now for more on the stories we covered be sure to go to youtube dot com slash r t america or check out our website r.t. dot com slash usa and you should of course follow me on twitter at christine. for now i hope you have a great night. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture.

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to. a low in welcome across a 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 or does money still make the world go round the. list can. start. to cross-talk be in the index of happiness i'm joined by mark and nell ski 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 summer 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 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 so impressive that i think we need a new accounting system not simply another index but 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. become a 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 has been the case for for many years so other things quite interesting to do the surveys from

a policy point of view they have very little relevance and the very little use ok family here we have two points of view here where you thing where you fall in on that. well for years economists have been talked about and 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 i deeply because that's what it's easy to measure we have on our balance sheet which we can count things and in the beginning of the nineteenth century and. the twentieth century in the nineteenth century probably 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 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 or less happy people who have lots of friends are happier

people who do lots of activities or not so it is a life happier such as volunteering 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 rated themselves are having a very low level of earth of life satisfaction is one way of putting it where it's in togo in sub-saharan africa eighty one percent of people they are very happy this is a big difference and it's something that we can take it ok mark. 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 a poor you are the happier you are because that's what it looks like. well not as a sara lee i mean once one has achieved material sufficiency particularly. 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 rate of happiness again this is seemingly paradoxical but you know the basis of good life is there and aquinas is a sufficiency of material needs and secondly approaches 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 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 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 poor countries are you might expect not to be cause a happy are surprisingly happy in the various reasons for that one major variable for example is religion sounds a buddy system shari'a believe 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 that is the policy relevance of this can the coming government introduce some sort of theocracy

can they somehow force you to our friends to spend time with you clearly not and this is a problem with out in the studies is holy 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 out here in sunny weather all the times of be happy if that 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 climate change the environment the qualities 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 going going keep. thirdly there are the things that the government already doing so we know that people who are very ill or unhappy we know the people

who are unemployed are unhappy but we known this for many many years like everything else in the happiness economics it's obvious stuff and the government has long been pursuing an agenda of creating jobs and of improving the health service 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 but does that mean we should abandon that 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 marchioness health in the health budget it's always been given less money than there are 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 well being mental health has a much bigger impact than many other illnesses so one of the things you can take and 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're going to have to say how or how you feel found that 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 other studies have shown that people who commute have a longer commute have a lower level of sysop life 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. is that is that is that people people sometimes perhaps mistakenly think that oh if i if i get this job which will pay a higher and higher salary and i travel further or if i buy a house further out of town which are going to get a bigger house but i'll have to get to work people often think about doing what happens when in fact it doesn't so that's ocean individual thing perhaps or

something you know all those reasons not to believe me when i would get that mark if i go back to you in any detail i mean how do you 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 that i like this idea of an industry because all of these other industries are for the stage in for financial institutions of people to make money not for everybody at the ninety nine percent is forgotten in 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. well let me just suggest i'm also an accountant so ok interest is in helping governments be wiser managers. i call a i well being balance sheet right now we are operating because a maze 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

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 that a tractor is to wellbeing we know the things that create better conditions for or being so let's 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 they today. you know i'm not i'm not totally convinced that's particular relevance to policymakers and it's interesting to maybe have a conversation across your cross of parents or my my neighbor gave me a teacher and said happiness is overrated you know. so this this idea of subjective subjective happiness is a moving target but let me say there's a difference between i think happiness and wellbeing and that's what the conversation in new york was about so the word wealth in the old english means the

conditions of well being so what i'm arguing for is a genuine wealth accounting system so that the wealth in the well being conditions are connected somehow with what we value boat right 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 etc and those were the kinds of ailments no gentlemen we're going to go to a break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on valuing well being. day r.t. . if you. still. want to. wealthy british style. the title.

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a story and it seems so for life you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything is off you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture. mission free cretaceous free zones for charges free to make amends. three stooges prelim mostly broadcast live video for your media project c.e.o. don carty dot com. you can. start. to. talk about your local remind you we're talking about how to

value happy. lives can. live. ok chris van i go back to london and we've been talking 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 but my point is what is the role of capitalism in the economy in all this. when people pursue their happiness. regardless of whether to pursue economic growth or whether brazil 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 out and buy things and go in and buy things for syrian 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 a incredibly broad it's the broadest possible aim that you can have because money is 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 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 a 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 they in britain and moan we have a government that nobody voted for so going through is more serious and has more knock on effects on everybody then somebody going out and buying something that they like it 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 didn't ignore rather the more government failure ok some of final very fact that so i had some a plan b. go ahead jump in i think very sad to say that there were the the only way for people to keep their happiness is always it's either by very tough for the right people or by consuming things i mean there's many ways that you can there are many things you cannot buy in fact you can't buy love and it's a bit of a cheesy think they 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 things in it because lots of adverts tell them that they can buy these things in. i mean let's tell them if they wear certain clothes or buy a particular car or whatever and they're more likely to get blood for self-worth

but actually as we know this sort of short term feeling that they get a little buzz they get when they do by saying it's quite short last year and short crucial last thing and what 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 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 when actually we can just get them directly by actually doing something market finger using up so a good referral first christopher go first go ahead why do you go 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 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 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 go she only 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 with they want to do ok that's why people do it and maybe there are certainly people now i've met them i was in investment banking money for money sake but i don't tell anybody 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 sort of 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 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 and that's a radical idea. but it's not within within the realm of possibilities we can attach a creation of 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 sustain a 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 can run without a balance sheet and i'm saying that if the federal reserve or the bank of england or the bank of canada had some type of asset account so you know the infrastructure the bridges in the hospitals the health of our forests and well ok perhaps some proxies for the degree of trust and relational capital in society we could actually intentionally attach the creation of money that you know the production of bonds or credit to the private banking sector would also be involved here i think this is a really exciting new frontier and i think it's possible i don't think this is dreaming in color i think in our history abraham lincoln basically said as much before he died that the might of the government can create sufficiency of liquidity to wipe to facilitate the well being of the 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 markets 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 without 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 prefer the market hasn't done very well recently and permit for actually quite a few years for quite a few people be angry because there's no one there's no reason to think there's some sort of top down government control would do any better we need to we seem to move on from general well being science and she's fairly hazy to blaming the whole of capitalism on the events of recent years which is really just an issue with one section of the banking system. ok you know me and mark you want to jump in there

you obviously have the impression you disagree go ahead mark but 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 as many assets and visible asset classes like goodwill and trust a relational couple that are are the hallmark of the new companies a new economy and i think that capital markets can play a role accounts need to first of all be able account for these assets as a legitimate and realize the real value increase the relational capital we have in society so i think markets and the capital capitalism large. is. 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 ok someone 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 through 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 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 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 start thinking well there's a lot of people here who are consuming a lot of his or consuming a lot of resources so for example in the last the last ecological footprint analysis americans consume let's say poor planet so i think everyone in the world can seem like people in america going with me for 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 expectancy less last extraction than a country like costa rica which consumes one quarter of the resources so that gives you brings you know the dimension of efficiency so if there are some things that some countries are doing which is inefficient in terms of converting environmental source into welding that's something those countries need to be christopher so let me let me pose it this way in light of what summer just said so britain's an american should consume a large large ok let's let's get out seventy five percent of it or they could be happier people. i would very much dallas and i don't know the people perceive

happen isn't the 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 catalyst in making that possible and what we're seeing here today in this discussion summarizes what's wrong with the developing 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 that voting patterns and that consumption patterns we just bring in any old ideas which people would not vote for no purchase and the new economic foundation for example once is to have a steady state economy they want the economy affected need to be to be flatter in a state of recession or near recession i think is very unlikely that such an economy would make people happy if i think it was my people extremism all right gentlemen you know the what is the economy economics is called the science of doom

ok thanks to my guests today in edmonton in london face to our viewers watching us here are the phoenix family members rostock. came. to the. i asked.

if. he believed me to be. if. he.