 All right, everyone, welcome back. I hope you had a chance to take a break, refill your coffee, have a glass of water, hug someone you love. We're back for our deep dive session. Well, we will be able to hear from our chapter authors with some more detail, the nitty gritty and the details most of you have probably been waiting to hear more about. And so we'll begin with Professor Richard Laird, who will be taking us through chapter eight, again, on living long and living well, the well be approach. OK. Well, thank you so much. This is a chapter written jointly with Kaccha Arparina. And when we were writing it, I began to think why wasn't this chapter in the first issue of the World Happiness Report? Because surely this is a basic issue for you looking at the amount of happiness, which is being delivered by different nations. It should surely include not only the average well-being at a point in time, but how long each individual manages to experience their well-being. And that really matters not only for policy, but also for the performance of nations and how we evaluate that. So I think it's obvious how we would move to include that. And I'm going to have to test my skill to the limit here. Right. So for each person, we would be concerned about their total experience of well-being, which is the sum of their well-being over all their years of life. We're calling the well-being experience in one year a well be, so for each individual, we are wanting to see the maximum sum of well-bears over their lifetime, which, as I said in the previous session, could be thought of as the average well-being each year times the number of years. And that's a good way of thinking about the performance of different countries. So here is the top of the slide, the basic equation. We think of social welfare as the objective that we value as being equal to the average well-being of the population of the country times the average years of life of each person born there. So we can now apply that equation to thinking about human experience since the Gallup World poll began in 2006, because we are interested in looking at what happened to average well-being, what happened to life expectancy, and then what happened to the product of the two, which is the well-bears per person. So you can see that the average well-being up to 2019, when I did these sums, because we've got the figures exactly, had gone down a bit. But life expectancy had gone up by 3.7 years. And as I mentioned, that's happened in particular in areas which started with low life expectancy and well below average well-being. So it's a hugely equalizing development. If you then ask what happened between 2019 and 2020, John's been explaining average well-being roughly constant up in some countries down in others. But life expectancy, we are estimating, was down about 0.3 years. That's got by an estimation for the US that life expectancy went down by one year. And we know the number of deaths per million. And if we assume the same relation between life expectancy and death per million in all other countries, we find that world life expectancy will have gone down by 0.3 years, which doesn't, in any way, fully offset the gain of 3.7 years. So in that sense, we've seen some progress. So that's the sort of accounting for human experience. And I wonder if we shouldn't be incorporating this kind of analysis in future reports. Now let's go on to policy. Then, of course, we're looking forward. We're wanting to maximize the future well-being per person born with a bit of discounting, but not too much because we want to give proper weight to future generations. So that's the thing which we're wanting to maximize. If the total expenditure is fixed, policy should be improved if the gain in terms of that expression higher up on the page relative to the net cost is above some cut off value, which exhausts all the available funds. So this is really the approach that we have been pushing in discussions with officials in all kinds of organizations, including EUE, OECD, and, of course, Britain. And of course, you've got to persuade people not only this is philosophically the right way to think, but it's feasible in terms of do we have the numbers to put into these calculations. So going back about five years in our group at LSE, we decided to try and put a lot of numbers together in one place that were internally consistent in the sense that they used the same outcome measure, which was life satisfaction. And they used consistent set of equations on seven or eight different survey bodies of data. And we put that in origins of happiness. So I think we've got quite a good naturalistic understanding of what is generating a person's well-being at a point in time. But that's, of course, not the same as knowing what a policy change would do. And I think where the happiness research literature is weakest is the quite small numbers of experiments where outcomes have been measured in units of happiness or well-being. And I think one of our main objectives is first to get everybody, whether they're part of our world or some other world, to include well-being questions as outcomes in every experimental evaluation. And then, of course, to give that outcome priority at a place when you are evaluating the success or otherwise of the experiment. Now, I just want to end more or less on a thorny issue, which is that, of course, if you're evaluating policies that affect both a person's income or income of the community and length of life against a single criterion, you must be implicitly implying some relative value between money and a life year. Some implicit measure of the monetary value of a life year. You can't avoid that. And here is what the way we are doing these things implies in terms of that implicit value. So if a life year is lost, we simply saying, well, that person didn't live that year, and they would have had, on average, a citizen for a rich country, 7.5 well-biz. So that's the value of a year of life lost. We also know from these equations that if a pound of household consumption is lost, 1 over 100,000 well-biz are lost. So that implies that a year of life is of equal value to $750,000, assuming they're spread widely over people at their existing margin utility of income. That is a very big number. It's much bigger than the numbers which are currently used in both Britain and America. For example, in America, the typical valuation is near, let's say, $250,000. In the UK, the official valuation is $60,000, which is close to coming up to $100,000. These are got by very shaky methods. So the people who use these methods are, of course, shocked when they see what our method is producing. The US one is based on wage differences between jobs with different fatality rates, which, of course, assume perfect information. It's also thinking that you should value things in this ex-ante way rather than what actually happens when somebody dies and what is lost ex-post. The UK method is based on hypothetical questions like willingness to pay for a reduced probability of death. But that's an incredibly different question for anybody to answer. And typically, for example, in one survey, it was found that people gave the same amount of money they were willing to pay for reduced probability of death of four in $100,000 and $12,000 in $100,000. It's so difficult to answer that question. So I think we're entering here a pretty open territory where we can push our own method. And one thing which one can certainly say, and many people have said it, if you use the existing values that the US and Britain use, you would never have any lockdowns. You only get a lockdown to be justified if you're using a method which implies this sort of really high valuation of life. Let me just end with some facts. Using this method, it's interesting to see what has been the impact on social welfare of a few things which we can identify. And it is quite interesting that actually the loss of GDP has caused as much loss of social welfare as the loss of life. But of course, as I think John probably is about to point out, what is interesting is that the GDP has been lost in those countries where life has also been lost because of failures of policy. And the correlation between loss of GDP and the loss of life is positive, quite a large correlation. So I'm with John and Jeff and others who have been speaking that certainly the only correct policy was to try and absolutely stamp out the virus. But for most policies, and Jeff kind of referred to that earlier on, for most policies, there are trade-offs and the well-being approach should be used. Thanks. Thank you very much, Richard. There are a few questions that have come in from the Q&A box, and so I'll pose them here for you because I don't think listeners are unable to unmute themselves. So the first question that's come in is how are well-beings different from qualities? Well, a quality is the so-called one, it's a so-called health-related quality of life. So it's not really how you're feeling. It's based on the EQ5D and some rather weird weights which are applied to the items in the EQ5D, whereas ours is just life satisfaction. That's first the measure. But then there's a question, obviously, of who's affected? The quality doesn't usually take into account even the family members. So we're obviously interested in taking out everybody who's affected. And of course, we're interested in applying this to every kind of policy, not just the health intervention. Thank you. The next question that has come in is how can the well-be approach account for fluctuations of well-being in a country over time? Well, it will measure them. I mean, it can identify them. That's what we want it to do. And I think it ought to become a standard reporting measure. We haven't tried this on our own Office of National Statistics yet, but it occurs to me that's the next thing for us to be doing. Thank you. I see another question here. I believe this one has come in from YouTube. This person writes, I also believe in the use of well-being as finality. In my study, I pointed out the use of well-being for sustainability. Do you believe in the connection between sustainability and well-being? Very good question. Extraordinary important question. I mean, this relates, of course, to the question of the discount rate. And I think that one of the problems which arose in the early stages of the climate change debate was that if you use a sort of typical discount rate that are being used by economists that say four or 5% real, really what happens toward the end of this century is of hardly any importance. And that led to the downplaying of the seriousness of the climate change threat. I think the well-being approach starts from the basic proposition that every human being is equally important, wherever they live, whoever they are, and whenever they live. So a life lived in the future is as important as one lived at the moment. And when it comes actually doing policies, because hopefully human race will go on more or less infinitely, you get into an absurd position if you don't apply some sort of discounting to the future for uncertainty and the general impossibility about looking too far ahead. So a small, mild discounting, I think, pure time preference rate of 1 and 1% is a perfectly reasonable number to use. The result of this, though, is this very interesting thing, that there is a natural partnership between people who are concerned about well-being and people who are concerned about the planet. And I think I see it from our side as arising from the fact that we think all people matter whenever they live. But the fact is that it's very often the same people who care about both these things. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Professor Laird. I think that is the end of our questions, and we'll move on to the next speaker. Thank you.