welcome back here with our team here is a look at the top stories peace deal in danger a syrian rebels failed to provide written guarantees that will hold violence something the government says is the main condition for army withdrawal. the world's most powerful gun lobby's under fire as a string of shootings leaves matie americans appalled at the law's leans towards those pulling the trigger. plus the skill of pilots and russia is under scrutiny quoting why new crews are often unable to perform emergency landings a week after

a failed plane crash killed more than thirty people. alice for the top stories here on r t up next you know about and he's gassed bringing another serving if he would debate and crossed up to us. please. liz liz. liz. can you start. listening to the king live. the low and welcome across about computers in pursuit of happiness as the time finally comes when we should value public aid of measurements of well being or 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 to kick. start the slim. cross not be 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 some a dollar he has a researcher and data expert at the new economics foundation center for wellbeing and also in london we have christopher snowden he's a research fellow at the institute of economic affairs all right gentlemen this is crossed i mean as you can jump in anytime you want to march do you believe in an index of happiness because we all know it g.d.p. is 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

a 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. but can a how could 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 the many years so although i think it's quite interesting to do these surveys from a policy point of view they have very little relevance and they're very little use ok family guy we have two points of view here what do you think where you fall in on that. well for years economists have talked about and have dreamed about having a way of measuring utility to measure the success of an economy they had tended to

use it and i mean we fall back on things like g.d.p. because that's and it's easy to measure we can we have it on our balance sheets and we can count thanks. in the beginning of the nineteenth century and. the twentieth century in the nineteenth century where they didn't believe that we could measure anything else now we've actually started seeing 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 of can we trust people that 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 who do lots of activities or lots of lives are 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 themselves are having a very low level of earth of life satisfaction is one way of putting it where is in tokyo in sub-saharan africa eighty one percent of people tell you that they are very unhappy this is a big difference and it's something that we can take a look a marketing about if you know i was looking at some of the surveys of the different reports about wellbeing and happiness it seems to me and i don't want to be too contrarian right here but the poor you are the happy you are because that's what it looks like. well not as a sara lee i mean once one has achieved material sufficiency particular 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 the higher the degree of happiness again this is seemingly paradoxical. you know the basis of good life as. aquinas is sufficiency of material needs and secondly virtues actions so i believe there is an interesting

challenge can we achieve a degree of of well being and happiness relative to certain level of g.d.p. and i have shown that it actually i think you can optimize happiness and g.d.p. around fifteen thousand dollars per capita so those are the challenges we face as a congress can we actually create conditions which maximize optimize happiness and g.d.p. so we can have a kit here tonight so that's ok interesting christopher what do you think about that and what is the role of the state in all of this i mean some of mention a number of things the number of friends you have or what kind of relationship you have i mean that's something the state really certainly hope doesn't have anything to do with now in the future i mean how do you put a how do you make some kind of an algorithm for that because i couldn't even imagine that. well first of all it's not true to say that poor countries or anywhere in 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 boots on and some of the some the indonesian countries some of the poorer countries who 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 have been sounds a country a 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 you're having friends makes you happy which clearly does it having religion makes you happy which clearly there's what is the policy relevance of this town the coming government introduce some serious sort of theocracy and they somehow foresees our friends to spend time with you clearly not and this is a problem with that in the studies is all the all the facts is 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 at

their married government can't the fact that or 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 equality is diversity legislation that will block out any kind of moves that much she might make people happy ok sam i thirdly ok go ahead keep on on keepin. thirdly there are the things that the government's already doing so we know that people who are very ill or unhappy we know that people who are unemployed are unhappy 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 going of in britain by ten years

in the last fifty years and again it seems that had no effect on our happiness per se but does that mean we should abandon i would say not ok sam what do you think about that because when i think of government i tend to feel i'm 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 marchioness health in the health budget it's always been given less money but there are various sort of different aspects of physical health can in fact if you look at the sort of the impact the different disease is on people's well being the mental health has a much bigger impact than many other illnesses so one of the things you can take a lot of things that the u.k. government has done is start to take more seriously and investing in mental health treatment you know giving a higher priority than it did before another example is is commuting and chris mentioned getting stuck in traffic and that's true actually one of that one study which looked at which ask people to rate health how they felt. was often enough to say how or how you feel found the people are least happy when they're at work but

actually when you'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 slice of life satisfaction on average controlling for other things like units of income and those sort of things so one lesson that we can learn from that is that it. is that people are 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 old you know which will be a bigger house but i'll have to commute further to get to work people often going out doing what happiness when in fact it doesn't so that's an individual thing perhaps or something you know all those leads me to believe that what i would get marked if i go back you're not going to let me 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 and for people to make money for everybody of the ninety nine percent disregard the most indices 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. well let me just suggest i'm also an accountant so ok interest is in helping governments be wiser managers what i call eight 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 assets the human the social and natural capital that actually underpinned well being 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 in 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 the fair distribution of well be 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 particular relevance to policymakers and it's interesting to maybe have a conversation across your cross of friends my neighbor gave me a t. shirt that happiness is over rated you know. so this this idea of subjective. objective 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 now 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've got you right we love a key reason 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 etc and those were the kinds of pale not know gentlemen we're going to go to a break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion and valuing wellbeing. 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 the stomach and chest pains of me 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 but question tonight is whether or not soldiers were adequately warned about its rare side effects serious life changing side effects. wealthy british science. markets why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy with my next concert for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to cause

a report on r g. c. well rostock i merely go to my job we're talking about how to value caffeine. q. ok crisp and i go back you learn and we've talked and 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 our 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 us to keep borrowing so i mean my point is what is the role of capitalism in the economy in all this. well people pursue the happiness. regardless of whether to pursue economic growth or whether they pursue wealth people primarily and instinctively pursue happiness and they can do that in one of the 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 go and buy things pursuing wealth from knowing 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 a incredibly broad it's the broadest possible aim that you can now because money's is the token with which you can do anything you want to go on my fine food or go on holiday i'll stop working or retire early you'll 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 going to argue that sometimes there's a market failure there is piles remorse people sometimes by things and then later find out that it didn't bring them as much pleasure as they 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 moment we have a government that nobody voted for so government failure is more serious and has more knock on effects on everybody then somebody going out and buying something that they later don't really want and end up selling on the second hand market. and i find it all that insofar as consumerism is a problem that more government is the answer because that we didn't we go or rather be more government failure ok some of final it's very fact that so i had some of them think i had jumped i think straight out to say that there would be a new way for people to keep their happiness or it's either by voting for the right people or by consuming things i mean basically there isn't any way that you can and there are many things you cannot buy in fact you can't buy love i mean it's a bit of a t.v. thing say but it's true you kind of i love you kind of i mean you cannot buy

a sense of self-worth and people trying to do this and they think they can buy the thinking of it because lots of adverts tell them that they can buy these things in . maybe you can tell them if they wear certain clothes or buy a particular car or whatever the name or like the glove or self-worth but actually as we know this sort of short term feeling that they get a little buzz they get when they buy something is quite short lasting and short crucial lasting and what people the way that people actually can achieve those things and the one kind of good relationships etc is actually through doing things and one of the things that one of the things one of the problems with a focus on. and focus on and in as much as possible is it takes away time from doing these 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 is going to use it up so i'll give you a list of our first christopher go first go ahead why do you work 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 they're 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 and how you divide your time up afterwards is entirely up to you and 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 can. 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 are certainly people now i've met him i was in investment banking money for money sake but i don't tend to think that they are the majority i think most people they want to accumulate some kind of wealth and security so they can do what 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 you can pursue happiness and relationships and meaningful work i think i try to live that in my own life and 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 a currently as we have an international back crisis we connect the creation of money to these wellbeing accounts 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 my promise and tally sticks in the u.k. experience so my proposal is that we rethink the entire monetary policy structure of the world that we look at the creation of money in parallel with well being conditions so we're actually investing in the real assets so 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 it was actually really deep go ahead. one example for example i've just said that the nations run without a balance sheet and most the most coca-cola could 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 accounts of you know infrastructure the bridges in the hospitals the health of our forests and wetlands ok perhaps some proxies for the degree of trust and relational capital in society we could actually intentionally taps 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 that might the government can create sufficiency it would

quickly to work to facilitate the well being of the people united states so 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 hasn't done very well but you christer the market hasn't done very well recently information for actually quite a few years for quite a few people the idea is no there's no reason to think this in some sort of top down government control would do any better we we seem to move on from general well

being science which is 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 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 invisible asset classes like goodwill trust a relational couple that are are the hallmark of the new companies the new economy and i think that capital markets can play a role accounts need to first of all be able to count for these assets as a legitimate and realize the real value increase the relational couple we have and society so i think markets and the capital capitalism large. 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 that a new form of capitalism that takes an into consideration wellness and happiness i mean that's that sounds nice. well i think the key currency and one that we haven't talked about so far apart from well being and your usual everyday dollars and 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 welding it's not you know it's not it's not necessary for government to get it to interfering in theory but at the moment we have a situation where our environmental resources are getting more and more constrained and i'm almost there when i meet 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 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 the well being dated a bit more seriously because we have to actually start thinking well there's a lot of people here who are consuming a lot of resources we consume a lot of resources so for example in the last the last ecological footprint analysis americans consume let's say planets where everyone in the world consume less people in america and we need for planets to sustain sustainable 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 less last night's action than a country like costa rica which consumes one quarter of the resources so that gives it 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 resource into welding that's something that there's countries need to be looking at christopher so let me let me pose it this way in light of what somebody just said

so. britain americans should consume a large large ok let's cut it in half let's get out seventy five percent of it or they could be happier people. i would very much dallas and i do know people perceive happen isn't the people expects pets to have about a lifestyle than their parents did and we've been expecting that for several centuries thanks to consume the cattle is making that possible and what we're seeing today in this discussion summarizes what's wrong with the developing agenda it just means anybody's pet projects can be tied in with these very very hazy loose bunch of evidence that doesn't really tell you anything apart from the obvious and rather than going through the at the revealed preferences of what people actually want and some of that voting patterns and that consumption patterns we just bring in any old ideas which people would not vote for nor purchase and the new economic foundation for example wants us to have a steady state economy the want the economy i think simply to be flotsam in

a slice of recession or near recession i think is very unlikely that such an economy would make people happy if i think it would make people extremely miserable all right gentlemen you know the what is the economy economics is called the science of of jumo cave many thanks to my guests today in edmonton in london thanks to our viewers for watching and here are the phoenix family members. and kids.