 Welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs. I am absolutely delighted and thrilled to have two colleagues and superstars on today for a discussion of a wonderful new book. First, Professor Richard Laird, Lord Richard Laird of the House of Lords of the United Kingdom, who is one of the world's gurus on our topic today. He is a professor emeritus at London School of Economics. I take emeritus to mean just filled with merit because nothing slows down with Richard in the slightest. He is the founder-director of the Center for Economic Performance and now leads LSE's Center Program on Well-Being, which is the topic of our discussion. And another dear friend and superstar in the area of well-being and happiness is Professor Jan Amonwell-Deneb, who is at Oxford University and he directs Oxford's Well-Being Research Center. And he studies our topic well-being in many, many different ways, well-being in the workforce, well-being in the environment. And both Professor Laird and Professor Deneb are co-editors with me, I'm happy to say, in the World Happiness Report. So after today's podcast, you will all get online and look at the 2023 World Happiness Report. This is an activity that Richard inspired in many, many important ways for all of us more than a decade ago to get started. Now, today we're talking about really a fantastic book, so I could not recommend it more strongly. It's a wonderful balance of a thorough and sagacious, wise overview of the topic of well-being and how to achieve it, and with a lot of just beautifully snuck in technical details. So you learn a lot about statistics and econometrics even and inference and avoiding pitfalls and reasoning. So it's actually a book that goes well beyond the topic of well-being, science and policy, which is the subtitle. It really goes to good reasoning and a logical approach to this issue so that we can understand what the evidence is. And by the way, one of the reasons I like it so much, there are many reasons. It's a terrific book, and as far as I know, it's really the first textbook of its kind, which is a thorough introduction, really smart and wise of this whole topic. The first textbook I would say in the past 2,300 years, because there was a very good textbook written around 330 BC by a really good researcher on this topic, Aristotle, in Athens. And one of the reasons, by the way, for both of you that I like this so much is that your cable of contents actually follows almost a risk-Athelian approach, because Aristotle wrote the first textbook on this topic. It's called the Nicomachian Ethics. Nicomachus is the name of Aristotle's son. It's a bunch of lecture notes, actually, most likely. It seems to have been collected by his students as lecture notes. It's sometimes said that he wrote it as a kind of self-help guide for his son. Here's how to be happy, but your cable of contents, which is fantastic, really thoughtful and comprehensive, takes the approach that Aristotle takes, and that's what we're going to take in our discussion. It starts out with the question, what is happiness? And then it goes right to the question of human nature, which is actually pretty core Aristotle, what makes us tick. And then you go through all of the different dimensions of our lives, actually, because they all play a role. And then you end up with what government can do, and just not to talk any longer, just to say that Aristotle finished his textbook on well-being, the Nicomachian Ethics, by saying, now we go to the next volume, politics. So he wrote, actually, a companion volume on politics, what should government do? You have that in three chapters, and with, I'd say, more mathematical precision than Aristotle. But really, you're in a long line of 2,350 years of tradition, so I congratulate you. And I think it's the finest textbook on this subject for at least a couple of millennia, so thank you for that. So let's get into it. Richard, what is the case for well-being? That's the opening of the book. Yes. Well, of course, you have to have some overarching objective if you're making difficult choices between alternatives. It applies to the government deciding how much to spend on education, or the transfer, or whatever, big difficult choices. It also applies to us. We've got to make big choices, what jobs to do, how to conduct our family life, and so on. There's got to be some overarching objective against which you measure the value of all the alternatives. And we say that it is the well-being of the community. That's the overarching objective. How do we get there? Well, you might say, well, wealth is very important, or the health is very important, or the freedom is very important. I would say, well, why don't we ask why these objectives are important? Why is wealth important? Well, it enables you to have a more enjoyable life. Why is freedom important? Because slavery makes you feel terrible. Why is health important? If you're sick, you feel terrible. Then you say, why does it matter how we feel? You can't give an answer. There's no answer. It's self-evident. It's self-evidently the thing which matters most, and other things matter because of how they contribute to it. So that's the argument. And I think it is critical if people object to it that they face up to the issue, well, what is your alternative criteria to this? And you'll find that none of the people who object to this are able to provide an alternative, in which case they're just not able to answer the basic question that's requiring answering. So that would be my justification for the case. Now then you come, of course, to can you measure it? We say, yes, you can measure it. You can ask people questions. This has got a lot of information content. We know what people say about how happy they are. This is one of the best predictors of how long they'll live, for example, as good as a medical diagnosis, good predictor of how they'll vote, how productive they will be, whether they'll stay the course in their job or even their marriage. So there's a lot of information content in these answers. So it's not only, as I was saying first, a desirable criterion. It's also a feasible criterion. And we now know a lot about what causes it. And until we knew what caused it, there was a bit of a difficulty in applying it. So as you were saying, Jeff, it goes back 2,300 years, but it got a big revival in the 18th century Enlightenment. And of course it influenced people, but it got undermined in the 20th century. Well, before we get there, we're going to cover all those grounds, but Yana Manuel, if you want to come into add to that. Well, on the measurement piece, because that's obviously where the rubber hits the road and where as empiricists, I mean, Jeff, you and other economists, we want to be able to show things and provide evidence. So we need the data. And I think that's been, I mean, it's been a long time since Aristotle and even the Enlightenment. But I think it's the data revolution that has really brought a lot of new life and will allow, I think, the field of well-being and what is the good life to take it to a whole new level, I think, is the availability of data. So the fact that the Office for National Statistics is measuring this as part of population statistics, the fact that the OECD is pushing this, the fact that the United Nations recommends this to be measured as a complement to GDP. So there's now these wonderful data sets and that allows, I think, us to take the evidence to the next level. So how we measure it is actually critical. As Richard says, I think there's an emerging consensus that we can measure this. The internal validity of the measure, the external validity of the measure, as Richard highlighted. And maybe if I can build on Richard on the measurement before we move on to other exciting topics, it's, well, how do we actually measure it? And then, Jeff, this will be very familiar to you because one of the ways to measure it is obviously by asking people, which is the one way to ask it, the one way to find out whether people feel good is obviously by asking them. And they are the ultimate sovereign on this. Well-being is in the eye of the beholder. It is not me who can decide whether Jeff is happy. Even if I look at all your objective dimensions of your life, it's ultimately you. And I have to ask you whether you're happy. And I have to take that for granted. And then reverse engineer to see, well, what helps explain variance in between Jeff and his family, et cetera. And what's interesting about these measures of asking people is that, in fact, if you are asked to predict how a friend or someone else you know is or isn't happy, you actually come up pretty close when they report or when you look at them. So there's something real in this because it goes actually both ways. Absolutely. Yeah. So the external validity of these measures that have been studied, thanks to many, many psychologists from the 80s and the 90s onward, we owe a lot to people like Ed Diner and Marty Seligman and a whole crowd around positive psychology for digging into do these measures, these feelings, these subjective well-being, do they hold signal and not just noise? And you're actually right. There's a lot of value to these numbers. And one thing that you emphasize and that is key to this whole literature and this whole field of study, I should say, is two basic different kinds of subjective measures. So I think it would be very good to explain that. And possibly a third, which then links even more closely to Aristotle. So the first one, the one that we've chosen for the World for Our World Happiness Report, is the evaluative dimension, which is essentially satisfaction with life or the cantor letter, a more sophisticated version of that. And just explain what do people answer in trying to get at that? Yeah. So the World Happiness Report, as the three of us know very well, are friends at Gallup who do representative surveys of populations around the world and would ask the question, imagine a ladder with the top rung being 10. And imagine that that is the best possible life for you. And the bottom rung, zero, is the worst possible life for you. Where do you think you stand nowadays on that ladder of life? So that's the cantor ladder. And that's essentially evaluating the quality of your life through your own eyes and how you experience it. That's the evaluative approach to well-being. And then as you as you rightly noted, there are all the other ways of measuring well-being, which then come at it from a more emotional or affective way, which would then be say, Jeff, are you happy right now? Or are you experiencing worry yesterday or today? And when we ask about yesterday, it's really just to get like a day and not be beholden to a specific time in the day. So those are the affective measures. And then there's a third sort of dimension. It's a slightly more debated. In the book, we dig into this a little bit, which comes closer to what is then called oedimonia, referring back to Aristotle, which in the Office of National Statistics gets translated as or a question as, do you find life worthwhile? So notions of purpose, worthwhile meaning, which has a virtue element to it. So is what you're doing, is your life worthwhile also to others or meaningful more generally? So that is somewhat debated whether that is sort of a third angle onto subjective well-being. Or something like part of the first approach. Precisely, precisely. Yeah, because you could even say the first approach is a little bit reflection, basically on the whole, how's your life going? Whereas the second, are you really annoyed because you're stuck in a traffic jam right now, which is the emotions or did you stub your toe or someone yelled at you and you feel miserable right now? So the emotional versus this longer term. And I think it's interesting to go back to what Richard was saying just a moment ago. Aristotle argued on the same basis as both of you that, well, if you think about, is it wealth? Aristotle said, well, yeah, wealth is okay. It's not bad, but it's for something else. What's the one thing that isn't for something else but is for itself? And that's your well-being, which, as you say, he called the ebdomonia. Maybe it's the ancient Greek pronunciation or eudomonia, as we say right now. And then the question is all of these measurements. And boy, it is really a kind of revolution because Aristotle didn't have one data point. He was just an incredibly clever observer and thinker and very logical, but without a data point. Whereas now we have these Gallup surveys, which is really the basic measurement that you're looking at in this book. In 150 countries or so, and every year, and this is incredible actually to have that kind of information available. And it is for the first time in history that this is being systematically collected in a way that can be compared within a country in a given time or across time within that country or across country. And so it's really remarkable. Well, surely it's the best description of what is the human situation on the planet. I love, we have right at the beginning, a diagram of the distribution of happiness in the world. And you've got averages in Scandinavian countries on a scale of 0 to 10, something like 8, nearly to 8. And you've got averages in countries like Afghanistan and South Sudan of 3. It's just incredible, the spread. And you can see that we're capturing in this something that is really corresponding to human experience. And it's never been done before. And in the 2023 report, people can find it online. But the top three reported countries of being on the ladder near the top rung, near rung 10 is Finland, Denmark and Switzerland. And the three countries on the lowest rung reported, as you just said, the very bottom is Afghanistan. And we know that's a place that has just suffered terribly from everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. And Rwanda and Zimbabwe are the third from bottom, second from bottom, and Afghanistan. So you really see a spread that makes sense and that is rather consistent over time. There are changes, but when the changes occur within a country, you can say, oh yeah. Well, they became happier because there's some economic development going on or more life expectancy. They became sadder because they're at war now. War has broken out again. And so you really can make sense of it. So I wanted to go to the second big theme of the book, which I think is terrifically put, which is you distinguish in three chapters, three big headings to think about our well-being, our behavior, you say, our thoughts, how we think about life, and our genes and our physical natures, personality and so forth. So could you discuss, these are kind of the big background factors and then you take a deep dive into what these mean. But I think we should talk about these three big factors that one is what we're doing in our lives and our society. The second is how we're thinking about that. And the third is something maybe that we've inherited that we're personality tending towards being happy or tending towards being, oh my God, I'm worried, whatever it is. So could you take us through these three big headings? Yes, maybe a good place to start is with the Nobel address by our friend Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who was awarded the economics prize, because what he had to say was very relevant to how we should think about political economy and how our lives should be organized. Was it just enough to have laissez-faire, for example, leave everything to individual choice? So I think it's almost his first statement is economists believe that people are rational, consistent and selfish. And psychologists don't believe that either of them. If we take the rational thing, you've got obvious counter examples. You've got people who suffer from addiction, who would like to stop doing something, but they can't stop doing it. Then you've got people who think that they'll gain something enormously from some change. They don't know that they'll adapt to it and that they will, in fact, have spent a lot of money on a bigger house. In fact, they don't feel any different after three months because they've got used to it. Then you've got people who are extraordinarily gullible, if you like, according to how a choice is presented to them. For example, are you going to opt into a pension plan? If the choice is presented to you, you have to say if you want to opt in. They find, typically, for example, in one of these cases, something like 20% opted in. If you have to say, I'll opt in. If on their hand, you're told you're in this pension plan, but you can opt out, only about 20% opted out, so that 80% are opted in. So completely inconsistent decisions, depending on the some tiny little way in which the question is asked and so on. The rationality is certainly not their consistency, not their. And then are people selfish? Well, actually, they're not that selfish. There's a selfish element in everybody, but there's an extremely unselfish element in everybody. We couldn't really hope to have moral behavior from people unless they had some strong feeling of sympathy for other people. They experienced other people's pain. And they didn't like to see other people in pain. They liked to help other people. And incidentally, going back to your previous thing about eudaimonia, they also got some satisfaction from helping other people. So we need a much wider view about human behavior, which of course also includes the obvious point that society, the way in which it steers things like pension plans or the whole setup of social support can enormously influence people's happiness. Well, then we go on to suppose things have happened to people. How does that actually affect their well-being? And one of the great discoveries of the last 50 years has been that the way people think about their experience has a huge effect in intermediating between the experience and the well-being that results. I'm going to insist, not discovery, but rediscovery, because the Stoics knew it. I'm quite happy with that. Marcus Aurelius knew it as Emperor in his meditation? Quite happy with that. But I think that it's a combination of ancient wisdom, obviously, Stoics, Buddhism, many things, with modern cognitive behavioral psychology, positive psychology, are giving us the tools to improve people's well-being through helping them think more positively and focusing more positively on the situations in which they find themselves. And Richard, if I may say, you've been really pivotal and transformative in insisting on mental health interventions, especially by its technical term, cognitive behavioral therapy, helping people to think better about their situation. And so this is a case not of happy people being happier, but of people who are desperately unhappy or suffering from terrible anxieties or other really debilitating conditions being able to be helped to think more clearly. If I could ask you to say something about that, because you've really been championing that for 20 years now, and people are listening. One of the points you've made as an economist championing this is, this doesn't cost very much, and you really get a big impact. So that's been very persuasive. Yes. Well, we started on this about 15 years ago, and we made the case to the British government that there were evidence-based therapies, not only CBTs that we call... Cognitive behavioral therapy for people. But interpersonal therapy, brief psychodynamic therapies, which have strong impacts on both depression or anxiety disorders like OCD, PTSD and so on. Panic attacks, phobias, really able to change lives. Not of everybody is treated, but in the trials, the success rates are over 50%, and we have found that in the service that we got the government to roll out, we are also getting success rates of well over 50% of people being relieved of symptoms that they've had for 20 years in many cases. So there's a huge way here in which we can help people, and I think it's something which benefits enormously from being well-organized, and I think we're able in this program to organize it in a way which is now being copied in seven different countries. So you have to have a very good training program to train people in these evidence-based therapies which are recommended by the health authorities. And then you have to have really proper, well-organized services with very good supervision, but also, which was secret of how success, really, measure the outcomes and prove, therefore, you can prove that the money is not going down a black hole, that it's actually achieving something. So this has been a huge improvement, I think, in the attitude which governments have but also population have had to psychological therapy that we can show that it's not people going round around circles as some people have criticized some therapists for doing. It is producing forward movement. Jeff, if I may, you mentioned at the beginning of the question, there's also a biological genetic. Yes. And I think it builds well on what Richard is saying. Yes, we can try and help people think better and that then improve their well-being. We have to accept that there is a stable component to well-being as well, often called a set point, though that language is not always accepted. And the set point is essentially a genetic predisposition, if you will. And the way we figure this one out, and I've contributed a little bit to this line of the research, is through twin studies. It's actually very intuitive. So we've got data sets where we've got, say, 600 couples of non-identical twins and another 600 or so couples of identical twins. And then you look at their responses to life satisfaction of the cantraladder. And what you find is that the identical twins, the covariance or the correlation between their responses is a lot stronger or quite a bit stronger than it would be between non-identical twins. Actually, you point out something even stronger than that, which is that identical twins raised in separate households are much closer than non-identical twins raised in the same household. Yeah. So it's really something. There's something there. And when you do these modeling, and then you sort of reverse engineer to see what extent of the variance between people's well-being is explained by genetics, it's about a third of all of the variance. So later on in the book, we'll talk about employment and marriage and age and what have you. And all of that has some impact. And it's typically one, two, three percent of the R squared of the variance being explained. But genetics as a whole explains about a third of the lot. Yeah, which is a lot. I want to get to the parts that are. Sorry, Richard. I just wanted to point out that there's no sense at all in which if something originates because of a genetic predisposition, that it's more difficult to change that than if it originates from a previous experience. Both of these things can be equally altered by appropriate psychological therapies or better experiences subsequently. Yeah. So, Jeff, the point here is genetic predispositions are not deterministic. Right. You're not locked into suffering or locked into happiness. All these other factors still matter for anybody, an identical twin or a pair and so on. I want to say as we move to the next part, which is really one wonderful chapter after another of the social and individual contributors to well-being. Again, I have to say I feel a lot of resonance of what science is showing with what Aristotle observed and wrote, because he didn't say everyone's rational and he didn't say everyone's irrational. He said, it's hard. We should try to think properly. Not everybody does. And he didn't have the term for addiction, but the Greek term akratia is you don't have self-control. So, he more or less describes the phenomenon and says we should be end-cratic, meaning with self-control, we should use our minds to help us tame our surging otherwise uncontrollable desires that could do a lot of harm to people. So, he had a kind of model of addiction or not addiction, but it was mainly saying, you know, at least we can help people and groups and even political communities move to well-being. And that, of course, is the bulk of your book, which is that well-being is explained by a variety of factors at the individual level, by things like a person's health, of course, mental and physical, by family, by schooling, which is Janemann Well, one of your really, you know, focal areas of thinking about what happens in schools, what happens in the workplace, and because that's where we spend our days. So, of course, it shapes our well-being, unemployment, your work relations and so forth. So, there's a lot there, and actually every chapter is very rich in practical evidence. There is no one key to happiness. It's not, if you just think right, you'll be happy. If you're just rich, obviously not. If you have a good job, it helps, but it doesn't guarantee and so forth. So, how can we take this kind of overview? Is there a way to summarize the broad mix of factors? You have a lot of diagrams showing many different things affecting happiness. How could we give an overview of all of these factors feeding in? Well, there are two ways in which you can go at this. If you've got a population of people whose happiness is varying, you can try and say, well, some of these people are in a really bad state suffering from what we might call misery below a certain level of life satisfaction, as Jan was putting it. You could then say, what are the factors that are the main factors which are accounting for people being in that state? And the answers which you get from a statistical analysis are the biggest single factor is mental health. A very simple question, have you ever been diagnosed with mental health problems of depression or anxiety? It's a very simple question. That's the biggest thing. Physical illness is also a big thing, chronic pain. Having no partner, which is easy to measure, loneliness. Loneliness or divorce or other things can cause people to suffer. And after all of those factors is coming poverty. This is in rich societies, but it seems to be quite similar the power of poverty to explain the most miserable sections of community even in poorer countries. There are so many factors, personal factors, which I feel governments in every country now have the tools to influence. They can influence what people's mental health is. They can influence whether they are abandoned and isolated, as well as whether they are poor. And we're going to have to have more concentration on health policy, on social policy, as well as economic policy from governments in every part of the world. The second question you could ask is, well, what's explaining the whole spread of happiness, including the upper reaches? It turns out they're the same factors. So asking the question, what are the main causes of misery is a pretty good way into this subject. Since economists generally start with the question, well, of course it's income. Because when we train our students or read our introductory textbooks, and I remember it was many decades ago, my introductory course I was told you have a financial budget constraint and that's going to determine what you can buy and that's going to determine what we call your utility. And there's some truth to it, but one of the most important findings, I think, and Richard, you've also done really interesting and important statistical work on this, is what's called the diminishing marginal utility of money. And maybe, Anna Manuel, could you just explain that concept and what's the implication of it? Thank you, Geoff. And Richard has a cool paper in Journal of Public Economics trying to get a measure for diminishing marginal utility of income. But in essence, it's the notion that at higher levels of income or household wealth, any additional dollar or pound or euro will have a lower and lower marginal impact on your well-being. And that tapers off pretty quickly. So there's obviously a contentious debate. This is typically what well-being economists would be looking at, is does money make you happy? And there's no hiding behind the fact that at lower levels of income, adding 5,000 pounds or 5,000 dollars to somebody who makes 20,000 is going to have a measurable positive impact on their life satisfaction. But add that 5,000 dollars to somebody who makes 150,000 or 250,000, it has no impact whatsoever anymore. And so there is definitely sort of a leveling off and depending on which measure you use, evaluations or emotional well-being metrics, that sort of satiation point or that leveling off happens a bit sooner or a bit later. And so Danny Collin and Agus Deed and Richard myself and others have been working on this. One point I wanted to make, which is one paper and Roswell and I did put that question that economists always look at on its head. So rather than asking the question, does money make you happy? We said, well, maybe richer individuals were happier to begin with. So there's maybe even a reverse causality. So whatever you're finding as a coefficient on money to happiness may have been driven by happiness in the first place. And lo and behold, guess what we found? When you look at the well-being, licensed action and emotional questions to adolescents, like we have data like big panel studies out of the US, when they're 14, 16, 19, 21, you guess what? Their licensed action and well-being metrics are highly predictive of their earnings later on. So whatever you find in your coefficient of money making you somewhat happy, well, I could have been because you were happier to begin with. So it puts you more doubts on that question of money to happen. And I find myself, I find it so striking that even us economists have always thought, have taken societies, like have taken it on as if it can only be one direction, money to happiness, but never, I mean, our 2012 P&E S paper was the first one to really put this properly on its head and ask the question, wait a second, how about reverse causality here? It's also very interesting. I'm going to invoke the classics again that, you know, there is a view in some religions and in some philosophies like stoicism that it's kind of all in your head or most of it. And I always liked Aristotle saying, you know, money is not everything, that's not happiness, but it sure helps to have enough so that you're not suffering. So he really, he didn't express it as the diminishing marginal utility of money, but he said, you need enough and in fact implicitly said you need enough to be able to be a philosopher, you know, to have time to think, to have time for leisure, not to be completely overwhelmed with trying to just put food on the plate. And so he had that idea and I always liked that because there are always extremes in everything we're talking about. One extreme is it's all money and I think this whole field that you're leading has moved the discussion away from that very naive idea, but that idea was around and it's still in a lot of people's heads. I just got to get rich, that's the only way I'm going to be happy. On the other hand, there's the other extreme which is, you know, it doesn't matter at all. It's just, I can accept anything and life doesn't work that way either. It's really something in the middle. And it also belies one of the fears about this whole line of study and whole line of approach, which our dear friend and colleague and Nobel laureate Amarche Sen always worried about, which is, well, you'll talk poor people into being satisfied. And that's what's dangerous about this because, you know, the poor person will be told, you should just be satisfied, but it's not like that either really. Poor people want enough that they're financially comfortable. Now, you raised a very, very interesting point and there's a whole discussion about it in the text, which is that many things contribute to happiness, but happiness contributes to many practical things as well. And you've just mentioned one that if young people are happy, it turns out that's not only predictive, but probably causal, that they're going to be more successful later on because they'll take on more challenges, they'll invest, they'll be more sociable, they'll be more aspirational. But you point out many areas where the causation is not to happiness, but from happiness to better outcomes. And I wonder if you could just take us through a few of those because they're fascinating. Yeah, well, Jeff, remember in 2014, I think in our world, happiness support, we sort of rounded up all of the evidence and we call it the objective benefits of subjective well-being. And that kind of is a good segue, I think, into this material. But you're absolutely right. So there's a lot of these positive spillover effects of being able to raise well-being. We mentioned one, doing better in sort of job outcomes and the salaries attached to it later on. And your intuitions were spot on and we were able to find the ways in which and why. That is like people become more sociable and more opportunities coming their way, they're more likely to be promoted if they are in a positive vibe around them. Other elements down the line consequence would be better health. Richard mentioned longevity and better health behaviors, more pro-social behaviors. People who are happier are more likely to donate, more likely to volunteer their time, et cetera. The one that I focused a lot of time on and implicitly today, online on management signs, the papers finally come out is the example of the link between how you feel and how productive you are at work right then. So we've for the first time been able to causally nail through a massive field experiment in collaboration with British Telecom to show that if you feel better from one week to another, that has a massive impact on, say, weekly sales. How could you do that? That sounds like a... Jeff, I'll be very brief. The way we've been able to do this is by leveraging the weather differences around the call centers of BT. So you're going to love this. It took us three years to get to causal evidence and the referee's really pushing on this. And it's not just the weather differences around the call centers when the call center employees came in that influenced their well-being, which was the exogenous shock on them. In other words, if the weather is bad, people are down. We're down. And then if they're down, then you look at how productive they are. But in a way that the weather won't affect directly. Exactly. So the calls that were coming in from work around the country. Not about the local weather. But the referees pushed us one step further. It wasn't just the weather impact as the call center employees walked in to door that morning, the local weather. They forced us to go one step further. Also look at the exposure. So the 16 call centers, we had to nail down the extent of window coverage to see how the interaction between the weather that day and the exposure to it to improve the accuracy of the effects. When it was bad weather and there was a lot of exposure to it because it was lots of glass windows, the effect was stronger than it was bad weather and there was little exposure to the weather. And so we were able to... Anyway, you see where I'm heading with this. So it was quite something to nail this, but we're there. So there's now causal effects, feel evidence for the link between how we feel and how productive we are. Phenomenal. Richard, one of the things that you have been leading on like you to describe it is a kind of grassroots level effort to help people in communities to find higher levels of well-being in part by getting together to build social connections, trust networking and so on. One of the themes of Aristotle is that our relations with others, whether they're virtuous, trustworthy and so forth, actually raises our own well-being and this is a big theme of the textbook. Also describe how community plays a role in all of this and what the implications are for how we should think about this issue rather than one individual as a time, but actually in building community. When you started on the movement, let me just say a little about the movement, then we come to community in general, but we live in a largely secular age. So the ethics that used to come to people through religion are not coming on the back of that. They need to come on the back of something else. And we believe that that should be the great enlightenment ideal that the way you should live is to try and contribute whatever you can to the happiness of the world around you and so the driving force for that movement that you mentioned. And what is the name of the movement so people can look it up? It's called Action for Happiness, Action for Happiness. The pledge that all the members take is I will try to create as much happiness as I can in the world and as little unhappiness. And I think that's a really inspiring message coming from the enlightenment. And we're seeing in particular at the moment, adolescents and young adults, is terribly uncertain about what they should be doing in their lives. But this is an incredibly important and stabilizing message. But it's a message for all of us. So the question is, how can we live well? It's not easy to live a good, balanced and relatively unselfish life without some framework that helps keep you motivated. And that's the idea of Action for Happiness. People come together on a regular basis around the ideal of how they're trying to live. All of us imperfectly. And how we can be sustained in coping with our own inner demons and helping other people in their lives and maybe with some of their problems too. So people meet regularly, but having taken obviously some sort of course through which they learn the secrets how to live a good life which is satisfying to you and to the people around you. And now they have a textbook for that also. This course, Jeff, has been subjected to a trial. And these are the remarkable results that after this eight session course, two months afterwards, people are still as much happier as the results of the course as if they had found a partner for life or a job from being unemployed. So there's an awful lot that can be done. Not by experts teaching, but this is volunteer led. There are also, of course, very good courses online. But coming back to your more general point about community. Of course, we are social animals. Your friend, Larry Soto, I think, was the first person to use that. Zohan Politikan, as they said in the group. We are getting our enjoyment from interaction with other people. We are getting our support from other people. We're getting our sense of identity from other people. And it's been shown many times over that how long people live depends on the strengths of their social connections when they are measured earlier in their life. And the thing which, of course, is a way of expressing your commitment to the community is to volunteer your services to help in local associations, even sports clubs, or helping other people who are in trouble. One of the interesting things you point out is arts and sports are very real. Well, of course they are, but actually they show up empirically as very important builders of community. They do. We've just had a very interesting experience in the lockdown here because people were encouraged to volunteer to help people who were isolated doing their shopping, taking them to the hospital. And there was huge over-subscription of volunteers. And it was a random allocation who was asked to do the volunteering. And it was found that the people who did the volunteering increased their life satisfaction quite substantially relative to other people. We should explain to listeners that any time there's a random allocation, economists see an opportunity to study the effect of that. And so you have been able to use that to see whether those who were lucky to get into this desirable situation actually achieved a higher level of well-being. Yes, and they did. And they did. So this is one aspect of community that gives you an opportunity to help other people. As Adelaï Lama always says, I benefit as much as the people that I help when that happens. Let's turn to the conclusions of the book, which is government. Because you give a lot of assignments to government to say, you have to do things differently in view of all of this evidence. What are you doing chasing variables, GDP, or whatever it is, that when you could really be helping directly by measurement and then by policies to promote well-being in the society. And you show also the studies that show if governments do that, they actually benefit as well by focusing on well-being. Maybe you could describe that two-way result as we conclude the talk right now. Maybe Yannem Manuel to comment on that. You go first. I will. So yes, in two chapters, one called how government affects well-being and then the opposite direction, how well-being affects voting and political behavior, we sort of round up all the evidence. And it's quite striking that quality of government, whether it's government effectiveness, rule of law, regulatory quality, or control of corruption is very positively associated obviously with well-being. Maybe it will not come as a surprise. There's probably a lot of other covariates, but still there's definitely something very powerful about what governments can do about themselves to improve the well-being. And I think it's very important and striking. And I think probably everyone listening can feel it also. When our government's misbehaving, when it's cheating, when it's corrupt, you really feel bad, not only about that, but it really is depressing actually. I mean, it's very annoying. I couldn't agree more. And I'm literally looking at the graph on page 258 where we look at the quality of, you know, democratic quality of governments, whether it's voice and accountability or political stability, which kind of refers to the point you're making. And the correlation is just massive. And obviously Denmark, Sweden do very well. And then you've got places like, you know, Bangladesh, Tanzania, well, Tanzania is fine with others at the bottom. And you can tell it impacts negatively population well-being. But then when you turn it around, what I think is really ultimately going to get the policymakers interested in this, is there some... Or the politicians even more than the policymakers. The politicians is obviously their self-interest, which tends to be focused on staying in power or reelection. And what we found here is thanks to one fantastic work by George Warden, and Rich and I have contributed a little bit to that in later stages, is the idea that if you look at levels of well-being prior to elections from one sort of electoral period to another, you find that nothing, literally nothing, better predicts how the incumbent vote goes than subjective well-being, measures of life to the suction. And we compare and contrast that to the traditional stuff, like inflation and GDP and employment levels, even sort of ethnic mix of the local populations. And you find that, yes, these matter, but well-being, how people feel, is obviously how they interpret the outside world around them. These changes, economic and social, they interpret that as the crops hit up and they're subject to well-being, and that's what gets out on the vote. So as one of the cartoons in the book emphasized, it's not the economy's stupid, it's the well-being. Precisely, yeah. And it's really important. And that brings us to the 18th chapter, very important. And Richard, you talk about how government should think about what they're doing and think about it differently from what they're doing. Tell us what a well-being is. So going back to the Great Enlightenment ideal, we want governments to direct their policies to maximize the well-being of the population. And Thomas Jefferson said, the care of human life and happiness is their sole legitimate objective of government. Absolutely right. You can't think of any other provided the happiness is relatively fairly distributed. So we have been campaigning to try to get governments to make well-being that goal. Of course, some governments have started using this language as a well-being economy governments alliance which was led by originally New Zealand, now has Finland and other countries in it. And the idea should be that if you imagine a country with a given budget, how do they spend their money? They should be evaluating all the policy proposals that are coming their way in terms of the well-being generated per dollar of expenditure. That's the proper measure of cost effectiveness that we are pushing. In our own country here, we now have the leader of the opposition who may become the prime minister in two years. We don't know. He has said that he will require the Treasury, the Finance Ministry to evaluate all policies in terms of their effects on well-being as well as gross. So this could be an interesting experiment in really applying some of the principles in this book. But we're trying to promote this idea worldwide. We are involved, Jan and myself, in a new movement called the World Well-Being Movement, which is centered in Yans Institute, but the Worldwide Movement, to get countries to adopt well-being as their goal for their governments and, of course, as a major purpose also for any organization, be it a business or a school, because this is such a general principle. That's, I think, where we should be ending this conversation, isn't it, Jeff? This is something which overrides everything. It relates to everything the whole of life is involved in contributing to the well-being of the people. And therefore, if we think well-being as a goal, that is influencing how we should conduct every aspect of life. Well, this is a wonderful place to not end, but to take a pause. And for me to thank you, we've been speaking about well-being, science, and policy with Professor Richard Laird of the London School of Economics and Professor Jan Manuel Dinev. This is a wonderful, wonderful book. It's going to sit on the bookshelf next to the Nikomaki in Ethics and the Politics, and it's going to make a major contribution. And I'm sure that people all over the world are going to be reading it with tremendous benefit. So thank you both so much for the book and so much for the conversation today on Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs. It's been great to be together with you. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. Bye-bye, everybody.