 Good morning, good afternoon and good evening to wherever you are in the world. Thank you again for joining us here, having conversations with the authors and editors of the World Happiness Report 2022. Today we have the privilege of having Professor Chris Barrington Lee talk about his chapter chapter three on trends and conceptions of progress and well being. So we will be having a very nice and brief presentation by Chris. And don't worry, his presentation will be available by PDF after the webinar. And we would love for you to add, ask questions during the presentation so at the end we can definitely do a live Q&A with Chris and I hope you'll be able to enjoy it so please do submit your questions in the chat box or the question box. So, Chris, please. Thank you very much, Sharon. Yes, the title of the chapter three is trends in conceptions of progress and well being. Given that over 9 million people read the World Happiness Report last year, you might wonder how the report itself is influencing ideas and attention related to happiness around the world. But that's not a question that I'm going to be able to answer directly. But the content of the report is usually focused on the measurement of happiness, reporting of happiness and understanding of happiness. But there's a deeper overarching message behind the rankings and the science. And that is this message, and this is to quote from chapter one this year, the true, the message behind the work is that the true, not one the true measure of progress is the happiness of the people that happiness can be measured that we know a lot about what causes it. And that given this knowledge, it's now possible for policymakers to make people's happiness the goal of their policy. I would say this is a profound and transformative agenda. And, you know, the full implications of it I can so far only imagine. So how do you get to a world in which society's expectations for progress and policy are more human centered. I don't have a specific theory of change in mind, but I would say that along that path. The choice of what actually gets measured and the intellectual ideas that gain attention and the policy that actually gets made all must pull each other along along with those public expectations. So this chapter explores in a modest and simple ways that are available, the trends in thought and thought and attention about human well being and social progress. So someone call this looking at the change in narrative, which means for science, the technical advances and science that are that are going on to understand happiness, what really matters at the society level is a narrative change. So chapter three starts looking at this narrative change. How is the discourse around progress and well being changing. How do people and institutions conceive of progress. We find, first of all, interest in happiness is on the rise. Now show you evidence from for this from from books from the emphasis in academic research from the geographic spread of that research, and based on the way the organizations and governments construct measures of progress. And secondly, those, those efforts to design new indicators of progress are evolving, and they're increasingly evidence based and focused on or incorporating subjective well being governments are increasingly looking to the science of happiness to inform the decision and budget making approaches. And I'll show you they're becoming more explicit about having subjective experience in mind when they do that thinking and talking about well being. Chapter concludes with a little bit of advice I'm not going to go into that much today but you might say that it is a warning that if you want to make happiness, a priority goal for government that doesn't mean that policy making becomes mechanical or easy. So let me start with evidence from the text in written books, a broad measure of attention can can be had thanks to the magic of Google, having scanned over 40 million books, every word in the book. And you can look up the history in their data of how frequently any given word or phrase was used in a given year. So for instance this plot shows how often the word happiness appears in print from 1995 to 2019. And this is as a fraction of the total number of words. So, as a fraction you can see over this time period it's more than doubled. Since 2013 or so happiness has occurred more frequently than the phrase gross domestic product which might be significant as an older measure of progress. In fact, the, the, the mention of GDP has been declining since 2010. Even more stark is what's happened to the word use of the word income, which you can see that here part of a multi decade trend of decreasing use, it actually peaked around 1980 which is before this pot starts, and it's uses cut in half during this period since 1995. Also shown here our life satisfaction and subject well being these are actually scaled up for this plot. And even though they're used much less frequently than the others, their growth is actually in a relative sense, even higher so during this period, the frequency of the use of subjective well being has gone up by a factor of eight. There are a few other phrases or terms that are less common but also change have changed interestingly. This one here that shoots up explosively after 2012 is references to the world happiness report itself 2012 was the first edition. And you can see that well happiness report is now actually mentioned more frequently than gross than genuine progress indicators. And indeed then, then the phrase beyond GDP which is so increasing beyond GDP is a, you know, important in the, in the history of these things and driving concept actually tied to the origins of the world happiness report. Now, there are a lot of books in English, but Google does this stuff for multiple languages so the trends I just showed you actually fairly consistent across different languages that that are available in the database from Google. And this plot shows the relative incidents again of translations of the word happiness appropriately translated into seven different languages, and essentially you can see that it's it's going up in all of them, the possible take here and in Chinese which is really interesting we had a dip earlier but essentially all trend it upwards. Similarly, if we look at the these contrasting words that I showed you in English. Here plots for six different languages of what's happened to mention of economic growth. And you can see that either since the turn of the century or since earlier, they're all trending downwards. That's also true of references to income. The lens on society is to look at academic research. And there we find similar trends for interest in happiness. So this plot is a bit tricky this shows the fraction of publications which mentioned either any of life satisfaction subject well being or happiness in either their title or their abstract. In two research fields, this is the psychology related research journals, this is economics related research journals, this is actually all the old research journals, and this is again the fraction of art. It's a fraction of articles which contain one of these three words. It's also on a factor of 10 scale so this means that in in these two fields, the frequency, or the fraction of articles that which are researching one of these topics has gone up by a factor of more than 10. Again, so these are large changes in attention and interest. This I found especially interesting. Here we're looking at exclusively at research articles that are in economics related journals, and which contain one of those three happiness related terms subject well being happiness life satisfaction. But within just those articles were now unpacking separating out the three happiness related terms and so it turns out that happiness. The mention of happiness is actually on the decrease right so at the beginning it was more than 80 or 90% of of academic studies mentioned this word. And that's being replaced with the more specific terms life satisfaction and subject to well being. And the other thing to note here is that amongst these happiness related studies the mention of policy is going up over time. Okay, staying with academia for one more graphic. The, you know the interesting questions about the whole world. So, and again, a lot of academic work is done in English, but we want to see globally who is contributing to this, the evidence base about happiness. So, I'm going to show you a changing map over the 50 years of research so far. This is about where the academic authors are writing from. Let's focus again on economics, and we see that in the first 25 years of this field, there were just a few countries contributing. Actually during this period. There were only 11 general articles. So, it started slowly took off just in the mid 1990s and the units here are into our authorship per 10 million inhabitants so this is scaled to the size of the country that where authors coming from. Okay, so that's the first 25 years, the subsequent 10 years, so a much higher pace of publication. I'm showing you five year periods for the rest, and you can see the field grows by orders of magnitude over this period. Oops, and, and it's spread globally, so that the science of happiness is now truly a global endeavor. Okay, so now now I want to switch gears to talk about another study we did to assess changing conceptions of progress and well being. We assembled a database of 166 indicator systems. So what's an indicator system. It's, it's an effort from around the world, where somebody has has an idea to build an index or dashboard. You know an indicator system of some kind of progress or well being and the somebody is usually it can be communities it can be governments it can be sometimes as academics. Examples that you might have heard of include things like the Human Development Index and the genuine progress index and the happy planet index the garden prosperity index these are indices but they don't need to be indices butans GNH gross national national happiness. The OECD better life index and many more including many local and community level ones. So we were looking for attempts to capture well being and progress in a coherent and measurable way. And of course, each of these is not just an attempt to measure but it's to advocate for its particular way of doing so of capturing those concepts. So the map on the left really just tells us that the desire for new measures of policy success and and human thriving is a worldwide phenomenon. The map on the right tells us that the subject of well being approach holds growing sway around the world. These are the indicators in this database, which have subjective well being measures is as part of their metrics. So we look for look at the words that are used in the titles or the names of each indicator system. And we look at the words used in the rationale which the creators use to explain the purpose of the of the that they're intending to capture in the indicator system. And we find there that the fastest rise are for words well being and quality of life and progress among amongst the ones that we look for. And we find that captures some of the language and trends that in people's conceptions. So last thing is that I want to talk about governments and policy, and increasingly many of those indicator systems are actually being designed by governments themselves. And of course it's, it's in government where the measurement and evidence can turn into at least the public form of policy. Okay governments this is where it gets harder to do quantitative analysis so let me just mention some anecdotal examples of the kind of language that's been used. This is from New Zealand New Zealand has just issued its fourth well being budget. And in 2021 for the first time the budget documents started out on page two with a summary of the status of life satisfaction across different groups and overall in New Zealand. You can see here the Prime Minister in front of their slogan more than GDP and some of the details of five domains in their, in their framework. Here's some of the language that came out this is back from 2019 about what this, you know how much impact this new way of thinking government may have. And New Zealand is working on language and conceptual frameworks to capture and reflect the Maori knowledge around well being. Something similar is going on in Canada, where a quality of life framework puts happiness measures as the organizing center of policy outcomes so here's one of their graphics and the happiness measures are in the middle with five domains of other policy amenable indicators around the outside, and to quote them. Self reported life satisfaction as a measure of subjective well being that directly is a measure sorry of subjective well being that directly gauges overall experienced quality of life, providing information that cannot be gathered in any other way. So in Canada's data portal, you can see the happiness measures there upfront alongside the five domains. The UK Treasury and Office of National Statistics have taken similar steps. So to articulate their conception of well being and progress and policy outcomes that they can influence. And they've actually gone further in in being specific about this I'll come to that in a moment here's some. They also mentioned national well being alongside personal well being but here's how they're explicit about what they mean when they when they use this word well being well being is about how people feel. It is measured by the Office of National Statistics through subjective reports of satisfaction purpose happiness and anxiety. So they distinguish in some places between personal well being and national well being but the analysis that they're prescribing is largely about valuing these national well being dimensions and outcomes, using evidence from their effects on personal well being and as I said they've gone further probably than anybody else in bringing the kind of evidence that's in the world happiness report, meaning that explains differences in happiness, bringing that evidence to the more formal cost benefit calculations that governments can do to inform their policymaking. Last example, these are the Nordic countries which have typically been at the top of the tables you're used to in the in chapter two of the world happiness report. And they are formulating language to build organizing conceptions around their policymaking. So those examples were not globally representative, but let me conclude by summarizing a few patterns which shed light on how thinking is evolving at the level of government. It's still the case that well being can mean anything. So you can talk about a well being budget or a well being economy, without committing to anything new, you know without if you don't carefully define what those terms mean so you know, talking about well being is seems to be a non threatening way to brand any policy, but at the same time, it seems to be a bit of a gateway to the happiness approach. And so that's, that's something which came out from looking at these different efforts and and was a new insight to me. So I also, I mentioned at the outset that measurement and knowledge and public expectation and policy must all shuffle along together. And what I see in these examples is the result of those happening and coming into alignment. And in part I think we can say due to the years the 10 years of the world happiness report laying the foundation for the first parts of those and how we value things and how decisions are made is a risky proposition for existing institutions. And it's not going to happen fast, but the evidence in this chapter about popular language and awareness about research interests about new frameworks for conceiving progress and about what governments are doing. So that's all our point point to a trend in how the world conceives of the human part of our aspirations. And it's a shift towards privileging evidence on how life actually feels to us, and on evidence about what makes life good, and how to make it better. So let me stop there and I'm very glad for discussion and questions on on that. Sharon, you may still be muted. Thank you very much Chris that is a very good, I would say, clear summary of your chapter. And we appreciate that there is a lot of data I know some people were asking about where can I find this data if you go to World Happiness Report. It can be found in, there's a button called data and appendices, but even throughout the, the website you can click on a few references. So the data is readily available. We're going to go on the subject of data. Can I just mention that some of, I mentioned the Google books data, I should actually have called it Google n grams if you want to find it. But that's something that's readily available and you can go and play with them and look at exactly as I have done quite easily. I didn't mention Google Trends which is another similar kind of database which looks at how it's not from a corpus of scan anything it's about how people search. And I didn't present any of that but if you do you'll you'll you'll find similar kinds of patterns. Thank you Chris I was about to mention and ground. So you definitely answered the question. I'm going to actually start with a question. I had for you. So I'm Sharon I'm one of the managers of the World Happiness Report and we were so very happy that Chris was a contributing author this year. But Chris I guess my question to you is. Are you approaching this more on, or did you ask yourself, you know, are people talking more about happiness or well being or did you do the other way around, you know, our policies, talking about happiness and well being, or what was your approach when doing this paper. There was probably some evolution into it as these things go and the attempt has been to look at it from all sides. Because as I said, there's, there are these two way or or coupled relationships, again and not being an expert at all on theory of change. One thing that I'm quite sure of is that what gets measured is what people think are is important. But what people think is important is not identical to but strongly influenced by what gets measured. And so, you know, we're still in one of the important policies for for promoting well being and happiness continues to be to keep measuring it more because it's something we didn't use to measure. And indeed as we discover things like, like our social connections and different kinds of trust are important, we were having to learn how to measure those more so I didn't look explicitly at policies. In some sense, we're one step behind that still in that governments are creating these frameworks for informing policymaking and in foreign budgeting. But, you know, but I think, you know, I think in the years to come we will see that connection become stronger so that when something is proposed the public is asking, you know, what is the rationale in terms of how this is going to make people's lives better. Thank you Chris, it's right. And of course, in your chapter title itself it says progress. So, you know, we'll wait and see how these policies, I guess evolved or get defined. So there's a common question, I think, if I'm just kind of maybe put some questions together. So you did analyze some questions, I mean sorry, the translations, you know, Chinese Italian French, but, and maybe the Ngram can, you know, or the, the strategy or method of the Ngram is will explain this but you know some languages have different words for happiness or well being and so forth does the Ngram or this Google that method and how did you were you able to do the differences or was there a difference, you know, and like, I guess, I can't think of a language right now but there are so many languages that you know have different words for happiness and well being. Yes. I mean your question, you know, arises commonly for people in this field because of because of survey questions in which we translate something like the life satisfaction question, or another life evaluation of languages and we expect to be tapping in somehow to the same kind of meaning and also hope that the data are comparable and so a fair bit of work has been done on that too. And of course we're, you know, anybody involved in this work is doing it because they, because it seems like we're tapping into the same thing when we asked that question, as it is translated around the world. So now the Ngram database itself is not doing any translating so the Chinese database is is a database in in written Chinese. The translating came and I should have said I showed my research systems in on the first slide, but I should also thank and I do in the written chapter of course, a few translators who helped with those translations. There are only the seven, I think languages that Google has scanned books in. And so for those seven languages, I got help from people who are familiar both with a little bit with subjective well being and we're native speakers in the other language to help translate so some of them we debated a little bit. But, you know, there was consensus from at least one person, usually two people for each of those languages that we had the best word. Now, the fact that we got similar patterns across those languages, you know, gives confidence that that even with the variation of meaning of course happiness has many meanings even in English as I said, you know, and unless you're careful defining these things, they can mean different stuff so so the trends that we see seem to be fairly robust. But here's where people can, here's where people can go and play and continue to, you know, put their own translations and variations into explore patterns, sorry. Yes, I support that. I see that many who have joined this webinar are, you know, either doing a PhD, or writing a paper on well being, and are asking for the data and where did you get your data so I think we will, of course, answer all your questions again, you know, to where the data is and please be reminded that we will have a copy of Chris's presentation to be shared. And obviously, his chapter is really available online. Let me ask a question that has come in. Maybe you can answer it or you have somehow relate to it. So how different are indicators for and how are indicators for and perceptions of what happiness means between the OECD countries and least developed countries, I think we kind of touched on that but if you had any further. That's a great question and maybe that's not even the only distinction to make. Of course, I think that Sharon helped me with the chapter number. There's another chapter five, six in this year's report that is very relevant to that and it was touched on in the last webinar as well. So what light can I shed on that so nothing in the work that I presented, you know, I didn't delve into that I mean you saw most of what I presented it was was as much about attention as really getting into the meaning. So, you know, when we look for indicators we're the indicator database we're looking for what is in our judgment people's attempt to express a broad aspiration for society in an indicator system. And also with keywords so we're looking for, you know, we had methods of searching but of course we're, we come with some assumption with some search terms up our sleeves, including progress and and welfare and economic growth, maybe some and happiness and other specifics, try and find those but, but you know what is the underlying concept there of an aspirational overall measure. We're really getting at that by seeing what people are talking about when when they're thinking about those things. And as and then as for the other the word counting exercises. We're talking about how much interest is there in a particular time so an excellent question is, what is the meaning of. I forget exactly the wording but you know what is the meaning of happiness or well being and honestly I think there are two ways that we get at that, neither which is relevant to this chapter. There's a dress in the chapter one one would be to go around and ask people so sit down with people from different cultures and languages and backgrounds and say and just talk about the concept and try and learn what the differences are. And the other, you know, and then that will inform what kind of questions you want to ask on a subsequent survey. And then the other is to ask about a really overarching question like how good is life this is, you know, the country ladder question the life today question or life and ask people to evaluate their lives and then find out what it is that seems to predict some people being giving a higher answer than others and that's exactly the kind of science done in the world happiness report. And again, as I just mentioned, the amazing lesson from the decades of work is that it seems the same kinds of things are driving people around the world to feel good about their lives. So, maybe more than you might think, given the given the diversity we have in in cultural norms and, and, you know, in languages. It seems like we're all these same social beings who want to have have good engagement and with others and a chance to contribute and be appreciated and loved and all those things. And I'm just saying that there are some people who asked, you know, especially specific to the world happiness report, you know, we do the, the Gallup world poll is talking about through the control ladder, and I think we have a very nice introduction about the control ladder in the Q&A in the world happiness report, because I noticed that some people have been asking that question. The next question is from Anastasia Stetsenko, hopefully I didn't brutalize your name as much. Christopher, I was wondering if you had any examples of institutions, governments or indicators that measure transformation as a distinct unit of change, as in measuring the evolution or amount slash rate of change in mindsets and policies. I know you said you didn't touch upon that in your chapter. Well, this is a very intellectual question and it's a great idea. I, and the simple answers I don't know of any but you should pursue this. I wonder if this is a, you know, a good topic to apply that kind of thing to, in a sense to a better job of quantifying the changes, then I've been able to do. I mean you could, yeah, you could ask. I've given us a qualitative sense of the direction things are moving and in some sense that, you know, some of these changes look rapid I mean when something goes up by a factor of 10. That's fast by any measure. So then you can think what more would you get out of knowing having having another metric of how things were fast things were changing. Honestly, actually, it might be difficult to come up with something that's comparable to other other transformations. But if you could it would be interesting. Also, just speaking quite speculatively, as I mentioned, for me, thinking about moving policy towards a well being approach is is really could have enormous implications so the nice thing about it is that you can start with that as a as a policy goal and there are immediately implications we know things that we can do now to make people's lives better. But what I'm not sure about is what does it look like if we really go all the way in 50 years how different is society how different is the way we spend our time how different is the emphasis of where we put our resources. And in my view it could be quite different. And so then you know now you're talking about real transformation of society. Yeah, I agree. The world happiness report just reached you know, 10 publication decade, and we've been, you know, are the measurement of what the control ladder has been going back, even decades before that. And it's interesting to see one of our things with wanting to concentrate on the future and your chapter really fit very well you know what's the progress. Even even so in just like day to day we talk about happiness and now more so even in the decade that I've been working with the world happiness. We talk about subjective will be and well be. And you know also to some degree mental health. So, I would like to say on behalf of the editors of the world happiness report. We are looking for students who want to actually study, you know, happiness science more. And so these questions that you have are definitely great and definitely should be asked, and should be continued to be research it is a growing field. What do you think Chris there. This is, you know, for me, being not an academic, but just observing. Do you. Are you seeing that this, you know, research and study on happiness, either that you know, as it relates to policy or the quantity that is spoken about do you see this area of study at least for students and academia growing. There's something, well I didn't include it in the report because it wasn't finished yet but since the report came out we've put together a database of all of the university courses on happiness. Now again this is mostly by, well some web search and then networking. So, so there's plenty out there, hopefully I can hope that there's there's some out there that I don't know of yet. But I'll be putting that database online and you know maybe writing up what we found but there's two sides to it, the number of courses has grown and you know maybe you could call it exponential, but it's still small in by some measures. So, there's also something else I didn't present today but which is in the details of chapter three, which is a bit of a caveat about the growth of research in one field at my own economics. The growth in the, you know, the, as I showed you the fraction of research articles that mention happiness related terms is going up, but it's not going up in the very top journals. So if you look at the top 20 economics journals or the top five which is a, you know, there's sort of a well, well established, taking over the top five econ journals. They had a flurry of activity in this field early on, and they seem to have slowed down. Moreover, while there's quite sweeping growth of acceptance of the field in economics as compared to 10 or 20 years ago. It's not a being taught as a dedicated course in many economics departments and be it's not permeating the existing courses. So this is actually difficult for me to understand how you could, once you have seen the red world happiness report or two, how you could not be talking about happiness in your econ one on one class. So there's something else going on there now economics, you know, like any academic field, the dynamics of transformation are sociological and complicated, and economics sometimes gets changed from the outside. It gets pulled along. And in this case, I would say that, you know, you might say that governments are ahead of the academics in in this field. And so when, when the the the UK Treasury is making cost benefit calculations with life satisfaction coefficients. And that's how decisions are being made. Certainly by then, economists are going to need to be taking this kind of work into account when they do their own welfare calculations and in their papers. Anyway, that's, you know, it sounds like a little bit of a complaint, but it's more of somewhere something I don't yet understand is why that is that piece of the transformation is slow. Now that said, for students who want to go into this field. It's not like it was 20 or 10 years ago if you want to study this you can and you can find someone and if you need to reach out even beyond your boundaries of university to do it. I do, because, you know, when I teach this stuff, there's enormous interest and it really inspires people. It provides, you know, it provides not only a new analytic tools but it provides a more positive picture of of our future as a society or societies, and also of a way to contribute to make things better. So, we need to be teaching it more. I completely agree with you Chris. Interestingly enough, and you know this is actually positive in that a lot of the requests that we get are to translate certain, you know, certain chapters or certain year reports on world, you know, happiness, and so forth. Interestingly enough, and you know I really do encourage students to continue to research and make, make known your interest in, you know, happiness science and, you know, well being and economics is because the majority of requests that we get in terms of having a translation of the World Happiness Report are from primary school. So, it's interesting to know that even, you know, in some different countries, you know, they're talking about happiness and well being in primary school I don't know how that will ever translate to high school or university but it is part of the dialogue and that is actually one of the goals of the WHR is for students like everyone here, young and old, you know, to really research and ask the questions about you know well being. I just wanted to put that aside because, you know, over the decade we have seen changes. So, you know, a little bit of positive light in today's world. But there is a question about and I know we've touched on this before Chris I think just in conversations that we've had with the editors. And so Tara Day asked, are you aware of, of anywhere in the world that's trying to put together subjective well being and life satisfaction with climate transition. And I guess I'm going to say like even with policy do you see where people are maybe making relations to it or talking about well being and you know the climate do what would you think or do you have any thoughts on that. Yes, I zoom actually failed on me there and I only caught the end of that question but I think I have two answers to to how happiness and and the climate crisis relate. And I alluded to this and didn't meant to cover it further in my talk, but the last sections of the chapter deal with a tendency of people who are creating the kind of indicators that I mentioned in that database, or of conceiving of or defining their own meanings for words like happiness and well being and so on so that's that's the, you know, the subject of the chapter was to look at how people can see with these things. And there's a tendency when people are articulating what they mean by adult, or making that concrete by putting together a set of indicators to include some things that I think dilute the valuable meaning. And so one of those is is to put in things like measures of sustainability. So, for instance to construct a happiness index that includes greenhouse gas emissions or something like that. So I just point out that there's a concept, there's some conceptual problems with that. And I am. And actually, along with that, there's the same kind of tendency to put in measures of inequality. So, you know, to use a very narrow and sort of old fashioned measure of inequality to, you know, put in a genie coefficient and, and my measure of long term sustainability into the same package and call the thing. Happiness, well you can see now that if I do that, it's really just a policy platform and I'm giving it a branding name of happiness because those things are not really related to the concept of happiness, even though happiness may be affected by our beliefs about what climate is going to do this rapid climate anxiety, and they are affected by the level of inequality of various kinds I wouldn't use genie but you know the social fabric in our own society. But if we want to think about happiness itself we should actually just stick to looking at the distribution of happiness. So, that's the beauty of the measure of a measure of subject well being again, evaluative ones like the country ladder or life satisfaction. Look at the whole distribution, we don't need to talk about inequality. It's part of our definition of, of life evaluation if we can actually see the distribution oh look there's some people who are not very happy and there's some people who are who are happier, and I immediately then want to understand why and go and find out what's driving, driving it. So, the way I get out of this this conundrum if you like because I understand the motivation to try and put things in that I know I'm finding out oh happiness we can measure it that's the most important thing for policy. Almost, I want to put everything I think is important in there, the way out of that trap is to realize that happiness is not going to answer all of your policy questions. And I've written quite extensively on this, and just briefly in this chapter, but you know the point is that there's a problem if we try and make really long run societal decisions, based on trying to optimize well being in some way. And the basic problem is that it's too hard is that it's too uncertain. So trying to make decisions based on how happy we're going to be if we mitigate 3% more and adapt 3% less to climate change in 100 years. It's nonsense we don't have the knowledge to make a cost benefit decision in that basis and so we have to use a different policy making principle to make those kind of decisions. And so part of my answer to this, this excellent question is that it's important to keep a distinction, we actually will not do justice to the conservation. Imperatives and the sustainability imperatives if we try and and deal with them through a happiness language we need to have and so I've used the word conservation, you could talk about the precautionary principle there's got to be some other principle plus oh, these things are too dangerous we're going to try and maintain some systems in a in a slower changing or steady state, because we don't want to deal with consequences not because we're optimizing. And in fact if you look not to play with this topic too much but if you look at how the kind of decisions we're making around climate, you know, go to nowadays is is carbon neutrality. That's not optimizing anything that's not trying to maximize happiness based on the cost of mitigation versus the benefits. That's just a conceptual focal point it's just a natural obvious thing to do when you know that messing with the climate is is a very risky thing. And so, I'm just demonstrating that we have in fact use a different principle for making that kind of decision. Okay. I have to mention one other thing that related to climate and and happiness and this has come to me so deeply from my teaching. You know, when we're ideal with young people and I have to teach classes and environmental economics at at McGill, and it's can be overwhelming if to tell young people here that these problems which are in some sense, we know they're you certainly know that they're too difficult so that I am not going to tell you the problems on on in one day of class and hand you the solutions here the buttons you need to push. Here's how you need to spend your life pulling these levers as hard as you can and they'll solve them instead. We're giving problems and saying, These are sticky problems and you know we don't have an easy way to solve them. It's really demoralizing. And what I realized is that quite fortuitously knowing something about the science of well being actually gives me a way to quite credibly and honestly tell a positive vision of the future that many young people are not getting in fact society at large doesn't get positive visions in the future we get apocalyptic Hollywood movies. And that positive vision of the future comes from the fortuitous fact that most of the drivers I think this is actually mentioned in the last webinar most of the, the really strong explanatory factors for what what is making people happy and explaining differences in happiness are not material. They are things that we can actually invest in and build up the better environments for people to thrive in a in terms of their social interactions and their identity and their fulfillment and all the things that seem to actually drive our happy our satisfaction. We can invest in those, without, you know, without big material impacts, and so the happy version of the future is not that doing one doing that, investing in, and say happiness policy is going to solve our sustainability problems, nor is the converse the case, but there are credible feasible pass forwards in which we impose material constraints on society in order to meet those environmental narratives at the same time as appropriately investing in the supports that build better lives for people, such that life is getting better for for everybody through the whole process. And actually many would argue that having that kind of positive stories essential for people to come together to solve collective problems to be outgoing and pro social in there and inventive in fact right if we are, if we are fearful we're not inventive and constructive. So, so for me being able to tell positive stories of the future has been very important for myself and and also as a message. And, and that's, it's a challenging time, it's hard to tell positive stories right now there are, it's not just a sustainability challenges that the world faces at the moment in fact I think some of the challenges that we face our social and political challenges are precisely because we don't have positive visions of the future. So, so anyways, that's a lot on the theme of how sustainability relates to well being but they are, you know, in my mind, inextricably linked in that way we need people to believe in the future in order to invest sufficiently in it and in order people to invest pro socially in it. And yet they're also quite distinct in the sense that we will need to we need to make some decisions without recognizing some calculation of what's going to be best for humans and to instead embrace something that I again have to just call conservation. Thank you so much Chris I think you, you know, we didn't, we didn't ask all the questions there's a lot of questions in the box but did you did touch on so many other elements of people's questions about, you know, inequality and you know, disproportionate populations and so forth and I'm going to answer one question about, you know, people always ask about, you know, race and disproportionate populations. And unfortunately, there's no like, at least from the Gallup data that we have is, you know, for different countries and it doesn't go specifically sometimes into race and or different groups, so like for the United States there is I think there was the, the, I think the US daily poll would do that. And I don't know Chris do you know of any other surveys out there that asked surveys to different populations in the country. I know it's very a unique thing in the United States but does Canada do that. Yes, absolutely. I mean, there are, you know, there are no global surveys quite to rival Gallup's well poll in life evaluations but there are, there are a lot of data, many different surveys including, you know, detailed panel data, detailed panel surveys run by governments and countless other, countless other contexts in which people are asked life evaluations and those surveys have a whole variety depending on their theme of coverage so there are places of course where there are data within countries or regions where there are such data. Canada is a good example. We used to ask in Canada only about ethnicity not race now I think, you know, we asked both on major surveys. So there's plenty of research. I shouldn't say plenty there is research on on that kind of question it's very important. US is also a little unusual in it. It actually doesn't have any domestic surveys other than the daily poll with full 11 point life evaluation question. Anyway, that's a bit of a, it's technically odd in that in that sense so we have to appeal to data from the world value survey from the daily poll which is domestic and from the well poll if you want the full full life evaluation scales but that's hopefully going to change, you know, the US government also getting appropriately interested in in these happiness measures. Anyway, good another good topic of research there is work done on that and much more to do. Yeah, that's that's a very common question we get all the time, you know, what about, you know, this population or that population and I'm happy you touched on it and their data out there. Not specifically what we publish in the World Happiness Report. We're almost out of time. I would like to tell the audience that will do our very best to answer the questions that you put. I see some psychology questions I see some other policy questions that the editors and of course friends and experts of our happiness network can can help answer. Maybe in about two minutes Chris, maybe you can tell us about, you know, work that you're working on now or work that you want to do in the future so we can follow you and all the great research work that you do. I do feel the need because come up a couple of times just to mention that I focused on economics, maybe even more so today than in the chapter as an academic field. And I give a reason for for doing that but you know there is but but in reality, people working on happiness wonderfully and more so than many disciplines do cross disciplines and so of course there are a lot of psychologists and economists who work together and contribute to the same knowledge base, sometimes a slightly different language, but also other fields in terms of, you know, the quantitative analysis there are a lot of sociologists and and people from other disciplines so for all of you, all the psychologists out there with budding interest in this field. It's, it's, it's very rich and promising thing to get into as well. In terms of ongoing work you know I'm doing a lot of work actually related to policy frameworks and discourse at the moment. And so, interestingly, interestingly, because you know the kind of analysis that I presented in this chapter honestly is not the norm I'm usually the kind of, you know, doing the kind of statistical inference regression and so on. That we've talked about is the science of well being, but, but I've become interested in the fact that there are a lot of different discourses. Just even within a country like Canada, different groups of practitioners or academics speak slightly different language when they talk about well being. That's fine and great. But they do also need to understand what each other are mean when they use the word, say well being. And so we're holding some little dialogues for that kind of exchange and and we're bringing people together from from the policy and practitioner world to think about what it means to have the kind of broad agenda that I mentioned earlier. I'm also going to be starting up a an online where a seminar series joint between an economist me and McGill and a psychologist at University of Toronto and that'll be in the autumn. So that's a month to start off with. And so that'll be a place, you know, maybe the first happiness science online seminar on the side of Atlantic for people to come and join in. That would be amazing. So a lot of information that was dispensed at this webinar. Thank you again Chris for your contribution to the world happiness report and being available to answer some questions and discuss further your chapter, and the future of this. I want to remind everyone that you know these conversations don't stop here. We are going to try to continue having more conversations with the contributing authors of this year's report. Also, we don't want the conversation to stop here. Please feel to join us in our future webinars will post them either on Twitter or in the newsletter. There is a symposium coming up at Oxford that deals with economy and happiness. We will have something in person in Italy this week, talking about the world happiness again in general, and we will have more webinars coming up. There will be a slide at the end that will show you some upcoming webinars, and you know, we will also post it on our newsletter, and we hope you continue to follow us and continuing the conversation on well being happiness for our future. Thank you everyone have a good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and we hope to see you again. Thanks very much and thanks to everybody for questions.