markets find out. why no one should really happening to the global economy with mike stronger or a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into khan's report. eleven thirty pm in moscow these iraqi headlines syrian opposition forces refuse to give in to the government's latest good bad and provide written guarantees they'll hold violence it's puts the potential cease fire by the u.n. said deadline in jeopardy as damascus says it won't withdraw troops on the us rebels in the same. controversy surrounding us gun laws gains momentum with the latest killing of an unarmed teen triggering ips ations out locks legislation has led to a wising homicide rate in some states critics say the right to bear arms primarily

serves not self-defense but the interests of those producing and selling weapons. at his report suggest the deadly plane crash in western siberia a week ago was caused by the cruise decision not to the ice the plane the issue of the shortage of professional pilots in russia is put into the start. of next on our team time for peter lavelle to try to rein in his guesses tempers flare on another edition of crosstalk. please. liz liz. liz. can you start. listening to the. live. hello 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. live. you can see live. cross typing in the 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 of 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 cross-eyed it means you can jump in anytime you want mark do you believe in an

index of happiness because we all know what 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 i 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 but an accounting system that actually measures well being ok christopher what do you think about it can you do it can you i can measure g.d.p. but kind of 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 for many years so 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 so on we go we have two points of view here what do you thing where you fall in 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 have on our balance sheet because we can count things. in the beginning of the nineteenth century in. the twentieth century in the nineteenth century so 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 sort 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 less happy people who have lots of friends are happier people who do you who do lots activities are not so pretty and lives are happier such as

volunteering for things so it creates a meaningful story which suggests the data isn't just people saying well it does tell you that something you see 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 rate themselves are having a very low level of earth of life satisfaction is one way of putting it where is in code go in sub-saharan africa eighty one percent of people tell you that they are unhappy this is a big difference and it's something that we can take a mark of and go back you know to now i was looking at some of the surveys of the different reports of our 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 particularly. 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 great degree of happiness again this is

seemingly paradoxical. you know the basis of a good life as there is and aquinas is sufficiency of material needs and secondly virtue is action 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 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 economists can we actually create conditions which maximize our demise happiness and g.d.p. so we have a king in here too in a sense ok into the receiver 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 a number of friends you have or what kind of relationship you know 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 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 newtown 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 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 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 can the coming government introduce some sort of theocracy can they somehow forces 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 or the times of be happy if they're married 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 he might make people happy ok sam i thirdly ok go ahead keep going going keep. thirdly there are the things 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 but we've known this for many many

years like everything else in the happiness economics it's obvious stuff and they kill them and has long been pursuing an agenda of creating jobs and of improving the health service and life expectancies goes on in britain by ten years in the last fifty years and again it seems to have no effect on our happiness per se but there's i mean we should have been there i would say not ok summer 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 marginal and health in the health budget it's always been given less money and then various sort of different aspects of physical 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 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 particular moment so often you have to say how or how you feel found the people are least happy 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 there's other studies which show that people who commute have a longer commute have a lower level of syslog like satisfaction on average controlling for all other things like you know sort of income and those sort of things so one lesson that we can learn from that is that it 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 you know which will be a bigger house but i'll have to commute further to get to work people often think i'm going what happiness when in fact it doesn't so that's ocean individual thing perhaps that's. what i would get mark if i go about community i mean i mean this is

just how you each individual defines it i mean you can have two people in the 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 state in for financial institutions and for people to make money now for everybody of the ninety nine percent is forgotten in most industries i would want to believe in this but it seems to me that even if you have one or two people in the same circumstances you can have very different outcomes. let me just suggest that 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 assets the 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 in wellbeing assets we know that

we know that the tractors 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 will be across the community that the idea of you know the issue of subjective happiness and my perception of happiness which changes they. you know i'm not i'm not totally convinced that's particular relevance to policymakers and it's interesting to maybe have the power station across your process of fencing my my neighbor gave me a teacher and said 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 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've got you why we lever cumi 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 in those wealthy comes on that no gentlemen we're going to get a little break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on valuing well beings. they are to. take a. story. to. 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 and with no more pain i wish i could have had a wife with that was a bit always picture of her being my wife and mother to my kids i love you all see you all in heaven in your time comes i'm going to meet jesus christ. thousands of u.s. troops in iraq received one of these drugs and 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 it's where side effects serious life changing side effects. there hasn't been a thing yet on t.v. . it is to get the maximum political impact. the source material is what helps keep journalism honest.

we wanted to visit. some feel. it. still. want. you know through my job we're talking about how to value happy. stories. ok chris van i go back to london 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 to keep borrowing so i mean my god my point is what is the role of capitalism in the economy in all this. well people pursue their happiness. regardless of whether the economic growth or whether pursue wealth people primarily i 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 up by things and go and buy 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 your only 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 fact in britain at mon we have a government that nobody voted for so going further is more serious has more knock on effects on everybody then somebody going out buying something that they like nobody 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 didn't we or rather be more government failure ok so i'm a final but it's very sad that so i had some of the let me go ahead jump in i think it's very sad to say that there would be any way for people to keep their happiness

is all it is either by voting for the right people or by consuming things i mean there's many ways 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 cheesy think they but it's true you kind of i love you kind of buy meaning you cannot buy a sense of self-worth 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 the things in. i mean let's tell them if they wear certain clothes or buy a particular car or whatever and they will 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 it's quite sure lost it until crucial lasting and what people the way that people actually can achieve those things that they want meaning related 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 on your own g.p. and for example and in on only as much as possible is it takes away crime 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 can just get them directly by

actually doing something like a market finder using absolute good referral first christopher go first go ahead what i do know who you are as a political economist i was looking at it from measurable outcomes there's the 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 for you and it does provide a certain degree of happiness you will need 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 and 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 surely that's a problem mark in admitting i mean i kind of want to 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 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 would be one of 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 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 marjorie policy in other words instead of money being dead as it currently is and we have an international bank 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 a creation money to anything we want whether it's debt or seashells and 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 because that's really deep go ahead. one example for example i've just said that the nations run without a balance sheet in most most coca-cola couldn't 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 wetlands 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 a graham lincoln basically said as much before he died that the government can create sufficiency of liquidity so wide to facilitate the well being of the of the people the 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 a 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 chris where the market hasn't done very well recently and for met for actually quite a few years for quite

a few people yeah indeed but there's no 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 wellbeing science which is fairly hazy to blaming the whole of capitalism on the events of recent years which is really just the issue with one section of the banking system. ok you know me and 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 and trust a relational capital 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 to count 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. 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 light and ok from what you think about it a new form of capitalism they've taken into consideration 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 everyday dollars and pounds is our environmental resources and this is one thing this is one reason why it doesn't 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 wellbeing it's not you know it's not it's not necessary for government to get it interfering in theory but at the moment we have a situation where our environmental resources are getting more and more constrained

there are nine 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 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 data and 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 us or who consume a lot of resources so for example in the last the last ecological footprint analysis americans consume let's say poor planets where if everyone in the world can seem like people in america then we need for planets to sustain sustainable consumption which we don't have that and yet they only achieve in terms of well being in terms of life satisfaction life expectancy lower life expectancy structure and then 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 sources into welding that's something those countries need to be looking at christopher so let me let me try to display in light of what summer just said so. britons of 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 and i don't know people perceive happiness and people expects pets have a better lifestyle than their parents did and we've been expecting that for several centuries thanks to consummate capitalism making that possible and what we are saying head 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 punch 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 that voting patterns and consumption patterns we just bring in any old ideas which people would not vote for nor purchase and the

new economic foundation for example is nonsense to have a steady state economy they want the economy affectively to be to be flatter in a state of recession on their 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 what is the economy economics is called the science of the art 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. still. get to keep looking for the. last. old. technology innovation called in these developments from

around russia we've got the future covered. from. them.