against the mold of the high income and life satisfaction go together. Well, you're asking whether specific countries. I mean, what our research has shown is there it was always a mistake to think of well being an income as being the measures of something like the same thing. They aren't. And there are clearly countries which are richer and and and less happy and and vice versa. It's probably true. If we go, Shannon, if you can go to the second slide, the one with the green bars. Give me one second I'll pull it up. Okay. Or maybe even the fourth one with the gain with the gainers and losers you'll see that for the countries that have done very badly over the last 10 years. They're often countries who've lost lots of things. Alright, go, go further on then, Shannon. Okay, so these are all countries where income may have risen, but other things have risen much more though the big gainers. So they're recovering often a more stable society within which connections are better than they were before and look at the largest decreases share in the next slide. These would be examples where everything has gone wrong. Well, you could see. Venezuela dropping as much as it did. And Lebanon dropping as much they had a whole range of reasons and Afghanistan as well, of which income is a part of the story but it's nothing like the whole story. If things go really badly it often affects your capacity to produce income as well. But it's really the other things that are happening that are more important. That's a very good answer. I appreciate that. I think what you're asking more is a. Anyway, there's lots of ways of digging into that question, looking at urban people versus rural people you say the urban people are richer and the rural people are happier. And the reason typically is that they have a sense of community connection and so anything that raises the sense of community connection in a country or a part of a country. And you're looking maybe for specific examples and we can dig some out for you, because these changes do happen. Anyone else would like to add well go to the next question, but that was a very good question indeed. Now we have Brighton asking question but before you and before you ask right and I just want to remind everyone to. I know everyone's ever a lot of people are asking questions in the chat. If you could try to post your questions in the Q amp a box that would be very helpful. Thank you for selecting all the questions and anything that may not be answered this time around. We'll try to post on our website so please keep the questions coming and thank you for that. Now back to you Brighton. Thanks Sharon. I'm just looking at the slides the previous slide displayed and my country is lambia ranks 138 on the ranking so that's pretty interesting. And I would like to find out based on this backdrop. This year's research, which as I lighted Benny violence as one of the key outcomes. As there been any relationship or links between people's trust in governments and the institution and happiness and their own happiness and well being has there been any link from the research that has been done and in connection with this year's report. It's been true in every report where we've looked at that question that that's a very big link we I may have emphasized in the presentation, the wallet return by somebody else well of course the the wallet return by police is even more across countries than wallet return by neighbors or strangers, and that represents a quality of trust in government right because the police are the agents you meet most often in government and so their key supports for happiness. Generally, we found that life satisfaction and life in general under covert was better for countries that had a greater confidence that was one of the things we modeled last year and this year is that a general confidence in the ability of your government to make decisions was connected with far fewer deaths from COVID. And similarly, a greater trust in each other had was Mark was evident in the countries that handle the pandemic better, and that harks back to what we discovered from previous disasters that had high levels of trust in their institutions and people in each other, and they're closely related. For reasons you can guess, and it's always easier to start rebuilding at the local level, then it is to create the more trust for the institutions, but in both cases, those constructions need to proceed in concert. This whole study of trust I was drawn into this whole field of happiness, because of trust, I was working in social capital at the end of the last century, and trying to find a way of valuing it. And because, yes, it produced higher economic growth and I said well it's really important to people it must matter to much more than just economic growth. So we found these measures of well being I said what do you mean we've been doing without these measures in economics for two centuries. If we know what people think of their lives then we can really value the quality of the social institutions, and the one that was most important in drawing me in was trust. And we had found continually since the value of trust is enormous you think of it in terms of the income equivalents or any other measure. And it's both as you say the trust in public institutions, as well as the trust and confidence in each other. Thank you john. I actually have a question from the question box. And this may be for for Laura. Mattias, hopefully I'm saying it correctly. Do you make a distinction between happiness and good mental health. I know that has been a big topic and we've touched upon it is twice in last year's report but maybe you can elaborate or add to it. Thank you Laura. I'll I'll give my take. I don't in short I don't know if there's a perfect working definition that everybody would agree with but I will give you mine which is informed by my read of the literature. So I think of mental health as a very broad construct that captures multiple domains of how people are doing and how they evaluate their life. A subsection of that I think is subjective well being and that's the focus of the world happiness report. But there's also kind of what some might think of as the reverse side which is more of if I were to consider it like a bucket or a grouping of things it would be more of the mental ill health so psychological distress anxiety and depression, which have many sub facets and then of themselves. And so I think of mental health as this pretty broad umbrella. On the one side is more of the positive functioning side of things that includes subjective well being and scholars in that field have articulated even ways to tease apart constructs in that domain. Some of the leading work there suggests there's positive affect negative affect and subjective reporting of one's life evaluation the life evaluation we use here. But then like I said before there's this other bucket that kind of includes the more negative experience of mental health challenges and that's often considered psychological distress, distress, anxiety and depression. So kind of two broad streams and more distinctions within them. I had a tiny bit because this has been a discussion among editors and with audiences throughout the world for several years. Do we properly pay attention to people in misery, whether it's mental health misery, or other forms of misery. When we're looking at these evaluations as a whole. So we put together a measure which is called a misery index which are people at the very bottom of the scale. And we find out that that does correlate very highly with other measures of negative mental health. But we find the correlation between the cross country ranking for example, of that misery index, and the actual average of the overall life evaluations which includes of course the people at the top, and the people at the bottom is essentially 999. So it isn't as though these are highly distinct things, you're just emphasizing people at the top or people at the bottom or conditions that count on it so subjective well being if if asked over a full spectrum includes both the top and the bottom. And if the focus is Lara's rightly said, has been on looking at the negative states of mental health rather than the positive ones because for the overall evaluation it turns out that to create the positive ones can be more important for improving the lives in general, including the lives of people at the bottom, then actually just focusing on and maybe even stigmatizing mental illness. Thank you john and Laura, I'm going to go. So we have about, it's a seven minutes to answer questions. It would be nice actually if everyone can turn their cameras on so they know the people who have been answering their questions live and, you know, and answering questions and this is just to kind of just show the group who's, you know, trying to have this conversation, plus doing it with an audience. I am going to open the question to actually this is more for john but you know please if anyone has anything to add. Do you think the growth and benevolence will be sustained. For example, do you think it represents a long term shift triggered by the pandemic or just short term response and that is from Paul, Elliot. The question which we ask ourselves. And we're so glad that we get the chance to see how it plays out. Our best hope is that this is something as people are recalibrating their lives and they rediscovered their neighbors and they've revalued their families. We thought again about the and seen again the value of the social connections that were distanced and are now being recreated that they will recognize the positives that they have been able to build, and they'll refashion their working lives and their off working lives in order to give them a chance to spread this benevolence that has happened in 2021. You could imagine there's an alternative point of view that says that's what people do. There's a crisis but at when the crisis is over they'll go back and and do all the ill considered narrowly focused things they might have been doing before. I'm on the optimistic side of that, but it's since it's a new phenomenon, and we can't read the future. I, I can say is it's a great question, but the others may have something to say about that. I wanted to chime in and mentioned that there is some empirical work showing this. This positive looks the obvious the opposite of vicious this this reinforcing positive cycle between well being and prosociality kind of this virtuous cycle that's the word I was thinking of. And so, you know, hopefully what while all of this may be stemming from a very difficult, difficult situation where people have been managing a war and a pandemic. It's about, you know, in higher rates than before or higher rates than before the pandemic to support one another. The hope and I remain optimistic with john is that you know if people are experiencing the, the, the well being benefits of engaging in this type of prosociality that might encourage and spur and reward and bring about sustained levels, but as john mentioned, it's an empirical question and we get to see the data next year. Great. I have another question from Miranda Woodland. I think this is an easy answer. Has any collaborative work been done to correlate this data with social determinants of health of health to identify additional trends. That's a little bit of a Richard question. Unfortunately, he's not here today. The social determinants of health 20 years ago and we're trying to start a science of well being. We brought together a whole range of specialties that positive psychologists and and the leading experts in the social determinants of health. And as you know, from the social determinants of health literature, it's mainly about economic and relative income positions that are used as the social determinants of health. And there hasn't, there wasn't in that time enough focused I mean there was a nice strand of that literature that emphasize that the people who had good social connections were the ones who lived longer and healthier lives. So that's been a continuing positive common thread between the social determinants of health literature and ours. But where the social determinants it was more income focused in terms of you look at the classic papers on when they're looking at the people who are ill health they focus on the income parts of it, much more than on the more easily buildable social connections part of it. So the social determinants of health literature typically had a more material content, and not as much of a buildable social content as us but increasingly we work hand in with the epidemiologists in that field, and that I see no difference now in this in fact the social determinants of health people are coming up with very different question very similar questions, very similar answers to how you ought to be operating in the medical care context in order to improve people's lives. So it's a positive reinforcement now but it took us a while to get there. Anyone would like to add Sean or Max. If not, we'll go to our final question. Which is, you know, going back it's been last week was Earth Day or Earth Week. So, this is a question from the Katrina. She asked or yeah she asked Nordic countries are also among the most consuming countries. How can we increase and promote well being without destroying the environment. Interesting question. Well, the, it's much easier. If you look at all the really big determinants of happiness, almost all of them are non material. So as soon as you focus on those and they clearly don't require consumption at all. And so, and that's certainly true you could cut consumption, redirect it and keep happiness. The key link that we haven't looked enough at in the environment and happiness is to note that you when you're trying to improve the environment, you change the social norms. And so you change the social norms in a way that lead people to work together and do something to improve the environment, not because they're forced to, but because they want to, and especially done in with collaboration of others. So these changing social norms are, if they're focused in a positive way are going to be building happiness at the same time they're cutting the worst aspects of consumption and converting consumption into into happy times with others. Thank you john anything to add Laura. No, I, my, my knee jerk reaction was the same answer john offered which is that you know the key predictors of happiness are not necessarily material so shifting our focus away from that can can offer a lot of opportunity. I like to thank john, Laura, Max, Sean, Philippa, Nadia, Brighton, Anita, Ellie, and of course our team at SDSN for hosting this event with happier way foundation one of our partners and helping us with our research. The conversation doesn't end here. Everyone had wonderful questions we will try to write up a nice blog post about this event and we invite you all to join us for the next webinar events I think some of the webinars that are coming are actually going to answer some of the questions people had about trends and measurement. The next one will be June 7. Also the same day and time time, which is 11am EDT which is a trends and concepts of progress and well being a lot of the talk about GDP and beyond GDP and national, you know, different measurements of happiness. And then we will also on July 12, talk about insights from the first global survey of balance and harmony. We hope you'll be able to join us you can go on our website and register. We will also be sending out a survey to all the participants and people who've registered for this. We do want to keep the conversation going so if you have any suggestions on how these conversations should should go, and we welcome your information or your suggestions. Please keep asking us questions so we can be more engaged because we do take these questions into consideration, when we do have the editor meetings. So, please do thank you for joining us. And again, thank you to everybody and especially our partners happier way foundation. Thank you.