 Good morning everyone. Welcome to the 2021 World Happiness Report session. Welcome everyone. We're so very happy that you can join us for International Day of Happiness. Before we start, I'd really like to thank our partners that help make this report and the work that we do possible. Not only do we have institutions involved and editors and authors, but we have people supporting us to make this work. We would like to thank our data partner, Gallup. Also our partners that were able to help with Gallup was the Lloyds Register Foundation this year. Also the COVID Data Hub with YouGov. And we also have our very special partners, the Blue Chip Foundation with Jen Gross, the Ernesto Ili Foundation, Ili Cafe, the Davines Group, which also includes Comfort Zone. We have Unilever, their largest ice cream brand, Walls. We also have the Happy Your Way Foundation. And also Indeed, where you can find them at indeed.com. Thank you very much for joining and we'll start and we will start with Professor Jeffrey Sacks. Thank you. Thank you all for joining today and a very happy World Happiness Day. Thank you Sharon for your great management and leadership of this whole process, getting us to today's workshop. This has been a tremendous amount of work under these very unusual circumstances. I also want to join in thanking our partners who are vital for every part of this work and an inspiration for us and invaluable in advice and content and every other kind of support. I hope people are doing well. This is definitely the strangest year in our lives. I think for most of us and also the strangest year of producing the World Happiness Report, because we have been trying in real time to understand and monitor an incredibly complex set of challenges and changes that people around the world are facing. Our partner Gallup has made a valiant effort to continue to collect data in a very, very challenging set of circumstances. Obviously, where usual survey methods could not be undertaken and where we are not moving around as normally we would. And of course, as the authors will describe shortly, the impacts of COVID-19 have differed so widely across different groups in society that we should be very careful and cautious in any and all statements, especially because this is also still a very deep, very complex and rapidly unfolding pandemic. Every day bringing good news in some places, bringing more difficult news in other places, bringing challenges everywhere. And the report provides an analysis and snapshot of this complicated story. I'd like to remind us as we are in 2021 that this is the 10th anniversary of a breakthrough resolution of the UN General Assembly that got our World Health Report, World Happiness Report, excuse me, started in 2012 and that was the basis and inspiration of it. In July 2011, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution, a 65th session, resolution 309, happiness towards a holistic approach to development. And this resolution said that because the pursuit of happiness is a fundamental human goal, it invites member states to pursue the elaboration of additional measures that better capture the importance of the pursuit of happiness and well-being in development with a view towards guiding their public policies. And it invites member states to develop new indicators and other initiatives and to share this information thereon with the Secretary General as a contribution to the United Nations Development Agenda. So it was in that basis that I'm so thrilled that my colleagues got started, we got started together the World Happiness Report. And it's an honor for me to be working with all of the co-editors whom you'll see on screen in just a moment. But let me say thank you for this 10-year adventure. And I would say that this resolution of the General Assembly has had an effect throughout the world. It's not sure that the world is happier now, but the world is more focused on happiness and well-being without question than it was 10 years ago. And that by itself offers us a hope that we can turn this better understanding into real happiness around the world. That certainly is the goal of the World Happiness Report. So thank you very, very much to all of the contributors and to all of the participants in today's workshop. Let me now give a warm welcome to our crucial partner and our partner from the start, John Clifton of Gallup, whose leadership has seen the way to collect this wonderful, unique set of data on well-being that is collected in countries all over the world every year. John, thank you also so much for the extra efforts that Gallup made this year to make sure that we would be able to track this very complicated and difficult period because it's more important than ever that we have this information at hand. John, thank you for being partner with us. Thank you for your leadership and over to you. Jeff, thank you for those really kind words. Also, Jeff, thank you for your leadership. On behalf of everyone at Gallup, thank you to you and every single person that's presenting today because these data do not come alive without your analysis. So thank you again for your leadership. There's another group of people that I want to make sure that I thank and that everyone from Gallup wants to thank and that's the more than 5,000 interviewers that literally walk this planet in order to make sure that people's voices in terms of how they represent how their lives are going are represented in this report. So on behalf of Gallup, we would like to say thank you to the more than 5,000 interviewers that we work with that make this possible. I want to say one other quick thing because I believe that this research has unearthed one of the most significant findings that's relevant to the world today and it's a concept known as happiness inequality. Now what is happiness inequality? We know that 15 years ago when we started doing this research we found that people in the top 20% said they're alive for an 8. Today they say their lives are a 9. Now what does that look like compared to the people who have it the worst? 15 years ago people who in the bottom 20% said they're alive for a 3 but today they say their lives are a 2. That means that gap has gone from a 5 to a 7. Now we know that income inequality is a major contributor to happiness inequality but it's not everything. Take for example the very concept of loneliness which we know that COVID-19 is only exacerbated. Right now loneliness when Gallup asks people whether or not they had a time in the past week where they were unable to spend at least a single hour with a friend or a family member we find that over 300 million people in the world which is of course the same size of the United States experience that kind of loneliness where they don't spend a single hour with a single friend. That's one of the biggest contributors to what's widening this gap because the people who have a great life the people who say that they're a 9 look very differently than the people who say that they're a 2. What I think so amazing about this report is this is where we can start in order to make the people who say that their lives are a 2 to make their lives better. So thank you again to everyone that's contributed thank you to everyone who's joined us today to figure out how to make those people's lives better. Thank you again Jeff. Thank you very much Jeff and John. We'll now begin the part of our agenda today where we hear from our chapter authors providing the highlights of their work. So we'll begin with Professor Halliwell covering chapter two. What a challenge it has been to collect the data and Gallup gets all our praise for launching what are quite extraordinary efforts to do that. This session's in two parts so this is very brief I'm going to be giving you now and then we'll be coming back later and going more deeply into the data. The first thing I want to do for the watchers is to tell you about the structure of the report this year. We essentially have two main focuses. One is how have lives changed and been affected by COVID itself. And the other half of the volume is how have nations responded to COVID and what can we say as happiness researchers about the methods they've used and their success they're quite different. So chapter two does a bit of both effects of COVID on happiness and what are the things that have supported the more successful COVID strategies around the world. The first part will be followed later by chapters five, six and seven dealing with the mental health, the social connections and the workplace aspects of the pandemic effects. So they're going to be more detailed and then I'll come back later and talk about how they mesh together. Then on the effect side on the policy analysis side the first thing that will be handled in both chapters two sorry three and four both of them dealing with the way in which the Asia Pacific countries have differed from the North Atlantic countries. In chapter two the analysis is more purely on a global basis. Let me give you a couple of highlights because I've got a couple of minutes. The first is that to an astonishing extent the life evaluations first thing to remind you is that we essentially collect and emphasize in the reports three dimensions of subjective well-being life evaluations which in our Gallup and based analysis is an answer to a question how do you evaluate your life as a whole these days on thinking of it as a ladder with zero the worst and 10 the best. Those life evaluations have been astonishing and resilient under COVID which surprised us and we were glad especially also that we could look at the underpinnings more carefully this time and look at emotions positive and negative during the pandemic and we found the biggest effects on negative emotions and you'll be hearing about that both in the social connections chapter and in the mental health chapter and also we find the emotions go up and down more and the life evaluations tend to be on a on a more stable platform. We wondered in the beginning whether we could have any kind of ranking analysis at all this year because we didn't know whether we can get enough surveys and whether we could make enough of the one year what we found with the stability that we carry on with our regular ranking which is what you'll find on the website and of course because on general countries haven't changed very much our rankings from last year to this year are very very similar and then we dig down in our micro analysis to look at which population groups within each country have been affected and that's what I'll come talk about later we find trust is a major link between the original effects and the effects of happiness on COVID and the factors that determine success in handling COVID and so two kinds of trust are important how much you trust and believe in the well in the ability and willingness out others to reach out and help you and secondly what kind of trust do you have in your national institutions confidence in your national institutions it turns out that both are extraordinarily important for life evaluations we now know from the Lloyds Register Foundation data that to think your wallet will be returned to you if found by a stranger in a neighbor thinking it very likely takes you up a full point on the zero to ten scale and that's more than the effects of any of the negative risks that that poll talks about from pure mental illness to violent crime so this positive support we also then in the third part of the chapter find out is extraordinarily important in supporting successful COVID strategies which as you will find out from the next presentation are quite unequivocal the results in all three of our chapters are that there was only one really successful strategy that was to drive community transmission to zero and keep it there and thereby avoid subsequent moves I think now that's the right time to turn and find out from the east Asian and Pacific evidence what the secret was thank you and see you later on thank you very much for those highlights Dr. Halliwell next we will see a video from our chapter authors of chapter three professor Ma who will be talking about COVID-19 prevalence and well-being lessons from east Asia ladies and gentlemen good morning good afternoon and good evening my name is Mimi Ma I'm an assistant professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics today I'm very happy to present the highlights of the third chapter of this year's world happiness report COVID-19 prevalence and well-being lessons from east Asia this work was collaborated with Shunwang from KDI School of Public Policy and Management and Fuyu Wu from Wake Forest University in this chapter we started with the fact that east Asian regions including mainland China Hong Kong SAR Taiwan province of China Japan and South Korea were more successful in the fight against COVID-19 shown by their much lower cumulative COVID-19 factor rates compared with many of the western countries then we show that strong government responses played a crucial role in their most successful control of COVID-19 we find that east Asia had stricter mobility control and physical distancing policies at the early stage of the outbreaks testing and contact tracing had also been more aggressive in east Asia a closer look further reveals that most of the east Asian regions adopted a restructure response system and a multi prone approach where under national directive multi sector efforts were coordinated with cooperation from all levels of governments an area of interventions were implemented including but not limited to comprehensive mobility controls extensive testing tracing free treatment mandated quarantine and enforced cell protection practice in particular extensive testing and tracing capacity allows for more dynamic response and precise control of COVID-19 during subsequent waves from a cultural perspective we also see that east Asian regions tend to have lower levels of individualism and higher levels of long-term orientation restraint which leads to more responsible civic engagement inviting the pandemic however we also show that COVID-19 can be successfully contained in countries with cultures quite different from those of east Asia such as australia and new zealand suggesting decisive and timely government responses might be more important than cultural traits last but not least east Asia also experienced changes and fluctuations in national happiness due to the spread of COVID-19 and restricted government policies using social media data and google trans data we find that daily new COVID-19 infection was associated with lower daily level of express happiness while more restraint and government policy on average is detrimental to happiness these policies were also protected for people's happiness when infection rates were high in the country and therefore helped mitigate the negative effects of the spread of COVID-19 to sum it up the lessons in east Asia point to the importance of strong government response systems as well as a robust combination of vigorous non-pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical measures in fighting COVID-19 and protecting people's happiness during the pandemic a more detailed presentation on chapter three will be given by phone you and i hope this chapter would contribute to the understanding of anti COVID-19 policy making and how this policy is related to the overall well-being in east Asia thank you right that's a lovely video to summarize chapter chapter three of the report we'll now turn to another prerecorded video from chapter five by professor banks who will cover highlights from chapter five on mental health and the COVID-19 pandemic hello my name is james banks and i'm going to tell you about chapter five of the report which looks at the effect of the pandemic on mental health this chapter is joint work with jiawei zhu from the institute for fiscal studies and daisy fangor from ucl the chapter begins by looking at the time frame by which these mental health effects might play out we could think of short run effects related to the way in which the lockdown itself the fear of the virus and the universities created by the pandemic lockdown might be affecting mental health or we could think of more medium to long run effects which are related to the demand and supply of mental health services or indeed the longer run consequences of the economic and social impact of the virus that we might also want to think about the way in which or the mechanisms and stresses by which people are affected so for example different people will be differentially worried about their health the economic situation their family living or caring arrangements or indeed their social contact and network and all of these things might translate into mental health differentially and so the full effects of the pandemic are going to be very complex to understand having set this all out we'll turn to look at some of the evidence that's been emerging of course there are many different studies and data sources all around the world with different measures of mental health it's worth saying that the existing analyses focus predominantly on richer countries and indeed countries with better data and also mainly on adults partly because of the different the difficulties of measuring mental health in children which is not to say that the potential effects of the virus on children's mental health couldn't be a very important dimension to understand it's also worth noting when thinking about the effects of the virus we need to have some idea of what would have happened anyway without COVID-19 we know that mental health has been trending around the world differentially for different groups and in different countries and we also know that mental health depends on the week or the month of the year in which it's assessed so if we just looked at the mental health in a particular country in a month and compared that to what had happened in the past we wouldn't really be seeing the effect of the pandemic we have to understand these pre-existing trends first so what what do we see in the emerging themes well one thing we see is for sure large initial negative effects on mental health in the first few months of the virus march april may 2020 i won't set them out here there's much more detail in the chapter looking further though what we see is by september if you follow these same people there'd been substantial recovery to the extent that actually although maybe mental health hadn't returned quite to what it would have been in the absence of covid the negative negative effects were much smaller than they were in march april or may and indeed we noticed that some groups and in particularly the young had recovered much more in this respect this issue of different effects across different groups is a very is a theme that comes out in the chapter and of course as with other aspects of the pandemic we found that some old inequalities or inequalities that we already knew about have been amplified and reinforced but we've also seen that some other new inequalities have been emerged i'm going to finish just by saying first of all that our data cover only the period up to october 20 since then we've seen further variants of the virus and further lockdowns in response to it but also the success from the gradual rollout of vaccination programs all of which we might expect to have further effects so we're going to need to continue to study and monitor mental health trends going forward not least because the longer term effects are yet to play out those identified in my initial diagram which are related to the changing demand supply of mental health self-services and the longer term mental health consequences of recession and social change on the positive side i think we've seen over the course of this pandemic that mental health has risen to the top of the agenda of many policy makers and of researchers in many disciplines and this is going to be very important and that's probably a very important development when thinking about what kind of policies should be introduced as countries build back in response to the pandemic that's all i'm going to say for now thanks very much for attention i hope you enjoy reading the chapter and we're delighted to have been able to contribute to this important volume thank you we will now be moving to a video a pre-recorded video um from chapter six by this Okabe Miyamoto who will be talking about social connection and well-being during COVID-19. Hi everyone my name is Karina Okabe Miyamoto and i'm a Ph.D. student working with Sonia Lubomirsky at UC Viperside our chapter for the world happiness report focuses on changes in both social connection and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic and we're happy to share some highlights from our chapter here today so given the plethora of research that has been published in 2020 we were able to touch upon both the protective and the risk factors for both social connection or a sense of belonging and closest with others as well as well-being or experiencing more positive than negative affect and feeling satisfied with your life and something that jumped out during our search of the literature was seemingly conflicting findings that have been published so far as to whether social connection and well-being have increased decreased or remain the same during the pandemic so for example US participants reported distancing more also reported increases in a host of negative outcomes such as depressive symptoms and generalized anxiety disorder and in a sample of both US and UK participants those reported increases in loneliness from before to during the pandemic also reported mere decreases in life satisfaction on the other hand however other researchers found that life satisfaction has remained stable for US and UK participants and in France participants actually reported increases in well-being from April to May 2020 and another large sample of US participants did not report any changes in loneliness but did report increases in perceived social support and so given these mixed findings we decided that understanding the psychological social circumstantial and time use differences among people across the globe might help us to identify potential risk and protective factors for both well-being and social connection for example we found that gratitude resilience grit and flow were protective of well-being during the pandemic as these positive psychological characteristics may have helped people to cope on the other hand consulting a larger number as well spending more time engaging with online news sources were shown to be risk factors for worse well-being perhaps because overindulging in these news sources does us to quell our fears and at some point begins to fuel them and for social connection because many of us were and are sheltering in place in our homes it appears that who we live with is protective of social connection particularly living with a partner was found to be especially protective of social connection perhaps because of the support they lend during times of stress and finally one's occupation such as being a healthcare worker was found to be a risk factor for social isolation perhaps because friends and family might avoid them due to the increased risk of COVID-19 exposure their profession involves so this was just a small snippet of the impressive work being published on well-being and social connection during the pandemic and while some have shown surprising resilience during the pandemic others were tragically affected and because we've seen inequality during the pandemic with some continuing to a career man's wealth and others losing family members and jobs we just encourage researchers to look at moderators and the everyday experiences of people across the globe as it will provide rich context and nuance what's happening during COVID-19 thank you all so much and happy world happiness day we will now turn to chapter seven of the report and hear from Dr. Denev as he describes his chapter on work and well-being during COVID-19 impact inequalities resilience and the future of work thank you Lara and I hope that you can actually see this screen excellent good well happy international day of happiness to to all of you and I hope you're coping well despite the challenging circumstances that we find ourselves in I have the privilege and pleasure to lead a stellar team of wonderful young scholars from the LSE Oxford and the MIT Sloan School and we left no stone unturned in trying to figure out what the impact was of the COVID-19 pandemic on work the world of work and in turn the well-being and so let me perhaps start by looking and considering the raw impact and making a few highlights as we go along in terms of impact most economists would start by showing you the data on how unemployment figures will have risen and they have but I want to show you something else that I find even more striking which is this the number of job postings and their tremendous drop their dramatic drop I should say at the start of the pandemic so we owe these data to our data partner for our workplace chapter which is indeed.com the large job search engine platform and what you see here is at the start of the pandemic there were about 50% less jobs being posted now gradually jobs were coming back where the supply of jobs came back but today we're still well below the levels that we would normally see in a normal year as you can imagine not having a job or falling unemployed during the pandemic mixed with half as few jobs available to try and regain employment is a toxic mixture and that is exactly what we find when we start delving into the degree of impact on people's well-being from being unemployed and during the pandemic so what you're seeing here is is whether you live in South Korea and Saudi Arabia or the Netherlands whether you're a man or a woman whether you're young or old rich or poor the impact of not having a job is devastating on people's well-being as measured through life satisfaction now this ranges from a 10 drop in well-being to about 30 drop in well-being depending on the context in the country that you live in now that's the raw impact let's think a little bit about the inequalities which were already highlighted by John Clifton and John Halliwell and others now we in the chapter dig deep into the unequal impacts on the workplace and the resulting well-being but there's one insight that came through and that talks and links also with ultimately a source of resiliency which is loneliness what you're seeing here is a week by week tracking of people's well-being as they fall unemployed or stop work for some reason in the United Kingdom what you're seeing here is the big fall and drop that we just discussed but we split the sample between those people who had social support to begin with versus those that self-reported being lonely at the start and even before the pandemic began now it's no surprise here maybe although with what we've learned subsequently but this was surprising when we first came across this or at least thought it was striking that there's about a 40 percent further impact in people's well-being if you don't have that social support to rely on as you are being made redundant from your work now this is obviously exacerbated by the physical distancing rules that were put in place during the pandemic so people that felt lonely were doubly impacted essentially especially in the case of losing the social networks that they normally would otherwise have one would hope through work so that's one aspect of unequal impacts across people and also hints at degrees and sources of resiliency and that's what I want to turn to next if you look at resiliency you have to start get a better understanding of what drives employee well-being to begin with and here we've been able to benefit from a tremendous effort by indeed.com who started measuring workplace happiness but not just workplace happiness also the drivers of workplace happiness dimensions such as the ones that you're seeing here to the left of this graphic there's a few important lessons to be learned or some insights that we think are relevant here and are worthwhile highlighting the first thing to note is that it may be surprising to some of you to find that the relative importance of some dimensions of work are way more important for example a sense of belonging in your company having a friend to rely on the social capital and the quality relationships that you have these kind of items really stand out flexibility has been important throughout well from well before the pandemic of course economists however may be slightly surprised or others may be surprised to find that pay and how much you're paid on the job really only falls in the middle of the pack in terms of how important it is in driving your sense of satisfaction and happiness while at work now a second insight from this is the stability the resiliency of the drivers of employee well-being so while there are some changes the drivers before the onset of the pandemic stayed as important if you will during and throughout and hopefully when they post a pandemic so the companies are that well in fostering a sense of belonging offering flexibility and inclusivity etc will have likely cope better or their people will have cope better during this crisis maybe a final third insight is that while there's relative stability across the drivers we did see some changes and so if you look carefully in the margins there are some intuitive changes sense of belonging became even more important flexibility especially around March and April came up and the supportive manager became a lot more important during the pandemic as well so these are some of the key insights from this very granular level of data analysis where we were able to track on a month-to-month basis many more lessons can be learned on this on the future work and how to build back happier but we'll leave those for the deep dive session in an hour or so back to you Lara thank you thank you again what a lovely presentation and a teaser for the deep dive that follows so now we'll be hearing from Professor Laird about chapter eight which is entitled living long and living well the well-being approach hello everybody thank you for being here um we like to think this is a very important chapter um because it deals with an issue which is not usually included uh in the happiness approach to social welfare and that's the obvious fact that it matters hugely not only how happy people are while they're alive but for how long they managed to be alive and experience that happiness so the question is how should we combine length of life and the average happiness uh per year and I think it's fairly obvious because what we would like for each person who's born is that they have the maximum well-being in each year and then they have as many years as possible in which they experience that well-being so just to introduce a bit of jargon let's call a person's well-being in one year a well-being well-being year or well-being so then what would you want for each person is the maximum uh total of their well-beings over their whole lifespan uh so you could put that another way what we would like is that they have a very high average well-being in each year but also a large number of years and we'd multiply one by the other and that is the obvious way in which we would get really a more complete measure of the performance of nations uh than we've ever I think put forward so far in the world happiness report um we're going to measure the performance of nations not just by the average well-being of the population but by the average well-being times the life expectancy of the population so let me just tell you a few things which come out of that way of doing it um what does it tell us first about how the human race has been doing over the last 15 years um average well-being as you probably know has been fairly stable but life expectancy has changed enormously it's gone up to over 72 so it's an increase over 15 years of nearly four years in life expectancy that's absolutely extraordinary achievement and I'll tell you where it happened in a moment so plus four years well 3.7 to be precise up to last year now this year of course we don't have the full figure but if you make some assumptions you will find that life expectancy has probably gone down by about 0.3 years so you can see that hasn't cancelled out the huge gains that have been happening over the last 15 years the the other really important thing about this is that life expectancy has increased in those areas which had a the lowest life expectancy before and also well below average well-being so if you're looking at well-being per person as the measure of how a nation is doing you can see that the inequality the world inequality of well-being has come down remarkably over the last 16 years and that is something which we really ought to celebrate just finally then let me tell you about you know the campaign really which we think of ourselves as engaged in to get policymakers to use well-being as their measure of the benefits of their policies so what we want of course is for everybody who's already alive or who will be born the maximum future well-being per person there's got to be a bit of discounting because the future is uncertain but we don't use high discount rates as are used by many economists because we want to give proper weight to the welfare and well-being of future generations so what we want to see policymakers do is take as the thing they're trying to maximize the sum of all future well-being per person discounted and to give an example I suppose the government's got a budget to spend like finance ministers do and they should be evaluating all the different ways in which can be spent in different departments according to the the value of the future discounted well-being that would be generated per dollar spent on that particular policy that should be the criterion for allocating money and for deciding policy priorities and some of you who are in touch with health economics can see that's not that different from the quality adjusted life years procedures used by health economists but we are proposing to use it for all policies and all those affected by policies and and the full well-being impact not just the health related quality of life so I think that this is the way forward for public policy analysis the well-being approach it's it's set out a little more formally in an article in the British Medical Journal last year which Jan Donavius the lead author many governments around the world are interested in this way of thinking about things including of course the coordinating organizations like the OECD and the European Union and some governments actually doing it as you know like New Zealand and I'm pretty confident that in 20 years time this is the way in which the world will be evaluating policy priorities thanks a lot. Thank you very much Richard we'll now move to the question and answer period and I've received a number of questions sent by the SDSN team so thank you for those who have posed them I think this question is most directly towards the authors of chapter two and the the question is from Rashid Alshamari who asks every year the world happiness report normally compiles data from the previous three years of surveys to increase sample size and keep confidence bounds smaller and with that we see Finland and at the top of the rankings Denmark in seconds Switzerland in third and Iceland in fourth this year because of the pandemic the team also reported how countries fared in 2020 only with Finland at number one in Iceland and number two and so the specific question is about what is Iceland's global happiness ranking is it four or two but I think the question might also be broader about the various conceptualizations and considerations of life evaluations. It's a good question and we'll be dealing with it in the later session in more detail but there has been some confusion in this year's report because the three-year average is the one with that we have as the official rankings but since 2020 is COVID year then we obviously wanted to look as much as we can at what's happening in 2020 however we only have 95 countries directly surveyed so you could see what would happen if we did our rankings solely based on the 2020 rankings 2020 surveys because of course we'd be missing out a third of the countries we normally do so we felt it was appropriate to keep the three-year average as the ranking because the rankings change so little from year to year we didn't want a country to drop out of the ranking just because they hadn't had their 2020 results in yet so quite clearly the three-year average is the appropriate one there are only small changes between the two we presented all three rankings in the report so you get to pick if you really want to look at what's happening this year you could look at the 2020 rankings on their own but remember there are a lot of countries not in it so Luxembourg was up in the top 10 last year it doesn't appear in the top 10 for 2020 because there was the survey in Luxembourg we don't know where it would be so we we want to stick with the large number always and we spent a lot of our time of course looking at what was going on in detail in the in 2020 and we'll talk about that later but thanks for raising the question it's always a problem when you've got two different ways of providing the rankings that which one is the appropriate one there's no question in our minds the more appropriate one is the three-year average still and we'll carry on from there thank you the next question might be targeted to several several authors it was about which instruments used were used to assess loneliness in the in the report so i thought this might be best targeted to Corinna, Sonia and Jan if they wanted to speak to their chapters but i'll open it to anyone who'd like to respond hi i'll just start by saying that the UCLA loneliness scale is a very popular measure of loneliness that was used in quite a few studies it has items like you know i feel lonely i feel isolated people are around me but not with me but there's other measures that are getting at a sense of connection you know items like i feel close to people in my life i feel connected so there's a variety of scales but i think the UCLA loneliness is the most popular one i don't know if Corinna or Jan want to add to that very briefly perhaps but backing up Sonia in our in our study the UCL COVID social study it was also the UCLA loneliness short scale which is the three item thank you thank you i'll move to the next question then i think we have a few more minutes one question is to Jan are the findings from the chapter you reported here comparable globally regarding loneliness loss of work and life satisfaction as observed in the UK oh wow that's a great question and it's an empirical question and i wish i have the i wish i had the answer to it normally we would very much rely on the Gallup Ripple data so maybe we should dig back into it because i think the the answer may be part of the Gallup Ripple data but john had exclusive access for the rankings and we had to rely on more separated data sets to get at this and so the the impact on well-being split by loneliness we had a very granular level thanks to daisy fancourts efforts with the UCL COVID social study my sense is that we that this will replicate across other countries and contexts no matter which region the world being lonely to begin with and not having social support outside of work will not help you when you're being made redundant from a job or without work and especially so in the context of a pandemic our physical distancing rules are being applied so my sense is that this will be very much something that travels outside the UK unfortunately thank you very much i i received one larger broader question that i'll pose although the three minutes might not be enough to respond but i it might be worth giving it a shot um there was a question here saying what are we going to be doing about the long-term consequences of COVID on on overall happiness what can we learn from the data and this crisis in terms of well-being go ahead Richard i think it is a huge opportunity of course because people have been reassessing um what things really matter to them and i think that the kind of lessons that john was bringing out about the importance of social connections is something that has probably impinged on almost everybody on the planet they've realized more than they did before just how crucial that is and how high a priority that should be when weighed against other things like getting a better job or getting a higher income or a bigger house so i think there really is a chance that we will have a society in which individuals uh make better choices but also in which governments are more willing to think about what matters to people because i think that people um are concerned as we know from the happiness research um much more about things like health and human relationships relative to income than politicians think they are and i think that the politicians who respond to what we know that really matters to people by providing them with support in those areas but will be the ones who get support thank you very much Richard um i think that there is one last question um and and i believe john clifton may may want to respond to an earlier one but i'll pose one last one that was received um and i uh i maybe it would go to john heliwell maybe to john clifton i'm not sure um but there was a question asking uh where in the report might readers be able to find if it is available data on when uh questions were collected within each country um under the understanding that the timing of data collection or or uh measurement assessment may matter for obvious reasons given the ebb and flow of covid this year that's a very good question and uh we have put together an appendix which we will post on the site showing the center month of every country's collection typically it spread into a month or two but most of them are centered on a particular month so it's then possible to go in and see we have not gone as deep as we might have because the reports have been coming in piece by piece we don't have quite yet have them all but i think there's some deeper analysis to do about the differences in the month when the thing was taken because we do notice there's some changes in all of the emotions and the evaluations during the stages of the pandemic so we will put that data out there and we'll also be doing more analysis on that potential link between the timing of the interviews and the consequences given the overall lack of change it's not going to be a huge part of the story but it's an important part nonetheless to john's point we also make the gallup's methodology available on our website so you can see the exact timing of when the interviews were conducted and also to john's point you can see fascinating trends take china for example when we look at how people rate their lives today and how they rate their lives in the next five years the way that people in china are rating their lives are higher now than they ever have been in the history of our tracking now a big aspect of any analysis would be when was that when was that conducted and it was in the fall of 2020 same as true in sweden when we look at those two metrics in sweden they're flat year over year and the reason might be is because of the timing when we did it at the beginning of the pandemic um so yes please make sure that you look at all the dates and the last thing is in the united states from just the one data point that we did as part of the gallup world pool the data are also slightly they look flat but in the united states we also have a separate tracker where we do this on a much more frequent basis and you can see that there were extreme changes throughout the year in fact it was probably one of the most volatile years we've ever seen in the history of our tracking last point i'll make and the questions of loneliness i did want to bring up one that we have tested in the past but we haven't been able to fund it today but one question that we asked before the pandemic on loneliness is in a typical week how many friends do you interact with this can be in person on the phone through a computer or any other way we found that six percent of people said zero to that question and i think it's another question that helps further understand the global state of loneliness thank you thank you everyone for those questions and responses i'm now going to pass the microphone back to professor sacks for our closing so laura i will not discuss my chapter at this point or that's in the next section right that will be in the next section right well thank you for fantastic presentations to everybody and also for great questions in a very active chat i i do want to say that i think that the new well-being approach of richard layered is going to become a a gold standard for the future you know it richard it goes back i would say two centuries to jeremy bentham's attempt to do this and of course the inventor of utilitarianism jeremy bentham said we should pursue the greatest good for the greatest number and a very worthy idea and he didn't quite know how to measure this because john clifton didn't cut him in on the survey so the problem was for bentham that he didn't have metrics he wanted a measure of pain and pleasure that didn't quite pan out so he didn't have a way to measure well-being so systematically but because of the breakthroughs that have been made in psychology and in survey data we now have serious ways to do what we've wanted to do for a long time which is to measure happiness in society and then use it as the basis for legislation as bentham said so rich what richard layered is putting forward is the next step of the analytical way to incorporate these data into policy analysis it is very much related to what the public health specialists have done with the quality adjusted life years which turned out to be an extremely fruitful approach and one that has helped to guide public policy priority setting for the last 20 years and i think we are going to make very serious advances on measuring social well-being through a kind of well-being approach so i want to underscore that from john heliwell and all of the rest of the colleagues we've learned what are the constituents that help to shape happiness and from richard layered we're learning how to apply these measures quantitatively and systematically and i think that this is a tremendous advance certainly a tremendous advance on our standard approach of the gross domestic product which we know is so flawed that it's almost meaningless or sometimes absolutely counterproductive to what we really want to achieve for good lives but this is a real breakthrough i want to thank all of the authors for wonderful chapters and the great chapters on the determinants of mental health in this crisis thank you so much on the importance of social connectedness on the differing experiences in different parts of the world i think we're going to take a short break right now and when we come back i'm going to say a few words about why it is that the asia pacific countries seem to have done well not seem to have done have done so much better than the countries of the north atlantic region europe and the united states in containing this pandemic because that too gives us some real lessons about social organization about culture and about politics so we'll talk about that when we come back from the break we read in the world happiness report 2020 the impact of covid 19 on human happiness is quite dramatic in terms of health well-being work income and social lives so what can we do as individuals we can adapt seeking eudaimonia as the ancient greek taught us a more altruistic virtuous and moderate life but even more important we can build a better future because this crisis is now systemic besides climate health economy financial it's becoming a social crisis in one world the entire world became systemically unsustainable so we need to transition our society from the past present extractive model in which we keep extracting resources from the ecosystems into a regenerative society where we can not only preserve but start rebuilding natural capital this is exactly what the regenerative society aims to do with regeneration 2030 we want to trigger this transition to a regenerative society by addressing first regenerative agriculture land and water regeneration urban regeneration and ultimately the regenerative industry davines is proud for the second year in a row to sponsor and facilitate a world happiness report we think it's a very important report that once a year allow us to reflect on the status and on the health of our world in a period where interdependence convergence and big themes like the role of men on the planet and post globalization the role of economies and societies have in the world it's a great honor to be part of this report and a big thank to all the scientists all the academics that that work on it for davines happiness is beauty ethics and sustainability our way of looking at happiness is eudaimonic and eudaimonia means life flourishing in our organization which we try to pursue eudaimonia for all people working with us and beauty ethics and sustainability for us means it's a different way to say people planet prosperity hi everyone gallup is proud to contribute the data for the world happiness report every year and from the first report in 2012 to the ninth report this year what we're most proud of is what we did last year the global pandemic forced us to completely rethink how we surveyed the world there was even a question as to whether or not we could do it but if there was ever a time when we needed to keep listening and reporting on what people worldwide were thinking and feeling it was 2020 the questions we ask about people's well-being which are the focus of today's report are the questions that leaders and policymakers desperately needed answered we found a way to do it safely and still maintain our high standards of data quality it was far from easy but we were successfully able to switch from face-to-face interviewing to telephone interviewing in countries where telephone interviewing is not the norm the report today features data from 95 of the 116 countries we ultimately were able to survey in 2020 this latest world happiness report tells a unique story of what the world was feeling during an unprecedented time in our shared history these data capture the essence of the world's well-being and the resilience of the human spirit thank you for reading this important report and happy international happiness day hi i'm ian maskell the guy that runs wall's ice cream here at unilever it's a real pleasure to be with you all on the international day of happiness at the launch of the 2020 world happiness report i announced the launch of wall's human happiness movement our commitment to make the world a happier more inclusive place one street at a time the last 12 months have been crazy and quite a journey for walls in january 2021 we launched our manifesto for a happier world a significant piece of global research examining how perceptions of happiness changed during lockdown with compelling evidence that people recognized the importance of social connections and community support as drivers of their personal happiness people learned that they can choose happiness in times of great challenge at walls we believe that the return to normal is a pivotal moment for human happiness do we go back to looking for happiness in all the wrong places money possessions and more stuff or do we choose to build back happier by connecting with friends family and our community our human happiness movement calls on everyone to grasp the things that truly makes us happy and prioritize them above everything else the world happiness report is a crucial stepping stone towards a happier world to richard jeffrey john janemannuel venessa and sharon and everyone else involved a heartfelt thank you for welcoming us into your community we feel blessed watch this space for plenty more happiness for walls in 2021 and beyond thank you hi my name is paul wolf and i'm the senior vice president of human resources at indeed we're so proud to be a sponsor and data contributor for this year's world happiness report our mission is to help people get jobs after an unprecedented year of work around the globe it is more important than ever to understand how people are feeling in the workplace this is especially true for those who are currently looking for work at a new company understanding what drives happiness and well-being at work is critical to individuals businesses and society as a whole by measuring and sharing these metrics we hope to bring more transparency for both job seekers and employers and to ultimately work towards creating a happier world of work for everyone