 Good morning, good evening, and good afternoon to wherever you are in the world. Welcome to the 10th edition of the World Happiness Report 2022. We're so happy that everyone was able to join. We know that there's been a lot going on and a lot of questions are being posed, you know, and talking about happiness and the state of the world today. We're very happy that you can join the conversation with us. We will start with founding editor, Professor Jeffrey Sachs from SDSN and Columbia University. So, Jeff, can you please start us off? Sharon, thank you very much, and thanks to all of my colleagues and thanks to all of the participants. We're celebrating the 10th anniversary of the World Happiness Report, and one could see on the screen the growing number of partners. We're so grateful for the partnerships. The notion that happiness should be at the basis of our global policy and global politics I think is felt more deeply and widely than ever before, even and maybe especially because of the very profound global difficulties that we face today. We launched this World Happiness Report a decade ago because of a confluence of interests and events. Bhutan had championed the notion of gross national happiness, and Bhutan inspired us, the co-founders of the World Happiness Report, the Prime Minister at the time, Jigme Kinley, absolutely inspiring gentlemen, hosted a meeting that was really the birthplace of the World Happiness Report. Bhutan also worked with colleagues around the United Nations to get a general assembly resolution in which governments around the world said please put happiness at the core of the global sustainable development agenda. And from that motive and momentum the report took off, but there were two other major components of this work that I'd like to mention. The first was the burgeoning social scientific and human behavioral science advances in understanding well-being, thriving the bases of happiness and a good life. And all of the colleagues and pioneers of that social scientific and psychological science breakthrough really deserve our great admiration and gratitude. The second was the leadership of Gallup in operationalizing these new insights by undertaking boldly a remarkable survey around the world of different measures of happiness, including the core measure of life evaluation that is the foundation of our report. And so the partnership with Gallup has been a tremendous boon. Of course it's essential for the World Happiness Report, but it's been a tremendous contribution to global well-being as well. And I want to give special thanks to Gallup for making it possible to have systematic data year after year on a global comparative basis of extremely high quality and data that offer great insights, which is why this report attracts so much interest each year around the world. And so without further ado I could turn and I will turn the microphone over to our second opening speaker, our partner, John Clifton at Gallup. And John as I hand it over to you a special thanks to you again. Yeah, thank you for those remarks and thank you for your partnership. This is the 10th year anniversary of the World Happiness Report, but it's actually the 17th year that Gallup has been doing this project. There are a lot of people that often ask us why did you do this in the first place? And our answer back to them is that experts have figured out how to count everything. CO2 emissions, the size of tourism in every single economy in the world, they even figured out how to count exactly the number of trees in the Sahara Desert, but nobody was systematically tracking how people feel. And so we set out in 2006 in order to quantify how much happiness there was in the world, how much anger is there, how much sadness, how much stress do people have. And every single year we report those data in partnership with Jeff Sachs, John Halliwell and the whole team of the World Happiness Report. But before we went out and did our first survey, we had a dialogue with Nobel Laureate, Daniel Conrad, and we said, what do you recommend that we do? What do you advise us to do? And I want to read you a quote that he recently said on Adam Grant's podcast, which is exactly the same advice he gave us back in 2006 when we got started. This is what he said. We speak of happiness. The dimension is labeled by its positive pole. That is very unfortunate because actually increasing happiness and reducing misery are very different things. I would not focus on the positive end. I would focus on the negative end. And it should be the responsibility of society to try and reduce that misery. The reason I bring that up today is because we found one of the most concerning trends we've ever seen in the history of our reporting, which is we find that stress, sadness, physical pain, and anger, and worry have now reached a record high in the history of our tracking. And you might think, well, that makes a lot of sense. War is breaking out in Ukraine. Hunger is rising. And we also find, or we just all suffered through global pandemic. But here's the problem. All five of those indicators have been rising for 10 straight years. And it's a massive problem. So as we celebrate International Happiness Day this weekend, let's not forget the amount of people that are unhappy in this world today. And do exactly what Danny Kahneman said, which is try to make a better world for those that are unhappy. Jeff, thank you again for your leadership. And thank you for this partnership. We take a lot of pride. Thank you, John. Thank you so much. Back to you, Sharon. Thank you very much, John and Jeff, for opening our launch today. Now we're going to go straight to the panel. The panel is made up of all the authors of the report today. So we have Professor John Hillywell, we have Professor Chris Barrington Lee, Professor Hannah and Micah and Tim Lomas from Harvard. So I'm going to, the basis for this conversation is to reflect back, not as Chris said, not only 10 years, but 15 to 17 years of asking the question about life satisfaction and life evaluation. We're also going to talk to the authors. You know, there are new methods out there in measuring happiness and therefore increasing the science of happiness, which all based on measurement, as again, Chris from Gallup also mentioned. So we're going to start with Professor John Hillywell. My question to you is, each year you spearhead the writing of chapter two, which is the central part of our report and contains national happiness rankings. Were there any surprises in your findings this year? There are always surprises. It's one of the beauties of the Gallup data that by having so many things covered, we have surprising things turn up and that they're measured right across the world, whether we were looking at them or not, means we find out things that we otherwise wouldn't have found. John has just now spoken of some of these trends on some, especially stress is the one that peeks out in our data. Let me remind watchers and readers that we have taken the data right from the beginning of the Gallup world poll in our looking back part of this report and of chapter two and presented all the trends both globally and within each of the 10 global regions for all of the emotions that are tracked as well as for life evaluations. And we have put a vertical line in separating 2020 and 2021 from earlier so you can see exactly what's happened in during the COVID years. So you ask what surprises have turned up? Well, we weren't especially looking for anything unusual, but of course when you start plotting all these data things jump out at you. So if you eventually go to your screens and look at regional changes, you'll find one thing that simply jumps out, which is that remember, I want to set a little bit of a stage. Remember in last year's report, we emphasized the increase in the first pandemic here in sadness and in stress specifically and in worry. In 2021, we found those dropping back closer to baseline. On the positive side, the Gallup poll monitors several key pro-social activities of which volunteering donations and helping of strangers. We found helping of strangers went up in 2020 and the other two which require more getting together normally were held back in 2020. In 2021, right across the whole world, we have found very large increases in every global region in all three of those components of pro-social activity and especially the helping of strangers by an amount that's roughly a quarter of its pre-pandemic level. So those are very large changes universally so and we use it as part of the underpinning of our general analysis in the chapter that helps us to explain why the overall life evaluations were not hurt or even the motions weren't in terms of the quantity of the change hurt as much as people had expected to be is that like all crises, it brings out the worst of some people but it brings out the best in most people so that in fact the places where trust was high got through COVID better and people in general found themselves coming out and helping others and finding themselves supported in their own life evaluations by three things one their own activities to help others two other people's activities to reach out to them and number three the fact they were seeing their neighbors reaching out and helping it wasn't what they were seeing because typically you tend to see in the media the things that are going wrong and not the ones that are going right but so this is people reporting what they actually did not what they perceived other people to do so that's a long answer to your question as to what was the most surprising thing this year it's that it wasn't the continual resilience in response to COVID because that changed its structure from one year to the other but kept that same general resilience at the global level and this what we now call a pandemic of benevolence was in fact one of the supporting factors for that thank you john for that summary of chapter two i did enjoy the chapter very much and i really did think that the benevolence was was a key factor today in today's world we we do concentrate on the ills but and i think only our american audience will understand this as mr roger says you know look for the good when something bad is happening and that certainly showed now we turn we go to chris chris in your chapter you consider how interest in happiness has changed over a large period of time and within academia could you please summarize the trends gladly uh well the report is usually in focus on how happy people are feeling and chapter three this chapter is more about how much people are thinking about things like happiness and the happy world happiness report itself and the science of happiness more broadly so chapter three pulls together evidence from four different sources to get insight as to how society's conceptions of progress and of well-being are changing and of course we're interested in the global picture of that evolution so those four sources are the set of all text from all printed books ever uh in seven different languages the titles and abstracts of all research journal articles uh and so those two databases or things that already exist and the third source is a novel database that we compiled and this is a database of efforts to measure progress and well-being around the world and there are 160 different indicator frameworks that people have come up with to try and define and measure those things and lastly I look at publications by central governments who are currently framing their well-being and progress initiatives so you asked for the summary uh well interest in happiness is on the rise as measured by how frequently phrases like happiness but also subjective well-being and life satisfaction are used in written text and and of course by by how frequently I mean in proportion to how much is written so for example the use of the word happiness itself has more than doubled since 1995 uh as a fraction of all the words in in books and we see this across all seven languages um so the what's interesting is that of course for uh if if one thing is going up something else has to be making space for it and indeed we find that people are referring to gross domestic product GDP and income less uh frequently over time and that's also true across all those languages something similar is happening if we look at published research in academic journals that is that the the fraction of articles that refer to happiness happiness related terms is also steadily rising and I go into a bit of detail about that in the chapter and I also show that the the this research undertaking you know the science of of happiness is now very much a global phenomenon so there's a map that shows where researchers on on happiness are doing their work uh and next I look at those indicator systems that I mentioned and government policy making frameworks and I would say there that the most exciting thing is to see what's happening in the language coming out of governments so um policymakers and practitioners of course want to have a helpful framework to to to guide their decisions and they're increasingly finding that the science of happiness provides such a framework so we can see that in in the more confident and more specific language that's coming out of those government efforts so altogether this picture is very positive for as a trend in broadening and shifting the conception that we see people have of progress and uh in fact I would say so what John Helliwell sometimes calls the giggle factor around studying happiness is seemingly uh fading memory now because in every sector that we look this way of thinking is being taken seriously and it's really helping people structure their thoughts about where society should be headed and how to make decisions and even allocate resources to get there thank you Chris can you give us maybe um an example of how this research is influencing policy in terms of a country maybe adopting a few things or uh certainly so we see in um I mean some of the countries that I mentioned uh government documents documents coming out of government in the chapter include uh my own Canada uh and the United Kingdom where um and also New Zealand and there are others but in each of these cases these the the the really you know executive level of the government um and in particular departments of finance and treasuries are constructing ways to evaluate policy and to make policy and they're appealing to frameworks that take into account subjective measures and to actually in some cases especially in the past year I mentioned you know in some ways it's it's a bit of a watershed cross watershed threshold that's been crossed is that uh governments are thinking about doing cost benefit analysis using the science of happiness and that's really that's the that's a very promising direction which which we can imagine having uh people's expectations of what policy is supposed to be doing really centered more on making human lives better thank you very much Chris that is one of the goals of the world happiness report is to inform governments um about what works and try to influence policy and in terms of well-being the well-being of their citizens now we turn over to Hannah Metzler um her chapter is very interesting or her team had very interesting findings on looking at Twitter data um Hannah your chapter discussed how tech space information used in social media can provide access to a very large amounts of data and offer near real-time measurement of emotion can you tell us what you've learned by analyzing twitter posts during COVID-19 yeah thank you very much for the question so um our chapter basically looked at two things and so we also learned two different kinds of things and the first one um is basically which emotions changed we looked at four different emotions um during the very early phase of the COVID-19 outbreak in 18 countries around the world and the second thing we looked at is um how these emotions that we can measure on social media how well they correspond to um what people say when they're asked how they're feeling in surveys and so there's also two studies that look at how these things are correlated once for the UK and once for Austria and so maybe let me first talk a little bit about how emotions changed really in the very early phase of the pandemic outbreak so the largest change we see and this is very plausible and not very surprising is a huge change um in the level of anxiety expressions that are used on twitter and so the the main measure we use in our paper is basically the frequency so the relative frequency out of all twitter postings um how many contain anxiety related expressions and anxiety here is defined really broadly anything that might be related to anxiety and we see these huge cases that are really long lasting so for over one and a half or two months in some countries and on social media this is really really long usually things on social media move much more quickly and peaks in certain emotions come down to their baseline after like two or three days and we see that these changes in anxiety are um related to during specific uh weeks um and overall across countries to the number of COVID-19 cases but even more so we see a correlation with um the stringency of measures that were imposed on to people's everyday everyday lives on to people's social lives and so this kind of shows that while everybody was afraid of this new um disease spreading people everyone really was concerned by what was happening in their personal lives and these were um very often measures more so at at this very beginning early stage we also looked at changes in sadness and anger um so they also occurred in many countries but not as consistently as anxiety which really was there in every country we looked at and we saw a slower um steadier increase in sadness that also lasted really long and it was also related in time to the onset of the string of the measures they were implemented and anger kind of showed the opposite it decreased um at the same time um and here we would um we thought um as the most plausible interpretation about the usual political discussions going on on twitter about um the politics of the day other controversial topics apparently they became much less in this early phase when measures were implemented for the first time the first lockdown in countries so probably people were less opposed to their governments doing something about covid then they're about about um other topics that are usually discussed on twitter when there's not a pandemic and finally what i think is really important to say because we're talking about the world happiness report today um is that we saw relatively little change in um positive emotion expressions on twitter so these were fairly stable in all of the countries we looked at we saw some tiny changes but they went back to the baseline after a couple of days already and as i said the most striking feature of our results was really how long these things lasted while social media are usually a quite short lift thank you hannah another question you know where do you think um the the results or the information that you analyze is very interesting where do you think it will go next i mean you are on the forefront of emerging happiness science where do you think your research will go next yeah it's a really good and a very very important question because although i'm talking about how emotions changed here there's still this is still a really new field and we're really at the stage where we are starting to validate these measures we're using and um there's a lot of things that remain to be clarified there um so um with validating i mean how well that's what we measure on social media how well does that correspond to what people would say if you ask them themselves and our chapter shows with two studies that when you look at the population level so you really look at what representative survey from people in the uk finds with regard to to specific emotions this corresponds quite well to what we can measure overall for um all tweets from the uk but this is not true yet for the individual level so like we cannot predict one person's emotion and i'm at a certain level i'm also quite happy that we cannot do that yet um so i think before we start really using these kinds of measures for policy and really relying on them it's really really crucial that we know which methodologies work and how robust they are and how precise they are and that's really where our efforts are focused on at the moment we want to make sure we're measuring something real um and not just uh showing fancy figures about the new modern types of data wonderful we look forward to to more research um from your group that did a fantastic job this year now uh we go to tim lomas uh tim your chapter encourages readers to consider broader array of experiences including balance and harmony peace and calm uh they're often thought to have more attention or popular in in east asia could you please tell us about the emotional experience of what you and your co-authors find regarding their prevalence and contribution to life readings reported in chapter six okay thanks Sharon and hi everyone lovely to be here so i'm here on behalf of the global well-being initiative which is a partnership between gallup and the japanese foundation called well-being of planet earth so just briefly the broad context for our chapter is the the general critique that happiness and well-being research um and psychology more generally has tended to be western centric mainly conducted by and on people in western industrialized context so there's a real need for much more global and cross-cultural research and fortunately the world happiness port and the gallup world poll is a shining example of that over more than a decade now um even so you could wonder whether the the concepts we use to understand happiness could still be considered having been influenced by western ideas and traditions and whether by that token we're also overlooking ideas relating to happiness that could be found in in other cultures so for example research by jane tzai finds that um there tends to be a greater focus on high arousal positive emotions in western cultures and uh a greater focus or attention to low arousal positive motions in eastern cultures now as our work shows there's reasons to be wary of these broad east west generalizations but it's a it's an interesting starting point to consider so based on that point uh the foundation was interested in exploring whether there are any concepts that are particularly emphasized in eastern cultures that could be relevant globally and to that end uh we landed upon looking at the ideas of balance and harmony and the interrelated notions of low arousal positive motions such as peace and calmness now i could get into defining these as quite an intricate discussion but balance essentially means the various elements constituting the phenomenon or the forces acting upon it are in some kind of proportionality or stability and this is a principle that applies across many different dimensions of happiness and well-being and it also relates to the phenomenon of low arousal positive motions such as peace and calmness and you can make the case that these have received greater attention of adorization in eastern cultures traditionally but that's not to say they aren't relevant globally um there are traditions and ideas around balance and harmony in the west and there's also a tension to uh in the literature to concepts like work-life balance balanced diet and so on but nevertheless you could still make the case that these have been relatively overlooked in happiness and well-being research so our team was keen to explore these on a global scale so to that end we had a set of questions in the 2020 poll one around balance in life asking whether people felt their life was in balance and then several around low arousal positive motions so asking whether people felt peace in their life um as well as two around calmness whether they experienced calmness yesterday and then also a kind of a preference item where they prefer a calm life or an exciting life as well as a somewhat related question around whether people should focus on taking care of themselves or on taking care of others um so we were interested to see that how these would play out globally because even though concepts like balance and harmony and peace and calm may receive greater attention in eastern cultures we were still led to believe that these would be relevant globally and it'd be interesting to see the patterns of responses to these when put into the world poll and to that end we did find that there was a very very strong pattern responses across the world in terms of these concepts mattering to people and when I say mattering there's different ways of approaching that so you can ask whether these are experienced by people and preferred by people and also whether they impact their life evaluation so firstly in terms of whether these are experienced by people we tend to find very high levels well there's there's quite a range but at the high end very high levels of people do experience both balance and peace and calmness and the rankings themselves are interesting and noteworthy but for example with balance in life there was a very high preponderance of um what relatively affluent european countries towards the top of the table which was relatively interesting um so we find that these concepts are experienced globally we also find that people tend to prefer them so in terms of preference we ask whether people prefer a calm life or an exciting life and with the exception of two countries a majority of people in all countries prefer to calm life and the numbers were quite striking and it's interesting and I guess somewhat sobering to think that this was occurring in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the instability of the world and in that context even though calmness and excitement might both be in general positively valence and desirable given the instability of the world you can understand why there might be a preference for calmness and then lastly we also found that these um we also found that these items had an impact upon life satisfaction particularly balance and peace and calmness so we conducted various regression analyses and so for example with regard to balance in life overall we found that this had um a relationship of a point um not point 37 as in um people who are experiencing balance in life tended to have an average of uh not point 37 higher life evaluation um which was the only factor also considered in the regression with a higher number was um relationships with others so we found that these items did have a relatively strong impact upon life valuation so it's the point that these matters to people they are seem to be experienced by people preferred by people and to have an impact on life valuation there are of course so many nuances in the data which we don't have time to get into here so I encourage people to look into into the chapter and we are of course just the beginning of looking into this topic into these questions um this is just one year so we're keen to see how these um these phenomena play out year to year but it's a it's an exciting opportunity to be able to have an initial look on a global scale into these topics thank you very much Tim I know these are these are new questions to the Gallup world poll and um I think everyone will agree that uh you know preferring calmness in these troubled times are is what will be high so we're very interested we know that um this question is going to be ongoing for for years to come and so it would be very interesting to see you know uh longer spans of of this research and um just wanted to let everyone know that I know these are short answers that everyone's giving but we do intend to go further in these chapters in other webinars that we will be sponsoring now we move on to Micah Bartels um they you know in your your chapter is very interesting and it really does look at science and in the biological field so in your chapter you and your colleagues offer helpful summary on how genes the brain the gut and and more have you know influence happiness can you please give us an example of how these complex systems might contribute to happiness yes thank you Sarah and I'm very nice to be here and congratulations with the new report um in our chapter we bring together the latest scientific research on several biological factors so we look at the brain we look at hormone levels at neurotransmitters we look at the immune immune system and also at the genetic influences and and we show that uh physiology biology is complex but we have for example a robust finding that about 40 percent of the differences between people in happiness is accounted for by genetic differences so while uh there is this very interested country ranking and that's all based on the mean level and we focus more on why people differ in their happiness and now that we know that there is this genetic component this could have and should have actually a very big influence on the development of prevention and intervention strategies because it's a very clear message that everybody's different so anything with respect to policy that is focusing on a one size fits all approach will not have the anticipated effect so we show that there are gene environment interplaying issues so we should take into account these genetic differences while we focus on interventions a very simple one that people do not often realize when they talk about differences in interventions for based on genetics is of course the differences between males and females and because that is totally accounted for by genetic differences and well although it seems obvious we don't often distinguish interventions from males and females and age is also an important factor and different genetic sets are at play at different ages so intervention strategies should be way more age specific and hopefully in the future we will be able to actually stratify and and create groups in more detail to make interventions and prevention programs more effective thank you Micah now I think as we are a panel we can we can now have a conversation between each other I'd also like to maybe note a few questions that are coming in through the the live feed and the first question is actually for Chris Chris someone asks how consistent well pervy correct I hope I said your name correctly Chris how consistent do you see the trend of happiness in report in the report 2022 this I guess is that for me yes he or she is asking how consistent do you see the trend of happiness in the report so the the well and I mean I think that might be interesting to put to to John Halliwall as well but in the chapter that's focused on these trends in changing conceptions or changing attention we have as as I mentioned there are different four different sources so I'll try and think about consistency for at least a couple of them the first one that we look at is printed books and there the languages that we have access to and this is this database is actually Google ngrams database is our English Chinese Spanish French Russian German Italian and so my answer is restricted to the the you know consistency across those and so the trends that I described are fairly consistent across all of those so for instance the doubling in the interest of happiness is is we see we see that on that order for all those languages and consistency and yeah I think that I may I'll maybe leave the answer there and and possibly somebody else don't want to talk about uh consistently what people are feeling that's that's a very different question but if it was addressed to me then and it's I would just say that as far as the evidence that we have um that there's consistency in that's remarkable consistency right I mean these are uh this is this is clearly not a phenomenon you know this is not a mistake somehow of growing literature or something these are really shifts that seem to be broad if not worldwide um the other thing that I mentioned was that that research in the field has grown a lot and it's still dominated a little bit by some of the early contributors and where most of those countries that are producing the bulk of the scientific research in general um but that's something that was very important to to see in this report is that this is really a field now which has gained participation and interest around the world in terms of producing contributing to the scientific knowledge um and then as for what governments are up to and what language is coming out of governments that's there's maybe not so much consistency there and it's really a very exciting time and that the leaders in in in uh bringing the science of happiness you know not just to policy making in the in the context of of organizations or of our individual lives our own policy um but to central governments and to government decision making that's something that is uh where there's it's dominated I would say by by leadership at the moment John thank you very much Chris John would you like to add to that one of the features of last year's report and this year's report is how consistent overall life evaluations have been and we use the word resilience to describe it and we haven't I didn't talk so much about it previously because it is actually that's the story so that's the simple answer to that question that there's very considerable consistency another way of thinking about it is we model what are the things that underlie these valuations that people have of their lives all over the world and that modeling has been remarkably stable uh when we take the first half of the Gallup data and the second half you get very similar results if you divide it up by regions of the world the same kind of factors turn out to be important uh all over the world and so that's a high degree of consistency in terms of what people think of I'd like to uh put in one little word to play the panelist role as well as answering that question to pick up the point that was made by Danny Cannon and and Richard Laird and Jeff Sacks both make it let's concentrate on those who are worst off I'd like to link the two parts of uh of uh the discipline together and note that in fact most of the things that improve the life for everybody in fact reduce inequality and help those at the bottom more uh and if you target people as being off the picture then that stigma in fact committed is a very important in mental health but it appears other places as well that can be an issue so you want to create conditions that are good for everybody and then make sure of course that that availability is there especially for the people who need it most one particular example on that is that we have found that for example being subject to discrimination being unemployed being very poor or being in mental health very bad for your own life evaluations and if you're worried about the people uh at the bottom a lot of them have all those characteristics we then asked how how much does it help to live in a high trust environment there's something we emphasize a lot because it's extraordinarily important uh and the answer is it helps enormously everywhere but it helps especially those in disadvantaged circumstances they're the ones who gain most from living in a high trust environment so to emphasize and build the context in which everyone is better able to connect positively with each other uh in fact improves lives of the most disadvantaged more and gives Danny Cannonman what he wants and I think it's very important then not to just focus on the one or the other but to focus on a world in which everyone is provided for appropriately thank you very much John we have actually a question for John Clifton if he's still on if you can turn on your camera there's a question about I guess he's not on but let's move on then to the next question actually there is a question to everyone actually you know to what extent do you think the current pressures of war and illness will shape your research and your findings um I think maybe Hannah if you could think about that will you be looking at um I guess now with with current world issues do you will you be researching that and looking at uh emotions of people during this time well what's for sure is that if you looked at emotions on social media platforms during the outbreak of a war you'd see huge changes and I guess that'd be similar in extent to what we saw at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic at least in the countries that are concerned the most um in my case specifically or in my team's case um we will be focusing more on the effect of emotion in the spreading of misinformation and so I think that is also really really crucial um especially with regard to war so I'm not yet sure we'll actually look at misinformation about war um or at misinformation about um COVID and other health related conditions both of these are really frequent and I think both of these are really really interesting and um social media are a great way to study that and emotions play a really important role so it's when people are really really anxious um that they look for information out there in the world and that they're particularly vulnerable also um to potentially fake news so that's kind of the direction we're currently going that would be great um Micah uh question for you you know you're doing biological and happiness research how do you think this is going to shape maybe policy or government policy um how would your research translate into informing governments on how to help people yeah first uh in in response to the previous question um interesting is in um together with two of my co-authors of the world's happiness report chapter and we worked on uh to see if the uh influences of genes and environment on happiness and optimism and meaning in life changed uh in times of pandemic when we had pre-pandemic data of over 10,000 individuals and and pandemic data and we show that there is a decrease in genetic influences and an increase in environmental influences that means that actually the environment is becoming more important in times of crisis um and that it actually suppresses your genetic predisposition for happiness so that's a very important finding uh based on the COVID-19 pandemic but we expect that that will also be the case in other uh well negative events like like the war that is going on at the moment we of course don't have data on that yet in a genetically informative sample and with respect to your question as Sharon um I think um governments start to realize more and more that everybody is different um but uh I think uh although they start to realize it they should develop their policy along these lines as well um so they should we're probably never going to assess everybody's genotype and that will not be necessary so don't don't worry about that it only shows us that there is a strong component within individuals that make people different um so with with that in mind we should actually stratify like we do in medicine we do like personalized medicine stratified medicine we should also do personalized and stratified well-being interventions and prevention strategies so that's something policy makers should keep in mind wonderful I think that's that's important um prevention before things things get worse actually um we have John Clifton back and there is a question again relating to what you've mentioned before um and let me see it's actually from Cheyenne Maddox and actually is there a need do you think for a misery ranking or index of some sort um I know that you know the world happiness report you know we're looking at life evaluation and that's what we rank but uh how about um misery or do you think there should be a ranking or maybe even index for misery not only should there be one there is one and we rank countries every single year on the countries that report the most stress sadness anger physical pain and worry in the region that's the most likely to express all those negative emotions is often the Middle East but we also see that when countries suffer economic devastation like Greece you can see that negative emotions skyrocketed back during the 2008 economic crisis um you can also see during really difficult times like um the murder of George Floyd for example we saw negative emotions spike dramatically in the United States um and the benefit that we had in that particular instance is because we have a lot more frequent tracking unfortunately for the world we only do that kind of tracking once per year for countries and the dream would be that we could do it a lot more frequently so that we could understand uh those variations the last one I'd say is in 2020 one of the top five countries in the world for negative emotions was actually Tunisia um in three to four months after we did that survey um you know of course there were massive riots that broke out in fact protesters were repeating the same three words um that they were saying during the Arab uprising that started in December 2010 so again you can see when there's a lot of pain anger sadness that's building in a society and we've been able to successfully capture it now for 17 years that's great if you could uh send us the the link to that um in the chat that would be that would be wonderful for our audience uh next question um we'll go back to chris chris uh can you describe the trends um how governments are adopting cost benefit indicators tied to sustainable development as a normative framework for human progress that brings up a couple of different things I would love to talk about um so let me let me pick some I mean um so maybe I can come back to the idea of sustainable development uh possibly if you want to hear about at the end but to focus on the cost benefit from the from from science of happiness um you know of course the there are new uh both methods approaches although they mostly come from traditional cost benefit analysis but the application of those to the kind of um evidence that that the world happiness report presents uh that work is initially mostly done by academics and then it is you know adopted by the kind of agencies and governments that have to both evaluate policy outcomes and also uh plan choose policies with with forward projections of what impact they'll have so uh so what's happened in the last few years is is that people in our research community have really put forward integrated ways to to do that kind of cost benefit analysis and then also I think it's up to academia probably to take the lead on compiling databases of these of the impact so that if if uh a government agency is thinking about uh changing the investment or level of whatever it is say public housing or something there's some evidence base to go to um to predict what the payoff is going to be to people how people feel about their lives and as John Halliwell mentioned uh that payoff we would expect to be across the whole distribution of life satisfaction not just those who are say using public housing but you know we know from we know that uh that our from our relationship to others and what we experience through others is all very important to our overall um life experience so that's one piece of the answer there's one thing I comment on in the report is that um so okay well there's also uh government civil service capacity that then needs to be built up uh in order to use new methods and and so on and in fact the bigger picture that uh really one optimistic way to see the promise of happiness policy making um is in that it it it's not just directing us to look at happiness outcomes but it's also giving us uh giving a boost to evidence based policy making and accountability in general and so in many governments it's you know it's very difficult to actually do good evaluation of the policy outcomes um across all of the impacts of a given policy we don't always have good ways to do that and so not only is this redirecting the thinking about what is the outcome what's the objective but it's actually giving maybe for the first time a good way to to do that kind of policy evaluation well and accountably um I just want to mention one thing that uh about language um by the way some of these maybe part of the answer I should also say you know some of the language that you see um that I describe as a as sort of a gateway around well-being okay so this the idea that the language of the way that well-being the word well-being itself is used across at least a few languages is quite fuzzy so people can mean all kinds of different things by well-being but but the nice thing is because we have this evidence base in happiness I would say that once uh a government starts embracing that um you know in in say well-being budgeting or or um or well-being economy or so these these kind of terms that have come up because we have the evidence base in happiness they lead they get they get led to down the road to looking seriously at the the evidence of subjective well-being and and having that kind of uh you know evidence accountability and so uh I see this the language of well-being that you see from some governments that are not yet fully on fully embracing in a certainly quantitative way the science of well-being it's a sort of a gateway to get there um and uh so okay so a bit more detail uh in in the chapter that that's something about trans governments everyone should read purses chapters chapter three in in our report this year the last question but you know maybe the pen ultimate question goes to uh Tim uh Timone Rez asked why should harmony and peace go together uh a bit he says a bit of disharmony discord and dividedness are productive in a way to get more happiness after solving a controversial and ends there but I guess the first part of the question why should harmony and peace go together oh you're on mute oh so yeah that is a great question and it's something that we're fascinated in and conceptually I don't think we have enough understanding of these constructs because we do tend to find that peace and harmony tend to be discussed as if somehow inextricably bound up with peace and calmness and I would agree that's not necessarily the case because I could I could imagine situations or uh circumstances in which there is an experience of balance or harmony but it doesn't involve these low arousal positive motions I could imagine for example a sporting team being playing together with considerable energy and vigor but it's not it's not a state of peace and uh balance peace and calmness but nevertheless they are in harmony with one another so I do think that we should disentangle these constructs balance and harmony on one hand and peace and calmness but nevertheless there does seem to be something linking them in a meaningful way to the extent that people do often discuss them as being tied together experientially and conceptually in some way so perhaps perhaps it is the case that peace and calmness are likely experiential reactions to experiencing balance and harmony but I do think this is something that we want to look into further because I would agree that they they are conceptually distinct and balance and harmony run through for me personally I think all elements of life and well-being more and well-being so I think it's research we need to do essentially and hopefully our research can this chapter and can provide the basis for that going forward we're almost out of time but I would like to ask professor heliwell john um to talk about chapter two that the the fight you know the you know we're stressing benevolence and that finding could you kind of explain more about that and what the chapter describes in terms of the higher rate of benevolence that was found or I presented as a feature of the evidence that's new and like all things that are new you you you don't explain them we're going to come back and and dig deeper one of the things that we are hoping of course is that we've seen lots of evidence that COVID has caused people to reevaluate their lives on a larger scale and because it took them all out of their regular lives and they're now gradually getting a chance to reconstruct that which they wish and can of the of to form new lives and increasingly in various parts of the world people are rethinking their objectives so we're finding a lot of people who are more inclined than they were before to value well-being versus a size of an income or a size of a house to think more deeply about the kind of social connections they have in their neighborhood in their family and how to develop them and one way of reading that evidence on the surge of benevolence is that that's evidence that people are in fact thinking differently about themselves and others and their place in the workplace in the community and internationally we haven't spoken about these the special role that often the Nordic countries play in these countries of being high levels it's an essential feature in those countries that people do look out for each other and do pay a lot of attention to other people's activities in today's world if we're thinking this part of this year it's really important that people think not just of people within their own countries and their own communities so we understand those are fundamental that life near your home is gives you your feeling about life but it's critically important whether you're dealing with the sustainable development issues broader or indeed issues of conflict that you take seriously the interests of those who live in societies quite different from your own and there is a real hope that that will happen and it is indeed the Nordic countries who are among the best and most outgoing at providing aid to other people and accepting refugees and not just being benevolent to people you know but spreading benevolence around the world it's very important indeed John we are about time to end there have been so many so so many questions and the good part is that we will try to answer all of your questions from today but we wanted to express also thank you to the support of our sponsors and our partners they include the blue chip foundation Ernesto Ili foundation Ili comfort zone Da Vinis Unilever's largest ice cream bun walls and of course some of our new foundation members which are the happier way foundation and the regenerative society foundation the great part is that each of our sponsors will indeed host deep dives into each of the chapters this year throughout so please check out world happiness dot report for events that are upcoming our first event will be with the happier way foundation we hope to actually talk about you know it's kind of like going to be a world happiness report 101 describing most of chapter two and what we do in chapter two and the goals and the meanings of or what we try to do here at the world happiness report we thank everyone for coming we thank our partners we especially thank the contributing authors this year who did amazing work hopefully in the next webinars you'll get to meet the teams behind each chapter so please stay tuned and sorry for going a little bit more over time but we want to make sure that even despite the current events in this world we are minded this weekend of international day of happiness sectioned by the united nations and take a look at this report and keep the conversation going and we hope that you will all join us for our next webinars and of course up and coming reports from the world happiness report thank you very much and have a great day