 Good afternoon. Welcome to the launch of the World Happiness Report 2023 and Happy International Day of Happiness. I'm your moderator, Sarah P. Jones. It's my honor and my pleasure to welcome everyone here today. I'm joined here by the editors of the World Happiness Report, John Hallowell, Richard Layard, Yana Manuel-Dineau, Laura Ackman, Jeffrey Sachs, and editor Shen Wang. It's not here but we do have the authors also of the chapters of the report. Our program today is as follows. I have a few opening remarks and then we'll get to the exciting results. Each of the chapter authors will share their thoughts from their chapter and all of you will have the opportunity to ask questions of the editors and the authors. Then we'll deliver you back to your day in about an hour's time after a panel discussion. Please take a moment to answer our three questions survey about where you're joining us from and why we would love to hear from you and the link is in the chat. Please also type your questions into the chat as we go along throughout the hour. I'll be putting those questions live to the editors and authors. Now for the last 11 years, the World Happiness Report has given governments, the UN, policymakers, people on the street facts and guidance about what drives happiness and well-being around the world. Each year the world holds its breath for March waiting for the world rankings to reveal who is the happiest country on earth. Each year those at the top and those at the bottom are splashed across the cover of every major newspaper in the world. To become one of the countries at the top of the World Happiness Report rankings has gone from being a novel measurement 11 years ago to becoming one of the most coveted annual honors in government and economics. To strive for the happiness and well-being of your citizens pays off for countries at the top of the list quite literally. These countries enjoy a better economy, less corruption, and better life satisfaction for citizens. The report authors and editors have a mission they carry out every year with your happiness in mind to find out what drives happiness, to teach governments, organizations, and people like you and me what drives our collective happiness, and to point out pursuits that are not driving our happiness as much as we think they are. But if there's one thing I know about while you have all zoomed in today it is not to find out what makes you and your community unhappy it's because you want answers to the question what brings us happiness. Other than what is the meaning of life this is the question most people feel is the most important question in the world especially in the post pandemic era. Many of us only ask ourselves this question when we think about making a big change like careers or relationships. But until I read the world happiness report I never once asked myself that question before an election. Who will I vote for to affect my happiness? Who will I vote for to secure the happiness of my children and my children's children and how can I and my community hold our governments accountable for that happiness? That's probably because my life experience is a naive reflection of the security the lack of corruption relative in my home countries not living in a war access to higher education the freedoms of choice that that brings the excellent support network I was lucky enough to be born into marry into and the friendships I take time to nurture but many people in this world do not share my experience and in fact live in the world's upside down. And if their governments do not aspire for citizen happiness they risk relegating their people to the upside down too. The world happiness report was originally intended for governments and policy makers but after 11 years it's not just governments who need to assess happiness using these measures it's also you and me personally. Why? Because once you and I recognize the value of these societal contributors to our happiness and the happiness of those around us you and I will fight for them. You and I will defend them we will vote for those who defend them and hold them accountable and we will take action in our communities to move the dial on these factors of happiness. So that's enough from me and my perspective on happiness. Here from the real experts it's my honor to introduce professor of the Lord Richard Layard founder director of London School of Economic Performance and co-director of the Center's program on community well-being. Richard's co-written chapter one of the report the happiness agenda the next 10 years. Richard please let's hear about the future I hand the floor to you. Well thank you very much Sarah. So this is of course a joint chapter by the three founding editors of the World Happiness Report Jeff Sacks John Hanwell and myself and we had a great time and took a lot of trouble writing this because of course it's about what the deepest beliefs that we all have about the goal of our society and the goal that we believe in is that we want a society where people are as happy fulfilled and satisfied with their lives as possible. So that's what the rankings in the World Happiness Report are illustrating but then we only get a society like that if people take care of each other. So the kind of civic virtue that Aristotle talked about is crucial if we are to have a happy society. Aristotle used the term eudaimonia to describe what he called the activity of the soul according to virtue and at the country level it's clear that if we have people like that we will also have people who are feeling happy and fulfilled. So eudaimonia and happiness are going hand in hand when we compare one country with another. If you think about individuals it's not quite as simple as that is it because virtuous behavior does of course very often give people a positive psychological glow but there are also many unselfish people for example many carers who are below the average of happiness but of course they're doing a lot of good and it's very important they do what they do so we need to train all citizens in the skill of virtue and that's a crucial means to achieving a happy society. Now there's another point what is really important is not just the average happiness of the citizens it's especially important that as few of them as possible are in misery. So one essential step to avoiding misery is of course to have a system of human rights such as the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights that is a basic means to the end of a happy society. Another really important point is of course the interest of future generations because the well-being and happiness approach says that everybody's happiness matters wherever and whenever they're born. The happiness of future generations is as important as our own subject only to a very small discount factor. So a key element again in the happiness agenda is sustainability and the 17 sustainable development goals are essential in fact their best thought of us sustainable well-being goals maybe after 2030 when we have to have the next lot of goals they could be efficiently designated sustainable well-being goals or SWPs so that's the goal. The goal is the happy society and especially the absence of misery. How do we get there? Well obviously that agenda implies a different set of priorities for every organisation one that reflects the evidence on what most affects well-being. So for governments the rule must be to choose those policies which produce the most well-being per dollar of public cost. This means for example more evidence-based treatment for mental health problems including for children and adults with depression and anxiety disorders and addiction. Britain has the programme of improving access to psychological therapies that's being copied in very many other countries other areas where cost-effective policies need expanding obviously well-being in schools services for youth and support for the elderly. Let me move on to to business because the well-being agenda also calls for change in the priorities of business. Profit is of course a necessity but the existence of a business is only justified by what it contributes to the well-being of society meaning that not just the shareholders but also workers consumers and suppliers. Similarly schools should have the well-being of their children as an explicit measured goal alongside their academic performance and they should use evidence-based methods to improve the license faction of their children which would also of course improve their academic performance. To us as researchers the well-being agenda is also a challenge. We are going to need in this next decade to be able to provide policy makers with user-friendly models of the cost effectiveness of policies in terms of their impact on well-being and of course going back to what I just said about aerosol we need a high priority for research on how to help people develop the habits of living virtuously. I'd like to end on a personal note by praising two organizations which aim to produce happy society. One is action for happiness which aims to help individuals to lead happier and more compassionate lives. Its members pledge to try and create as much happiness as they can in their lives and of little unhappiness and the other is the newly launched world well-being movement which aims to get decision makers to measure the well-being of those that their policies and decisions are faked and to make that well-being into the overarching objective of their organizations. So here are the main points that I've been making. The goal is the society with high levels of life satisfaction. The means is high levels of civic virtue which includes eulomania and contributes to eulomania. The third is the prevention of misery where the universal declaration of human rights is so important. Future generations matter why the SDGs are important but hopefully it would become SWGs. Policy priorities have to change and so do our research priorities and it's a really important area of research well-being for policy and decision purposes and there are two good movements that are pulling their weight in the right direction. So thank you all so much for listening. I hope you enjoy the report especially chapter one. Richard thank you. Before we move on I do have one question for you. Nikomaki in ethics is not something I ever thought I'd be talking about after leaving undergrad but the three of you brought up in chapter one. Eudaimonia requires moderation, fortitude, a sense of justice, an ability to form and maintain friendships, citizens in the community. These things appear to be some of the greatest challenges facing young people in marginalized people today. Can you clarify a bit more the relationship between life satisfaction and eudaimonia? Sure yes. I mean life satisfaction is how you feel about your life and the goal is to have people who feel really good and fulfilled and satisfied in their lives. Then there's the issue how do you get to that and you're not going to get a happy society if everybody is just pursuing their own happiness. They've got to be pursuing the happiness of other people. There is an important extent to which that will also make them feel good but they should be doing it whether it has that effect or not. If we had to have a society which is happy overall. So the pursuit of virtue is a central feature of eudaimonia and it's a key element in producing a happy society and I think that we don't want the idea of a happier society to get confused with people thinking they should be happy all the time just pursuing their own happiness. We want it to be an inspiring vision which involves you in trying to make other people happy whatever contribution you can make and of course as an empirical matter finding that your life is more meaningful if you do that. I think that particularly for young people who many of whom seem to be quite uncertain what should be the purpose of our lives I think this is a really inspiring ideal and so just all of us. Thank you Richard thank you for that. I would love to call to the to the dais here University Professor Jeffrey Sachs now Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University founding co-editor of the World's Happiness Report President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Podcaster for Thinker Doers and Prevers. Jeff can I hand it over to you for some remarks? Absolutely Sarah thank you and a happy day of happiness to everybody. It's great to be with you sorry to be joining just a few minutes late I'm at a UN meeting in Vienna so I just got off a panel and I'm happy to be with you just now and delighted and always honored to follow Richard Laird who has been a great pioneer in this area together with John Helliwell and I've been thrilled to be working together with them and Yana Manuel Denev and Lara Ackman and other colleagues during the past 10 years on this agenda. We need this more than ever the world is not in a in a happy state in fact it's in an extraordinarily dangerous and challenged state and I'll just say a few words more about what Richard was saying about virtue because virtue ethics and happiness in our ancient traditions our sage traditions whether of Plato and Aristotle or Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism and other great ancient wisdom traditions went hand in hand that to be happy was a skill that one developed by being a good person and Aristotle explained that being a good person meant being good to oneself in the sense of taming one's bad instincts and using reason and taking care and being temperate and moderate and so forth but also being good to others because as Aristotle said we are zoan politic on we are political or social animals we only find our happiness in society and so he argued for two kinds of sociality in the Nicomachean ethics he wrote a whole chapter about friendship as vital to happiness and in the companion volume the politics he wrote about civic virtues living in a polis in a community political community as a decent people we forgot a lot of that in modern history the ancient traditions were brushed aside by some very bad philosophy of Hobbes and others who said people are evil they're nasty they're ruthlessly ambitious insatiable in demands and it's all a game of power or wealth and so modern philosophy turned away from the issue of personal and social virtues and turned to how to tame the bad instincts of human beings who were pretty incorrigible and Hobbes model Hobbes said you need a Leviathan and all powerful government Machiavelli just accepted that politics isn't about the common good politics is about the prince keeping power and later writers in this tradition just talked about preference maximization but it was all about maximization it wasn't about moderation it wasn't about friendship it wasn't about the skills of being a good citizen in a political community well i i think we need to go back to the ancient wisdom fortunately when you do that around the world whether it's a Confucian thought or Buddhist thought or Hindu thought or Christian thought or Jewish thought or ancient Greek philosophy you find deep similarities which is a good society needs good people it's one of the roles of the society to help nurture good people who know how to behave take care of each other have generosity have moderation understand what the common good is about and i think that the research over the last 10 years of the world happiness report really emphasized this point and this year's excellent chapters and i just want to thank all the people who wrote the excellent chapters for example the chapter on state effectiveness which is a terrific paper the chapter on altruism and happiness are emphasizing different aspects that we we don't achieve our happiness alone we don't achieve our happiness by maximizing our utility function by the most goods we can buy or the most wealth we can accumulate we achieve our happiness within societies we need governments that function for the common good like Aristotle said in in the politics not like Machiavelli said like Aristotle said we need that and we need our own proper way of behaving towards others that's what the chapter on altruism emphasizes people who are altruistic are happier people but it makes sense it's people who have an other regarding this who live for others and with others well and i would like to see this instilled in the coming years i also would like training of our national leaders in virtue and happiness before they blow us all up because they know a lot about war but they don't know much about talking with each other they don't know much about sitting down with each other they don't know much about negotiating with each other here we have a war raging in which the us and russia are facing off and biden hasn't picked up the phone wants to talk to president poot well i would like us to train our political leaders in virtue also thanks a lot it's a an incredible honor to be part of this venture as richard said we need to put happiness at the center of our politics at the center of our personal lives at the center of our attention in schools and how we help children to become fulfilled uh members of society and to build the skills for happiness in our workplaces yanaman well the nev has been writing so beautifully in many reports and this is what we're aiming to do in the in the second decade of the world happiness report so thank you very much and really a happy day for everybody thank you for joining well thank you jeff thank you for those remarks and i think we all uh agree that we hope that the leaders of our worlds will listen to those kinds of messages listen to each other and that's virtue becomes at the forefront of our leaders minds now we're going to turn to john hello well co-editor of the world happiness report to reveal what's behind the rankings this year and to tell us about how benevolence is affecting our happiness john thank you sarah uh you could see uh those of you who are dialing in from all over the world uh how much fun uh jeff and rich and i had doing chapter one which they both have been telling you about i'm going to take you down into some of the data uh i'm going to start first of all by showing you the rankings that bring so many people to the report of course for us the rankings are just something that bring people in we want to then focus back on some of the issues about what really does underlie a happier society now this year you'll notice i've shown here in the first slide the top 25 countries um that we also have added not just the rank on the left but the range within which the rank for each country falls which is shown on the right of that picture and it'll be in the version you pick up online as well uh that's the top of the rankings there the next slide sharing is the bottom of the rankings and you can see what a huge gap there is there are only three countries that are not sharing a rank range with anybody else and it's finland at the top and lebanon and afghanistan at the bottom all of which have their own uh values uh distinct from any other countries in the middle countries can be within a range of 20 or 30 whether probability range one of the things we've done this year is dig deeper into the inequality of well-being and asking ourselves how to put our smart ways to measure the inequality of well-being and the one we came up with and we can look at the next slide now is what is the happiness gap between the average in the happiest half of the population and the unhappiest half in general of course uh we've found lots of evidence and richard and jeff already alluded to this that people are happier when they're living in countries that are more equal now the happiness gap than you'd think would be smaller in the happier countries there are some very unhappy countries that have a small happiness gap and there you see afghanistan at the top that's because everybody's unhappy so there's not a big gap between them you could have the same thing at the top as well but in general people are happier living in countries where the inequality of happiness is less and so that is in some sense the empirical backstop to what richard and jeff have already been saying that you have to focus on the happiness of others but it turns out that countries that do people that do societies that do are themselves happier for that emphasis on looking after each other next slide please now we're looking at what's happening over the last 15 plus years for the top half and the bottom half and so the solid top line is the green line is the mean it looks pretty constant there over that period the top and bottom halves look to your eyes as though they've been getting further apart they have indeed if you compare the first half of the period to the second half of the period the average gap has risen by almost half a point so that there's more inequality of well-being than there was before focusing on the three covid years to the three years proceeding which is one of the other focuses of this year's report there has been no widening of that gap within that period the overall level of misery has been roughly constant during this period but that's a good sign of course you'd like to see it coming down next slide please thank you Sharon so one of the striking things that's been true for several years is the convergence between western and eastern europe and so here we've got the top and bottom halves in western europe and in central and eastern europe you see that happiness gap is less in western europe than in eastern europe but the striking thing is that the average levels of well-being have been rising and inequality dropping in central and eastern europe relative to western europe and that convergence has been going on a long time it essentially there are no changes in that if you want to look at the covid years which you can do on this picture you'll see a low for the world as a whole average life evaluations in the three covid years are essentially exactly the same as they were in the three previous years but in western europe there has been a decline that you see as the especially for those in the bottom half of the distribution you'll see for those at the top it's really no difference but from the in the bottom is where it's been felt as much of what we read in here would tell us next please another feature isn't it thinking about the convergence from east to west the three countries that have converged fastest in eastern europe or let you any of the three Baltics Estonia and Latvia where they've all come up dramatically and you can see it shown even more dramatically if you look at the shares in misery the portion of the population answering three and below is the pink and then the gray gray pink is is those answering four so you can use two different measures of misery but you can see by all measures these countries are happier than they were 15 years ago and they're the most dramatic convergers they've come up an average of about 25 places in the rankings each over the last seven or eight years next so the next thing we're going to look at is the some of the emotions here we have enjoyment and worry and you can see each half of the population so there's been a bit of a spread between the half there's more of top bottom spread in both worry and enjoyment so there's some inequality there but a notable thing here we can put enjoyment and worry on the same graph we're talking bottom and they don't overlap a general feature of these emotional results we have is that the positive emotions on average are twice as prevalent as negative ones next and this is social support and helping a stranger the social support is the key do you have someone to count on in times of trouble perhaps our central variable in our whole modeling of well being it's of critical importance you can see there has been a growing gap the there has been no decline in the social support for the top half of the population although there has been some at the bottom so there's been a growth in the gap between the two helping a stranger is one of the striking things about last year's report and it happened again this year is a huge rise in the extent to which people reached out to help a stranger notably on this picture you can see it was true for the happiest half of the population and the unhappiest half equally have come from where they were to something that now is a level of 25 percent higher than pre-pandemic next I'm going to I'm running out of time so I'm because we've only got an hour and we we want to make sure you hear the next three chapters so you these are different groups of countries that we divided and then we found that in the first years of COVID the countries that had an eliminator strategy had much lower death rates it's the western pacific region of WHO and the Nordics other than Sweden and next slide please and we show even when you put all three years together because now essentially under Omicron all strategies are off the table and death rates are converging around the world but it still remains true over those three years that the eliminators no longer have a current advantage but they had an advantage in the past that leaves them definitely better off next please and this is going back to the benevolence you looked at health stranger and these are the different measures last year they were strikingly up you can see in 2022 they're still way above what they were pre-pandemic next please and now this is going to Russia and Ukraine another example case we've looked at you see average life evaluations in the two countries starting in 2012 after the annexation of Crimea and the gap rose mainly by drops in Ukraine to a gap of two which is in life evaluation terms is huge it's an equal to the multiple of levels of income per capita they converge gradually until 2021 and then you can see what happened in 2022 on the right hand panel B you can see what happens to the approval of national leadership so we've got three measures here we've got respondents in Russia and their approval you can see both in 2014 and in 2022 Russians generally approved of their leader more under what was being done the same is true not in the post 2014 period but definitely in 2022 in Ukraine so that the trust in own government has risen in Ukraine by much more than in Russia putting them at the same levels in 2022 the dotted line shows you the trust among Ukrainians in the Russian government and you can see that fell dramatically in 2014 and remained about about 10 percent averaging across the country until 2022 when it essentially disappeared everywhere in the country of a thousand people surveyed there were only two who had any approval of Russia's policy next and worry of course each time and this is especially in Ukraine and not in Russia rose in 2014 and then sharply again in 2022 acts of benevolence and here we're getting back to something we'll hear more about from chapter four those acts of benevolence were up all over the world during the pandemic years including both Ukraine and Russia the dotted lines of the helping stranger lines which took the biggest increases you'll notice in Ukraine both measures are up in 2022 and in Russia both measures are down in 2022 so though both took part in the previous post the reactions are different during 2022 next please here we have something new this year where we were looking at benevolence sorry social connections there's a meta-gallup survey looking in detail per seven countries what are the average levels of feelings of social support feelings of social connection and of loneliness people talk about the pandemic of loneliness but in fact during 2022 which is when this survey was taken place in each of these seven countries spanning six global regions the prevalence of social support and social connection was double that of loneliness and the next picture will show you that not only was the prevalence much greater but so was the effects so if you use these positive things they're not only more prevalent than the negatives they were more important than the negatives in determining your satisfaction well the purpose of these four components of happiness and our examples of the evolution of happiness I've taken you through now is to help explain the key factors that have made it possible for life evaluations to remain on average across the world as stable as they have during three years of crisis thank you very much and I turn over now to the chapters from our invited guests who have been wonderful at providing an opportunity to dig deeper John thank you so much it's my pleasure now to introduce the co-author of the well-being in state effectiveness chapter Joseph Marshall from the London School of Economics who co-authored this chapter Bristol Timothy Bestley and Torsten Pearson we turn now from the benevolence of individuals to how effectively our countries are operating and how that affects our happiness and well-being Joe great thank you very much Sarah I will try and follow on from those giants of happiness research um yes my name is Joe Marshall and I'm one of the authors on chapter three uh one of my co-authors Tim Bestley is also here in the call but unfortunately our third co-author Torsten Pearson could not make it today um so as we've seen today and the world happiness report has been arguing this for a long time uh raising the well-being of citizens should be a primary goal of governments worldwide but how exactly can governments pursue happiness as a policy goal so our chapter attempts to flesh out this theory by first introducing the components of an effective state as per the Bestley person framework popularized in their book Pillars of Prosperity and then we attempt to link these components with happiness empirically we find that core state capacities that is the ability to raise taxes to deliver services and to maintain the rule of law and the absence of repression and civil war are all strongly positively correlated with measures of well-being of the country level however the Bestley person framework stresses that there is no magic bullet when it comes to building an effective state but rather income state capacities and peace form a complex web of mutually dependent links and therefore it is useful to think in terms of of clusters in terms of groups of countries that share similar levels of capacities and peace which we find arise naturally in the data so the ultimate goal of a state is to become a common interest state which we define fully in the chapter but essentially they can be characterized by having strong state capacities and a history of peace and then crucially we find that being in such states is associated with a two-point increase in one's control ladder score of life satisfaction so given the numbers we just saw from that presentation that's pretty substantive then we find that effective states are not just instrumental to the level of happiness but also to the spread of happiness so in these common interest states not only are they the most happy but and again this rhymes with what john has just been talking about happiness is much more equally distributed across citizens finally and this should bring some comfort to those in the chapter two team their determinants of well-being that we've just discussed so GDP per capita social support healthy life expectancy and freedom to make life choices free from corruption and generosity are all strongly correlated with our measures of state effectiveness as well so we had some discussions with john and we believe that the state effectiveness measures are upstream in the causal link to the chapter two determinants so to give a concrete example of that strong collective capacity enables say vaccine provision and therefore healthy life expectancy which in turn drives happiness anyway i don't want to spoil the the contents of the chapter too much we had a lot of fun writing it we hope you enjoyed reading it and and thank you for listening great terrific joe thank you thank you very much up next are shawn roes and abigail march whose chapter doing good and feeling good will address altruism and well-being shawn and abigail on chapter four hi everyone uh thanks so much for joining us today uh my name is shawn roes i'm a postdoctoral research fellow at the icon school of medicine at mount sinai and today i'm very happy to present the highlights of chapter four for this year's world happiness report on the relationships between altruism and well-being for altruists beneficiaries and observers this work was a collaborative effort between uh me and my phd advisor abigail march who is a professor at georgetown university the last three years brought seismic changes uh to our social and emotional lives as well as mental and physical health as the covid 19 pandemic catalyzed various forms of social political and economic unrest all over the world but unanticipated positive changes were also documented during this period there was a surge in various forms of altruism during this time more people donated to charity volunteered or helped a stranger than in the years leading up to the pandemic countless people in need of assistance undoubtedly benefited from this increase in altruism with likely impacts on global subjective well-being here we're defining altruism as any costly behavior that improves the welfare of another person and does not bring any tangible benefit while subjective well-being is measured through a substance of life satisfaction and positive or negative daily emotions in our chapter we review how altruism is linked to subjective well-being for beneficiaries altruists as well as observers today i'll briefly review a few examples that demonstrate a complex bi-directional nature of these relationships around the globe but please check out the chapter for more starting off evidence suggests that altruistic acts typically do improve beneficiaries well-being which is in line with the goal of altruism this can include increasing objective indices of their well-being such as relieving a financial hardship via monetary donation or improving their physical health for example via blood donation but it can also include an often does result in greater subjective well-being of beneficiaries people on the receiving end of altruistic acts often report greater levels of happiness life satisfaction and lower levels of negative emotion however it should be noted that it is possible for altruism to lead to unintended negative effects for example beneficiaries may experience negative emotions when they feel in debt dependent or think the altruist is acting for their own gain the relationship also appears to run in the opposite direction typically altruism is the result of empathic concern elicited by someone by seeing someone in pain or distress but people who display more positive emotions are also more likely to receive help people may prefer helping those who appear happier because they're seen as more desirable social partners and those who benefit from altruism are also likely to pay the altruism forward in the future possibly due to feelings of gratitude but also guilt well it's clear that altruism improves the well-being of beneficiaries it may be less obvious it would improve the subjective well-being of altruists themselves since altruistic acts often entail a cost to the actor but it often does all over the globe it's clear that people's happiness increases after helping strangers spending money on others or volunteering and this is an effect that's particularly robust when altruistic acts are personal choice but reduced when helping is viewed as obligatory well-being increases not only the likelihood of being the beneficiary of altruism but it also increases the likelihood of engaging in altruism much work has demonstrated that people who are happier help strangers give the charity are more likely to donate blood bone marrow and organs invest more hours in volunteering spend more money on others and exert greater effort to benefit others two recent global investigations have found this at the geographic and individual level one of these studies found that country-level life satisfaction was associated with seven forms of altruism including charitable donation blood donation kidney donation volunteering helping strangers bone marrow registration and animal welfare policies in some cases acute stress is also linked to altruism this was well demonstrated during the pandemic during this period people experiencing the most stress for the most likely to exhibit increases in altruism it's maybe because this may be because fewer stress motivates people to act which can manifest as helping behavior when the stress emerges in the social context it may help to explain the surgeon altruism observed during the coven 19 pandemic and finally we briefly note that even just observing altruism can be beneficial observing altruism increases mood energy desire for affiliation the motivation to do good things for others and the desire to become a better person among other things but it should be noted that in some cases observing altruism may also leave the negative emotions for example when witnessing others deviating from norms where it's less acceptable to act altruistically or if the act makes observers feel worse by comparison but when third parties do feel the benefits of deserving altruism it may motivate them to act altruistically as well observing altruism may lead people to update their beliefs about normative behaviors and as a result adopt more altruistic norms and behaviors in the future taken together the available evidence suggests that the global increase in altruism during the pandemic is great news on multiple accounts not only is an increase in altruism good in its own right but this widespread our increase certainly almost certainly contributed to increases and remarkable resilience and global well-being during the same time period this leaves me optimistic and I look forward to the future work that will continue to unpack these bi-directional relationships which will be crucial for identifying the most effective ways to promote altruism and well-being around the world. That's all I have for now. Thanks so much for your time and attention. We're delighted to have been able to contribute to this year's report and I hope you enjoy reading the chapter. Sean thank you for that. Now let's turn to our final presenter, Johannes Ikested, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Human Centered AI at Sanford University. Johannes is going to tell us about the state of the art of measuring well-being through social media. Johannes. Hello everyone it's a pleasure to see you this morning from all across the world. It's so nice to be here so what we've seen so far is in large part based on surveys and to collect surveys from all around the world is a very heroic effort but it has certain limitations and these limitations can in part be alleviated by relying on social media data on big data sets that people naturally produce in the digital ecosystems they already inhabit, places like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, online spaces. These spaces capture the language they leave in these digital spaces leave cues how people are thinking, feeling and how they're behaving and so we can use this data to measure well-being for millions of people. We can get to parts of the world and to small areas of the world where services are not available. We can do this fairly cost effectively. We can do this below the annual level and we can do this below the national level and we can extend this measurement in principle to many constructs so not just life satisfaction and happiness but we can also think about new constructs that might be perhaps more appropriate for other parts of the world like harmony and balance and justice, things that may be valued in different parts of the world. All of this we have a sort of flexible infrastructure and of course we can go back in time right. So if there's a crisis happening in the world or an unforeseen epidemic we can go to the before days and get to get pre-event data to then compare to to post-crisis data. So in part because of the potential of these digital data spaces social media measurement is happening around the world for example the Mexican government in Neji where the the Institute for Statistics with the Mexican government has rolled out an online tool to measure affect of Mexican provinces this is online right now. We have shown that this can be done for example for Spanish provinces of course we've done this in the US and this can be down here by another research group this can be done all the way down to the census track level for cities. So these are all based on Twitter and they so these are pipelines that collect Twitter data and then they analyze it with machine learning and then they generate estimates of if nothing else happiness. Normally it tends to be a measure of sentiment or a measure of affect but we as I said we have a broader toolkit but this work has advanced that has advanced to three generations which is what we argue in our in our chapter. In generation one which I call the how hard can this be approach you take random Twitter feeds and you aggregate this and you run say sentiment against it. In generation two you get more sophisticated you think of Twitter is really a set of people that you describe and you understand and then generation three you follow people over time to understand longitudinal trends and I'm just going to showcase this a little bit so you get a sense. So generation one looks like this you take the raw tweets say you aggregate them to counties say in the US and then you're done and then in generation two a bit of a breakthrough you take the tweets you aggregate them within users and rather than have billions of tweets you now have five million users so 1.5 percent of the US population in this case that you have the tweets nested within and you can already controls for bots then you can estimate the age gender income education of these users so you can post stratify your sample you can deal with representation biases and then you get a stabilized language sample and when you use these pipelines to estimate the life satisfaction of communities by comparing what Gallup says to the language you see on Twitter in this case we use topics which are particular kind of language frequencies and we build a machine learning model just going from Twitter to life satisfaction and say if we try to predict life satisfaction from Twitter how well does it compare against what Gallup says and we benchmark this against say the logarithm of income you see that if income predicts life satisfaction this well this is the first generation of methods that predicts life satisfaction from Twitter and this is the second generation we're now moving on to the third generation and to give you an example of how good this can look this is what a map looks like that's only based from Twitter that predicts this for the US down to the county months level so looks at changes even months to months for counties and to give you a final example here for the third generation of methods that follows people over time we do everything we did before except now we look at how people change in regards to themselves which really stabilizes the variance in these models and the trends in these models and these models in the past could have been very noisy I don't know if you've ever seen a social media sort of sentiment graph but they can be very noisy and so to give you one example of what this looks like right now this is sadness in 2020 reported by Gallup if you want to remember what this be curious this is the murder of George Floyd one of the most negative affective events ever measured in Gallup data or ever measured on social media and then compare this week to week plot here against what we measure with this new Twitter pipeline and you see how stable these measurements architectures have become and so if we look beyond these three generations that have outlined here of course there's been other methods of progress in the population measurement of well-being so rather than how the data is aggregated there is more sophistication as you go through how you take language and turn it into well-being estimates from dictionaries to machine learning to all the large language models and the deep learning and GPT these these artificial intelligence systems but it actually turns out that the way you aggregate the data and the way you cluster and understand data within people is more important so I hope to have wet your appetite a little bit to read more about these methods in our chapter thank you very much for your attention yeah honest thank you for that I have a number of questions that have come from the the Q&A from our audience and I might ask if all of our editors and our authors can come to the forefront here and I have a question perhaps that I could direct to John from Gabrielle how does the trust how does the level of trust social and institutional influence the level of happiness John hello well please a short answer is deeply and everywhere one of the examples we enjoy talking about a lot is because it's instructive is that if you combine trust and benevolence as you do if you see a wallet on the street and you pick it up and go and find the person who owns it people are very much happier living in an environment where that is true and thank goodness there have been experiments showing on average people who live in high trust environments think their wallets will be returned indeed are places where wallets will be returned so that people are very good about telling whether they're in a relatively high trust place what they're very bad at is realizing how trustworthy the world is relative to what they read and hear about so on average the number of wallets that will be returned is double or more the number of people think will be returned so a trust is enormously important and be its effect is under recognized and its presence is under recognized so that has to be an important part of the story we tell well remember that next time I leave my wallet or my laptop in the back of the bus so thank you I'll be much more of an optimist I appreciate that John this is a question that perhaps could be for Richard this is from grace what are the potential and limitations of using well-being data for development policy is there room for theorizing happy development well I think it is just as relevant to development and poorer countries as it is to to richer countries and interestingly there are many common features for example if you're looking at the effect of a proportional change in income on well-being in a poor country it's exactly the same as it is in a rich country of course that the a proportional change of 10 percent in a poor country is a much smaller amount of money than a proportional change in rich country but there are those sort of basic similarities which seem to be built into human nature and equally of course the the importance of of human relationships and social context is just the same in rich countries and poor countries and perhaps I can just take the opportunity here of taking a swipe at the Maslow theory of hierarchy of emotions which implies that until you've got a decent income social connections are not so important it's not like that at all in fact the founder really of happiness studies Ed Dina did a wonderful paper in which he looked at all the different Maslow items and showed that they each have an independent effect on happiness so I think that the fundamental thing is that human needs are very similar across the whole world and we therefore need to take into account all the factors both the health factors the social relationship factors and the material factors equally in all countries. Well thank you for that I think it's about time for us to wrap up now for those of you who have posed questions into the chat we will do our utmost to answer all of them so make sure to check back in thank you to the editors and the authors of the world happiness report for joining us today for sharing their thoughts on this year's incredibly thought-provoking report and for answering all of our questions here and afterwards this year also harolds an exciting development which is the world happiness report dashboard which is now available live at the website worldhappiness.report this new interactive tool examines happiness over time in every country where the report collects data please also remember to register for for the world happiness report 2023 in Asia Pacific perspective with the editor professor Shen Wang on March 23rd to learn more about the world happiness report to dive deeper into the research or to join this team for webinars and in-person events throughout the year please register at worldhappiness.report and thank you all for observing the International Day of Happiness with the world happiness report team and myself Sarah P. Jones on behalf of the world's happiness report team and supporters I wish you a very happy day wherever it may take you and goodbye