you argue correspondent in a stuffy a church in a in new york and for us here in washington that's going to do it but for more on the stories we covered go to youtube dot com slash r t america our web site r t dot com slash usa and you should also follow me on twitter you can find me at christine for that i'll. live. live live.

live. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then something else you hear sees some other part of it and realize everything is are you new you don't i'm tired was a big picture. and you can still. listen to. the low and welcome the cross talk i'm peter 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 his money still make the world go round. live you can still live. to cross not 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 cross-legged 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 are my in situations 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. 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 the for 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 so when we go we have two points of view here what do you think 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 had tended to use of measures i mean we fall back on things i deeply 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 and. the twentieth century united centuries where 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 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 or less happy people who have lots of friends are happier people who do you do lots activities are outside and lives are happier such as volunteering other things so it creates a meaningful story which suggests the data isn't just people saying well it does

tell you that something is 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 for having a very low level of earth of life satisfaction is one way of putting it where is included 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 and 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 happy you are because that's what it looks like. well not necessarily 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 but you know the basis of good life is there are stars and

aquinas is sufficiency of material needs and secondly virtues actually and so i believe there is an interesting challenge can we achieve a degree of wellbeing and happiness relative to a 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 a columnist can we actually create conditions which maximize our demise happiness and g.d.p. so we need to get 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 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 it how do you make them 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 boots on and. some of the some indonesian countries some of the poor countries 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'm really drawn to your second question if having friends makes you happy which clearly does it having religion makes you happy which is clearly this what is the policy relevance of this town the come the government introduce some sort of theocracy can they somehow foresees our friends so you spend time with you clearly not and this is a problem with out in the studies is all the all the focus is the improved

happiness i've heard the government can 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 that merry government can't affect 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 the qualities diversity legislation that will walk 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 the government's already doing so we know that people who are very ill or unhappy we know that people who are employed are unhappy but we known this for many many years like everything else in the happiness economics it's all b.s. stuff i'm a government has long been pursuing an agenda of creating jobs and of improving the

health service and life expectancies gotten 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 have done then i would say not so 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 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 impact of different diseases on people's wellbeing mental health has a much bigger impact than many other illnesses so one of the things you can take and that's one of the things that the u.k. government has done is started to take more seriously meant investing in health treatment and 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 that one study which looked at which ask people to rate health how they felt particular moment so

blue careens off in your in you have to say how or how you feel found the people at 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 other studies which show that people who commute have a longer commute have a lower level of life satisfaction on average control than for a lot of things like you know some 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 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 are thinking of getting more happiness when in fact it doesn't so that's an individual thing perhaps or something. like what i would get mark if i go back culinary 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 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 for everybody of the ninety nine percent just regard 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 can have very different outcomes. let me just suggest i'm also my counselor 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 the human the social and natural couple 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 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 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 conversation cross your cross offensive 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 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 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 investment taxes except for in those wealth accounts ok on that note gentlemen we're going to go to a break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion unvalued wellbeing . they are to. wealthy british style.

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ok. well. your little mind you were talking about how to value caffeine. to keep. still. ok crisp and i go back feeling 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 in from sumption 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 perceive the happiness. regardless of whether economic growth or whether pursue wealth they will 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 pursuing wealth trying to get a better job increasing their salary is not some narrow obscure objective that we've been focusing on too much in society and it's

a incredibly broad it's the broadest possible aim that you can now 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 wealth for yourself because it shouldn't be your only objective and if it is your only 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 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 like to nobody wants 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 go or rather be more government failure ok so i'm

a final it's very bad it's going to add some of plumping go ahead jump in i think is very thought to say that there would be only way for people to keep their happiness is always invited by voting 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 cannot buy love i mean it's a bit of a cheesy thing fade but it's true you cannot buy love you cannot buy meaning you cannot buy a sense of self-worth people are trying to do this and they think they can buy the things you know because lots of our parents tell them that they can buy the things in. adverts tell them if they wear certain clothes or buy a particular car or whatever the name or like to get love or self-worth but actually as we know this this sort of short term feeling that they get is a little buzz they get when they buy something it's quite short last year. and what people actually can achieve those things that relate to 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 on and focus on and in on only as much as possible is it takes away time

from doing those other things directly so we spend our time working so that we can get all these other things that we desire well actually we can just get them directly by actually doing something ok mark if i'm going to use it up so i did refer first christopher got first go ahead but i do agree that 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 are probably the most important thing but money does provide freedom 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 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 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 get to show you that's the problem ok i'm going to mark in edmonton 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 that maybe there are certainly people now i've met him i was in investment banking money for money sake but i don't really believe the majority i think most people they 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 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 a currently as 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 the 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 sustain 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 that the nations run without a balance sheet and most of the most common call it 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 accounts of you know infrastructure the bridges in the hospitals the health of our forests or 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 grand lincoln basically said as much before he died that the government can create sufficiency with quality to wipe to facilitate the well being of the people of 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 get you 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 christer the market hasn't done very well recently and permit for actually quite a few years for quite a few people yeah indeed but there's no one there's no reason to think this isn't some sort of top down government control would we 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 well 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 and relational copyable that are are the hallmark of the new companies a new economy and i think that capital markets can play

a role in accounts need to first of all be able to count for these assets as 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 sam what do you think about that a new form of capitalism it takes in 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 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 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 and i'm almost there when i meet billion people on the planet and by twenty fifty the planet isn't getting him to go the amount of resources are 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 resort who consume a lot of resources so for example in the last the last ecological footprint analysis americans consume let's say for planets well if everyone in the world consume like people in america then we need for planets to sustain sustainable consumption which we don't have now and yet they only achieve in terms of wellbeing in terms of life satisfaction life expectancy the lower life expect to live

a life that structure and then a country like costa rica which consumes one quarter of the resources so that gives you brings you know the mention 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 this country nicholas kristof very so let me let me pose it this way in light of what summer just said so. britain should 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 that i do know people pursue happiness and people expect expects to i have about a lifestyle than their parents did and we've been expecting that for several centuries thanks to consume a couple is making that possible and what we're seeing today in this discussion summarizes what's wrong with 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 patterns and their consumption patterns we just bring in any old ideas which people would neither vote for nor purchase and the new economic foundation for example wants us to have a steady state economy the want the economy effectively to be before us or in a state of recession or near recession i think it's 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 if the economy economics is called the science of of doom ok thanks to my guests today in edmonton in london thanks to our viewers for watching and see large felix salmon remember. to keep. the.

you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else in here or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture. if. he. knew he'd.