welcome back this is all she's with lee the headline is. the u.n. vibes peace plan for syria is in chapters interest days ahead of this the sideline position rebels have refused to regimes demands for guarantees that all done nothing has calls out his troops and. also the time to egyptian presidential hopefuls have in our hands a job applications for the race to take out its seeds left by polls no barak who was ousted over a year ago the muslim brotherhood the most powerful political group has fielded

accounts that despite previous pledges not to do so triggering fears of pushing the country on a string strict islamic track. because the case of exhibit policemen most rages on buzz to bring the edge to russian arms dealer code that subset if you are supporting sentence the businessman to twenty five years back and acquiring to kill americans are next on our piece about his guests bring you another heated debate in crosstalk stay with us. please. liz liz. liz. can you. start. listening to the king live. alone and welcome to

crossfire computer in pursuit of happiness as the time finally comes when we should value qualitative measurements of well being over industries such as g.d.p. and other government statistics can and should be more focused on what is known as a national happiness index for this money still make the world go round. live you can. live. across copy in the index of happiness i'm joined by mark and l.c. in edmonton he's an economist and author of the economics of happiness building genuine wealth is also an adjunct professor at the university of alberta in london we have summer like he is a researcher and data expert at the new economics foundation center for wellbeing and also in london we have christopher snowdon he's a research fellow at the institute of economic affairs all right gentlemen this is crossed i mean you can jump in anytime you want mark you believe in an index of

happiness speaker as we all know in g.d.p. as we can all follow the stock markets and we know what financial institutions are doing if they're going up or down we know about mortgages we know just about everything you can imagine about the economy except for maybe if people are happy. i think we should i believe we already have the gallup well-being index the united states so we already are setting precedent i think we need a new accounting system not simply another index but an accounting system that actually measures well being ok christopher what do you think about that can you do it can you i can measure g.d.p. because of how good how do you measure happiness. all you can do really is ask people how happy they feel generally on a scale of zero to ten and people generally say in reasonably wealthy western societies that there are seven or eight and this is been the case for many years so a lot of things quite interesting to do these days from a policy point of view they have very little relevance and they're very little use

ok so when we go we have two points of view here what do you thing what are you following on that. well for years economists have been talked about and have dreamed about having a way of measuring utility being able to measure the success of an economy they have tended to use sort of measures i mean we fall back on things like g.d.p. because that's and it's easy to measure we can we have on our balance sheet because we can count things and in the beginning of the nineteenth century and. the twentieth century in the nineteenth century so they didn't believe that we could measure anything else now we've actually started to see that we can do some measures of people how people feel at first it might seem like a strange thing to do might seem a bit some can we trust people but actually the data that we've been getting over the last fifty years and particularly over the last sort of ten years we start getting more and more actually tells you something meaningful it does seem to tell you a story that you would expect it correlates with the things which we know to make us happy people who are people who are in good relationships are happier people who are in abject poverty less happy people who have lots of friends are happier people who do you do lots of activities outside in lives happier such as volunteering or

things so it creates a meaningful story which suggests the data isn't just people saying well ok it does tell you that something is in it does tell you differences between countries i'll give you one example in the netherlands for example the latest survey two percent of people rated themselves for having a very low level of earth of life satisfaction is one way of putting it where as in cocoa in sub-saharan africa eighty one percent of people they are unhappy this is a big difference and it's something that we can click ok mark i know that you're going to now i was looking at some of the surveys of the different reports about well being and happiness it seems to me and i don't want to be too contrarian right here but the poor you are the happier you are because that's what it looks like. well not as a sara lee i mean once one has achieved material sufficiency particularly say in bhutan there's a level of contentment that's achieved and it seems it seems paradoxical that the lower the g.d.p. per capita in some cases. of happiness again this is seemingly paradoxical

but you know the basis of good life as a result and aquinas as sufficiency of material needs and secondly riches actually and so i believe there is an interesting challenge can we achieve a degree of well being and happiness and relative to certain level of g.d.p. and i've shown that actually i think you can optimize happiness and g.d.p. around fifteen thousand dollars per capita so the challenges we face as economists can we actually create conditions which maximize our demise happiness and g.d.p. so we have to in a sense ok into the priest or what do you think about that and what is the role of the state in all of this i mean some of the mentioned a number of things a number of friends you have or what kind of relationship you have i mean that's something the state really well i certainly hope doesn't have anything to do with now in the future i mean how do you put it how do you make some kind of algorithm

for that because i couldn't even imagine that. well first of all it's not true to say that poorer countries are in any way happier than the rich countries within countries rich people are invariably happier than poor people and the rich societies around the world are generally happier than poor ones you will get some countries such as newtown and some of the same the indonesian countries some of the poorer countries are you might expect not to be quite so happy are surprisingly happy in the various reasons for that one major variable for example is religion sounds a country of belief and having a belief in god has been shown in many studies to increase your happiness but i really don't see your second question if it having friends makes you happy which clearly does it having religion makes you happy which clearly is what is the policy relevance of this town the coming government introduce some sort of theocracy can they somehow force feed our friends so you spend time with you clearly not and this

is a problem with the happiness studies is that all the all the factors that improve happiness i've heard the government can't do anything about them in the case of for example people tend to be happier in sunny weather all the kinds of be happy if their merry government can't affect that or he won't do anything about them because the government has bigger priorities so for example it might be that we would be happy if we had a huge road building exercise in britain to get people out of the misery of being stuck in traffic that's not going to do it there are any number of priorities such as you know climate change the environment the qualities diversity legislation that will block out any kind of moves that much you might make people happy ok sam i thirdly ok go ahead keep going going keep. thirdly there are the things that governments are already doing so we know that people who are very ill or unhappy we know that people who are unemployed are unhappy but we've known this for many many

years like everything else in the happiness economics it's all b.s. stuff and the government has long been pursuing an agenda of creating jobs and of improving the health service and life expectancies goes in britain by ten years in the last fifty years and again it seems to have no effect on our happiness per se but does that mean we should abandon i would say not so ok some of what do you think about that because when i think of government i tend to feel one happy go ahead. and i can think of two counter-intuitive examples or examples that have changed the way we think about things one is mental health so mental health until recently has always been considered slightly marginal no health in the health budget it's always been given less money and then various aspects of fiscal health but in fact if you look at the sort of the impact of different diseases on people's wellbeing the mental health has a much bigger impact than many other illnesses so one of the things you can take and what's one of the things that the u.k. government has done is started to take more seriously meant investing in health treatment giving it

a higher priority than it did before another example is this commuting and chris mentioned getting stuck in traffic and that's true actually one of the one study which looked at which ask people to rate health how they felt particular moment so bleak or rings often you know in have to say how or how you feel found the people at least happy not when they're at work but actually when they're commuting when they're on their way to work. now one of the things that one of the lessons that we can draw from this and other studies which show that people who commute have a longer commute have a lower level of side life satisfaction on average controlling for all other things like you know sort of income and those other things so one lesson we can learn from that is that it is that is that is that people people sometimes perhaps mistakenly think that oh if i if i get this job which will pay a higher and higher salary and i travel further or if i buy a house further out of town which are going to be a bigger house but i'll have to commute further to get to work people often get not getting more happiness when in fact it doesn't so that's ocean individual thing perhaps or something you know all those reason to believe that when i get that market i go back you know because i mean i mean this is just how you each

individual defines it i mean you can have two people in exactly the same circumstances and one could be happy and one could be unhappy and that i like this idea of an industry because all of these other industries are for the stated for financial institutions of the people to make money enough for everybody of the ninety nine percent disregard the most industries i want to believe in this but it seems to me that even if you have one or two people in the same circumstances you could have very different outcomes. let me just suggest i'm also an accountant so ok interest is in helping governments be wiser managers what i call a i well being balance sheet right now we are operating the economies without a balance sheet we use an income statement called the g.d.p. but really there's no kind of accounting for the asset sleep human the social and natural capital that actually underpin wellbeing so that's what i'm arguing for and working with governments particularly local governments and showing how the chief financial officer can start to look at investment and wellbeing assets we know that

we know the detractors to well being we know the things that create better conditions for all being so let us invest in the asset classes that actually give the best opportunity for wellbeing and a fair distribution of wellbeing across the community that the idea of you know the issue of subjective happiness and my perception of happiness which changes day to day. you know i'm not i'm not totally convinced that's particular relevance to policymakers and it's interesting to maybe have a conversation cross your cross offensive my neighbor gave me a t. shirt said happiness is overrated you know. so this this idea of subjective subjective happiness is a moving target but let me say there's a difference between i think happiness and well being and that's what the conversation in new york was about so the word wealth in the old english means the conditions of well being so what i'm arguing for is

a genuine wealth accounting system so that the wealth in the well being conditions are connected somehow with what we value boat why we love or kimi whether you're living in edmonton or london or moscow and that should be the basis of our accounting system and our reporting back to citizens about how we're doing in terms of the investment of taxes except for in those wealthy kind of ok on that note gentlemen we're going to go to a break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on valuing well being. they are to. say. dear mom i'm sorry that i had to do this i've been in so much pain in the past year

that i can't take it anymore stomach and chest pain to be getting worse and no doctor has been able to help me please know that i'll finally be at peace and with no more pain i wish i could have had a life with elizabeth always pictured her being my wife and mother to my kids i love you all see you all in heaven when your time comes i'm going to meet jesus christ. thousands of u.s. troops in iraq received one of these drugs a drug called lariam and it may have prevented many soldiers from getting sick the question tonight is whether or not soldiers were adequately warned about is where side effects serious life change and side effects. download the official t how to make a show job on the phone the i pod touch from the. jaunty life on the go. video on demand. tease mine comes

and says feeds now in the palm of your. question on the com. page to see. to remind you we're talking about how to value happy. kick. start. ok chris fran i go back to you in london and we've talked we've talked about individuals and we've talked about governments here but you know when we talk about happiness and consumption is i mean for most of all of our life all of our lives consumption has been the key factor here and consumption and capitalism have almost everything together i mean is this something the capitalist ruling class was interested in

they just want people to buy stuff ok they're not particularly happy if you're if you're worried about if you're happy about it later or not ok i mean if we look at the debt crisis of the last decade they didn't worry about our well being they just wanted to keep borrowing so i mean my point is what is the role of capitalism in the economy in all of this. well people pursue the happiness you know regardless of whether the preview to economic growth or whether pursue wealth people primarily and instinctively pursue happiness and they can do that in one of two ways they can or both ways they can vote they can vote for the politician who they think will make them most happy and they can go out and buy things and going on my things pursuing wealth trying to get a better job increasing the salary is not some narrow obscure objective that we've been focusing on too much in society it's so incredibly broad it's the broadest possible aim that you can have because money's just a token with which you can do anything you want to go on by fine food or go on

holiday or stop working or retire early you will need money to do it so it's a very broad and sensible objective to pursue well for yourself because it shouldn't be early objective and if it is your objective you'll be very unhappy and i'm not can argue that sometimes there's a market failure there is buyer's remorse people sometimes buy things and then later find out that they didn't bring them as much pleasure as i thought it would but there's also government failure and most people don't get the government they vote for this is just a simple fact in britain at meaux we have a government that nobody voted for so going through is more serious and has more knock on effects on everybody then somebody going out and buying something that they don't really wants and end up selling on the second hand markets. and i probably all that insofar as consumerism is a problem that more government is the answer because that may just be or rather be more government failure ok some if i don't it's very fact that so i had some a calamity go ahead jump in i think is very sad to say that there were that the only way for people to keep their happiness is always as i did by very time for the

right people or by consuming things i mean there's many ways that you can there are many things you cannot buy in fact you can't buy love i mean it's a bit cheesy think they but it's true you can't buy love you kind of buy meaning you cannot buy a sense of self-worth and people trying to do this and they think they can buy the things in it because lots of adverts tell them that they can buy these things in. maybe that's tell them if they wear certain clothes or buy a particular car or whatever name or lack the capital self-worth but actually as we know this sort of short term feeling that they get a little buzz they get when they do by saying it's quite short last year and lasting and what people think the way that people actually can achieve those things that they want meaning the kind of good relationships etc is actually doing things and one of the things that one of the things one of the problems with the focus on g.d.p. and for example and in only it's not possible is it takes away climb from doing those other things directly so we spend our time working so that we can get all these other things that we desire when actually we can just get them directly by actually doing something ok mark if i get you up so i'll give you

a referral first christopher go first go ahead but i do know who you are as a political economist i was looking at it from measurable outcomes there's a politics and there's economics of course people pursue love and friendship and all these things of the free and there at the end of the day probably the most important thing but money does provide freedom and it does provide a certain degree of happiness you will need to put food on the table at some point how you divide your time up afterwards is entirely up to you but you do have the freedom to go out and get a part time job your work life balance is entirely a matter for you and it's clearly going to be different for a twenty three year old city trader than it is for a fifty year old mother of four but that's for the individual to decide and not the government's ok mark if i go shelly that's the problem ok let me go to mark in edmonton i mean i kind of money go on that side of christopher here i mean people do accumulate wealth so they can do with they want to do ok that's why people do it and maybe there's certainly people now i've met him i was in investment banking

money for money sake but i don't think that they are the majority of think most people he want to accumulate some kind of wealth and security so they can do with they want all the things that we've talked about on this program. i agree i think having a certain stock of financial capital so that you can pursue happiness and relationships and meaningful work i think i try to live that my in my own life let me let me raise the bar a little bit and say that one of the proposals i made in new york which was never discussed was the connection of well being to margery policy in other words instead of money being dead as it currently is we have an international debt crisis we connect the creation of money to these wellbeing accounts and that's a radical idea. but it's not within within the realm of possibilities we can attach a creation money to anything we want whether it's debt or seashells and i promise and tally sticks in the u.k. experience so my proposal is that we rethink the entire monetary policy structure

of the world we look at the creation of money in parallel with well being conditions so we're actually investing in the real assets or we're going to state the possibility for a good life for everybody ok mark can you give us an any one example of what you mean by that because that's really deep go ahead. one example for example i just said the nations run without a balance sheet most the most coca-cola can run without a balance sheet and i'm saying that if the federal reserve or the bank of england or the bank of canada had some type of asset account so you know the infrastructure the bridges in the hospitals the health of our forests and well ok perhaps some proxies for the degree of trust and relational capital in society we could actually intentionally attach the creation of money. you know the production of bonds or credit in the private banking sector would also be involved here i think this is a really exciting new frontier and i think it's possible i don't think this is

dreaming in color i think in our history abraham lincoln basically said as much before he died that the matter the government can create sufficiency of liquidity to want to facilitate the well being of the people the united states i think it is incumbent on us as part of this conversation to think about the role of money and how we can reinvent the creation of money ok christopher what do you think about that because a lot of people would say in light of what we just heard from mark is that you know it's still the market is the best mechanism to decide on the distribution of investment into an economy would you still do that in light of the conversation about about well being and happiness yes absolutely yes. prices and bodies are to be decided by the market i would be very wary but the market has engendering out but you chris where the market hasn't done very well recently and for me for actually quite a few years for quite

a few people the i'm gay because there's no one there's no reason to think there's some sort of a top down government control would do any better we we seem to move on from general well being science when she's fairly hazy to blaming the whole of capitalism on the events of recent years which is really just an issue with one section of the banking system. ok you know me mark you want to jump in there you obviously have the impression you disagree go ahead mark let me say as a as a new and genuine capitalist i think we're actually we're we're actually leaving a lot of profit on the table there's many assets in visible asset classes like goodwill and trust a relational couple that are the hallmark of the new companies a new economy and i think that capital markets can play a role accounts need to first of all be able account for these assets as a legitimate and realize the real value increase the relational capital we have in

society so i think markets and the capital capitalism large. is isn't in line for a completely new retrofit and i think not to throw it out in fact to marry this well being. peace and aspirations to in fact a new kind of capitalism that i think is more enlightened ok from what you think about it a new form of capitalism and it takes into consideration wellness and happiness i mean that's that's sound snobbery. well i think the key currency and one that we haven't talked about so far apart from well being and and your usual i think eight dollars in pounds is our environmental resources and this is one thing this is one reason why it does make sense you could perhaps if you were living one hundred two hundred years ago i might have said oh you know government doesn't have a role it's not in well being it's not you know it's not it's not necessary for government to get it to interfere or to be interfering but at the moment we have a situation where our environmental resources are getting more and more constrained

there nine almost that we know only billion people on the planet and by twenty fifty the planet isn't getting any bigger the amount of resources we're having is in fact getting less and we do need to start thinking a little bit more seriously about whether we have enough resources to achieve the kind of quality of life that some people at least have been enjoying in the in the beginning of this century and the last century and the evidence just that we don't have enough and that's one of the reasons why we do have to start thinking about well being dated a bit more bit more seriously because we have to start thinking well there's a lot of people here who are consuming a lot of his or who continue a lot of resources so for example in the last the last ecological footprint analysis americans consume let's say poor planets what if everyone in the world can seem like people in america then we would need four planets to sustain to sustain our going to consumption which we don't have that and yet they only achieve in terms of wellbeing in terms of life satisfaction life expectancy lower life expectancy love life out of action than a country like costa rica which consumes one quarter of the resources so that gives you brings you know the dimension of efficiency so if there are some things that

some countries are doing which is inefficient in terms of converting environmental resources into welding that's something those countries need to be looking christopher so let me let me pose or just way in light of what summer just said so . britons of americans should consume a large large ok let's call it let's get out seventy five percent of it or they could be happier people. i would very much doubt and i do know people perceive happen isn't the people expect expects to out about a lifestyle than their parents did and we've been expecting that for several centuries thanks to consume a cop was making that possible and what were you saying today in this discussion summarizes what's wrong with the the well being agenda it just means anybody's pet projects can be tied in with this very very hazy loop sponge of evidence that doesn't really tell you anything apart from the obvious and rather than going through the the revealed preferences of what people actually want and some of their voting patterns and their consumption patterns we just bring in any old ideas which

people would not vote for nor purchase and the new economic foundation for example has to have a steady state economy they want the economy effectively to be to be flotsam in a state of recession or near recession i think it's very unlikely that such an economy would make people happy in crowds i think it would my people extremists are all right gentlemen you know between what is the economy economics is called the science of of doom ok thanks to my guests today in edmonton in london face to our viewers watching us here are the phoenix family members. can't seem. to keep your secret.

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