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the low and welcome to crossfire computer in pursuit of happiness as the time finally comes when we should value public aid of 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. to kick. start. to cross start the india index of happiness i'm joined by mark and elsie in edmonton he's an economist and author of the economics of happiness building genuine wealthy is also an adjunct professor at the university of alberta in london we have some like he has 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 cross i mean you can jump in anytime you want mark 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 if people are happy i think we should believe we already have the gallup well-being index in the united states so we already are setting precedent i think we need a new accounting system not simply another index by the 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. become a how do you 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 has been the case for many years so although i think it's quite interesting to do the surveys from a policy point of view they have very little relevance and they're very little use

like a family get we have two points of view here what do you think what are you following on that. well for years economists have talked about and have dreamed about having a way of measuring utility being able to measure the success of an economy they had tended to use of measures i mean we fall back on things like g.d.p. because that's when it's easy to measure we can we have on our balance sheet which we can count things and in the beginning of the nineteenth century and so you begin to the twentieth century the nineteenth century really 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 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 or less happy people who have lots of friends are happier people who do you do lots of activities a lot so tonight is

a happier such as well and hearing other 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 as one way of putting it where as in togo in sub-saharan africa eighty one percent of people they are very unhappy this is a big difference and it's something that we can take a look a marketing about you know because i was looking at some of the surveys of the different reports about wellbeing and happiness it seems to me i don't want to be too contrarian right here but if you're poor you are happy you are because that's what it looks like. well not as a sara lee i mean once one has achieved material sufficiency particularly so in butan 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 but higher the great degree of happiness again this is

seemingly paradoxical but you know the basis of good life as our style and aquinas is sufficiency of material needs and secondly virtue is actually so i believe there is an interesting challenge can we achieve a degree of wellbeing and happiness relative to certain level of g.d.p. and i've shown that that actually i think you can optimize happiness and g.d.p. around fifteen thousand dollars per capita so the those are the challenges we face as economists can we actually create conditions which maximize our demise happiness and g.d.p. so we have a cake and eat it too in a sense 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 well i certainly hope doesn't have anything to do with now in the future i mean how do you put 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 other rich countries within countries rich people are invariably apia 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 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 good history 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 there's what is the policy relevance of this town the county government introduce some sort of theocracy and they somehow forty eight hour friends is going to spend time with you

clearly not and this is a problem with happiness studies is that 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 or the times of be happy at their married government can't affect that or we 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 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 on going. 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 to have no effect on our happiness per se because i mean we should have been there i would say not ok some or 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 and the health in the health budget it's always been getting less money and then various sort of different aspects of physical health but in fact if you look at the sort of the impact the different diseases 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 and what's one of the things that the u.k. government has done it starts to take more seriously meant investing in health treatment you know giving

a higher priority than it did before another example is commuting and chris mentioned getting stuck in traffic and that's true actually one of that one study which looked at which asked people to rate health how they felt particular moment so bleak or is often when you have to say how or how you feel found the people least happy not 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 have shown that people who commute have a longer commute have a lower level of satisfaction on average controlling for all 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 people sometimes perhaps mistakenly think that if i get this job which will pay a higher 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 to work people often think not getting more happiness when in fact it doesn't so that's such an individual thing perhaps or something you know all those reason to believe that when i would get marked if i go back you mean having 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 i like this idea of an industry because all of these other industries are for the stated for financial institutions or people that make money enough for everybody of the ninety nine percent is forgotten in most industries and 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 a 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 they came in 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 too 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 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 it's particular relevance to policymakers and it's interesting to maybe have a conversation cross your cross of france or my neighbor gave me a t. shirt that happiness is overrated 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 wellbeing 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 value about why we love or kimi whether living in edmonton or london or moscow and that should be the basis of our accounting system and our reporting back to citizens how we're doing in terms of the investment taxes etc and those wealthy kind of ok on that note gentlemen we're going to go to a break and after that your break we'll continue our discussion and value wellbeing . they are to. see. your 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 have been getting worse and no doctor has been able to help me please know that i'll finally be at peace with no more pain i wish i could have had a life with it was a bit 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 and question tonight is whether or not soldiers were adequately warned about its rare side effects serious life changing side effects. wealthy british scientists. sometimes.

markets. find out what's really happening to the global economy for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines to name two kinds of reports on our. sister. long time ago to remind you we're talking about how to fast. are you happy. if you can't. stand it. 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 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 to keep borrowing so i mean my my my point is what is the role of capitalism in the economy in all of this. oh people pursue their happiness. regardless of whether to pursue 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 go and buy things for syrian wealth trying to get a better job increasing their salary is not some narrow obscure objective that we've been focusing on too much and as i say it's a incredibly broad it's the broadest possible aim that you can now because money's just a token we want you can do anything you want to our my 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 going to argue that sometimes there's a market failure there is buyer's remorse people sometimes buy things and then later find out that it 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 thought in britain at moen 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 buying something that they like to go really wants and end up selling on the second hand markets. and i find it all that insofar as consumerism is a problem that more government is the answer because that we just need more rather be more government failure ok so i'm a final it's very fact that i had some a plan b. go ahead jump in i think is very sad to say that there would be only way for people to achieve their happiness or is either by very to 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 of keeping faith 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 and they think they can buy the things in it because lots of adverts tell them that they can buy these things and. maybe that's tell them if they wear certain clothes or buy a particular car or whatever the number like to get love 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 quite short lost it will crucial lasting and what people the way that people actually can achieve those things that they want kind of good relationships etc is actually doing things and one of the things that one of the things one of the problems with a focus on g.d.p. and for example and in earning as much as possible is it takes away kind from doing those other things directly so we spend our time working so that we can get all these other things that we desire but actually we could just get them directly by actually doing something mark

a friend to use it up so i'll do the rest of our first christopher go first go ahead well i do agree but 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 at the end of the day probably the most important thing but money does provide freedom is 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 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 to you that's the problem we're going to market i mean i kind of want to go on that side of christopher here i mean people do accumulate wealth so they can do would be 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 of it 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 that you can pursue happiness and relationships and meaningful work i think i try to live 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 it international back crisis we connect the creation of money to these wellbeing accounts i bet it's a radical idea. but it's not within within the realm of possibilities we can attach the 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've just said that the nations run without a balance sheet most the most common call it couldn't run without a valid 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 attach the creation of money that 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 abram lincoln basically said as much before he died that the man the government can create sufficiency of liquidity so wide to facilitate the well being of the of the people 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 i mean prices and bodies are to be decided by the market i would be very wary when the market hasn't done very well but you christopher the market hasn't done very well recently and for me for actually quite a few years for quite a few people the idea because there's no one there's no reason to think there's

a sort of top down government control would do any better and we need to 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 i mean it mark you want to jump in there you obviously have the impression you disagree go ahead marc let let me say as a as a new general capitalist i think we're actually we're we're actually leaving a lot of profit on the table there's many assets invisible as a class as a goodwill trust a relational capital that are are the hallmarks 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 couple we have in

society so i think markets and the capital capitalism large. is. 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 of a latent ok sam what do you think about that a new form of capitalism that takes an interest in federation wellness and happiness i mean that's that's sounds nice. 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. perhaps if you live in one hundred two hundred years ago i might have said oh you know government doesn't have a role it's not in wellbeing it's not you know it's not it's not necessary for government to get it to interfere in the game theory but the moment we have a situation where our environmental resources are getting more and more constrained and i'm almost thirty nine 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. 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 she's got thinking well there's a lot of people here who are consuming a lot of resort to continue a lot of resources so for example in the last the last ecological footprint analysis americans consume let's say for planets where if everyone in the world are consumed by people in america then we'd need four planets to sustain to sustain that level of 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 expect to live a life that faction than a country like costa rica which consumes one quarter of the resources so that kitty 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 sources into welding that's something those countries need to be looking at christopher so let me let me pose it this way in light of what summer 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 doubt it i don't 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 catalyst in making that possible and what we're seeing 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 loose bunch 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 problems and their consumption patterns we just bring in any old ideas which people would not a vote for no purchase and the new economic foundation for example once is to have

a steady state economy they want the economy effectively to me to be for us are in a state of recession or near recession i think it's very unlikely that such an economy will make people happy because i think it would my people extremism all right gentlemen you know the what is the economy economics is called the science of of jumo paved citibank's of my guests today in edmonton in london face to our viewers watching us here are the phoenix family members. can. see. it's. easy to control everything. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for like sleep you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't i'm sorry mark it was a big check.