Freakonomics Radio - 345. How to Be Happy

Episode Date: August 16, 2018

The U.N.’s World Happiness Report — created to curtail our unhealthy obsession with G.D.P. — is dominated every year by the Nordic countries. We head to Denmark to learn the secrets of this happiness epidemic (and to see if we should steal them).

Until a few years ago, Helen Russell was leading a seemingly happy life in London, working as an editor for the fashion magazine Marie Claire. True, she did feel restless at times. Also true, she and her husband had been struggling with fertility treatments. That said, she had no intention of leaving the UK. Until out of the blue, one wet Wednesday, my husband came home and told me he'd been offered his dream job working for Lego in Denmark. And we knew nothing about the country, as many people in other countries are fairly ignorant of Scandinavia. We couldn't really have pinpointed it on a map.

They decided to go for it. But as soon as they arrived, in a small town in the rural hinterlands of Denmark, in the dead of winter, she had regrets. My husband left to go to work at 7.30am. I didn't know anyone. I didn't speak the language. I was in this freezing cold, dark country all by myself. I did a lot of howling at the moon, thinking I'd made the biggest mistake ever. And I did a lot of eating Danish pastries,

because as a repressed Brit, I like to eat my emotions. But Russell had heard, as you may have heard, that Denmark is routinely at or near the very top of the annual happiness ranking compiled by the United Nations. The other Nordic countries, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Finland, pretty much dominate the top 10. Russell naturally wondered, why? What are the causes and consequences of this alleged happiness epidemic? Was it for real? What are the downsides? She set out to answer these questions

in a book she called The Year of Living Danishly, uncovering the secrets of the world's happiest country. Along the way, she asked nearly every Dane she met how they would rank their happiness on a scale of 1 to 10. A funny thing happened during this process. Russell herself became quite a bit happier. I was maybe a, I'd have said a 6 was a good day in London, and now I'm generally on that 8, and sometimes it's a 9 if I'm lucky. You're practically Danish, yeah?

I'm practically Danish. Today on Freakonomics Radio, what causes all this happiness? What it is, I think, is a kind of ethos of life. What's keeping less happy countries from copying it? The price tag. And an economist who thinks we should worry more about well-being and less about traditional measures like GDP. My god, let's get serious about the quality of our lives and stop this nonsense of chasing such a poor indicator that is taking us actually farther away from our happiness. From Stitcher and Dubner Productions, this is Freakonomics Radio,

the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Duffner. I recently spent a few days in Copenhagen. There was one person I was very excited to meet. So my name is Mike Viking, and I'm the CEO of the Happiness Research Institute here in Copenhagen. And is Viking a common surname here? No. So I think we're a handful of people called Viking. My dad is called Wolf Viking. I have a brother called Kenneth. I have a couple of nephews. One of them is called Max Viking. So he really needs to grow up big and tall. Do you do Halloween here? Where you dress up as costumes? I'm just curious, were you a Viking every year when you were a child?

No, but there was one episode, yes. Viking has a background in political science, economics, and sociology, all of which figure in understanding what's called happiness. I mean, one of the challenges we have with happiness is, of course, to define it and to measure it. And we should first and foremost acknowledge that it's a wide umbrella term. So you have one understanding of what happiness is and I have another one. So we need to break it down and look at different components. So the first is an overall life satisfaction. And here you essentially ask your respondents to take a step back and evaluate your life. Happiness researchers also track

people's moods in the moment. How happy are you right now? Or how happy were you yesterday? And there we can see that whether what day of the week it is impacts our happiness levels. And people are happier, no big surprise, on the weekend than they are on Monday mornings. They also measure people's sense of meaning. That builds on what Aristotle thought the good life was. So to him, the good life was the meaningful life. So here we try to understand, do people have a sense of purpose? A sense of purpose, a self-evaluation of life satisfaction. You may think all this sounds a bit squishy, especially to an economist. Yes. I'm going to answer anything you're going to ask me.

Okay, we'll ask some questions. First one's easy. Would you please introduce yourself? Jeff Sachs, a university professor at Columbia University, and I am special advisor to the United Nations Secretary General on the Sustainable Development Goals. One part of that is human well-being. And so I am a co-editor each year of the World Happiness Report. The World Happiness Report, that's where Denmark and the other Nordic countries always come out on top. Jeff Sachs, just so you know, isn't some woo-woo feel-good witch doctor. You may have heard him on our program before, talking about his work as an interventional economist for governments in crisis. I worked in Poland and in Russia after the communist system collapsed. Also in Bolivia, trying to tame its hyperinflation. And I worked in Latin America very extensively for several years after the work in Bolivia until...

The calls kept coming. And then in 1995, another quite decisive turn for me was an invitation to go to Zambia and to see what this experience and these lessons might mean for Africa. Over time, and because of those experiences, Sachs came to believe that his fellow economists had left something out of their worldview, something, in fact, quite vital. The economics profession took a very bad turn roughly 150 years, when it decided that since it wasn't possible to measure happiness or to compare happiness across individuals, we would look basically at consumer preferences. The inspiration to incorporate happiness into economic modeling came from a rather unlikely source. So back in 1971, the fourth king of Bhutan, who also brought democracy to the country and was

an extremely, extremely wise leader, he raised the question already, why are we pursuing gross national product when we should be pursuing gross national happiness? It was such a wonderful phrase, and GNH entered the vocabulary of a small niche of economists and a small niche of Buddhists and others who were dreaming of this already decades ago. But Bhutan went ahead as a very poor country and actually set up the mechanisms for detailed survey measurement of dimensions of gross national happiness. It set up a gross national happiness commission. It ordered that all legislation should be evaluated, a kind of happiness benefit cost ratio. Sachs began meeting with the king, and they brought

more world leaders and economists into the happiness conversation. This ultimately led to the creation of the UN's World Happiness Report. The concept was jarring to many of Sachs' colleagues, particularly in the U.S. Well, in our country, we don't talk about almost anything else in the public space. It's all about growth, GDP, incomes. Of course, there is a massive industry of happiness studies, self-help manuals, helping people to overcome all sorts of unhappinesses, trying to help people find meaning in their lives, trying to help people make better decisions about their lives. To Sachs, the booming self-help industry in rich countries like the U.S. reveals a disturbing paradox. We have the paradox that income per person rises in the United States, but happiness does not. And it's not that that's because humans are humans. It's because the U.S. is falling behind other countries because we are not pursuing dimensions of happiness that are extremely important. Our physical health, the mental health in our community, the social support, the honesty in government, and this is weighing down American

well-being. Like the Danish happiness expert Mike Viking, Sachs finds wisdom in the ancient Greek model. I go with Aristotle. He's my guy. He's my favorite philosopher. And he pointed out in the Nicomachean Ethics 2,300 years ago that to be happy requires the good benefit of having material needs met. So don't deny those, he said. But he also said only aiming for wealth, single-mindedly pursuing higher wealth is certainly no way to happiness. And after a certain point of income, work on other things. Work on your friendship. Work on your mental health. Work on your physical health.

Work on good governance. Work on your charitableness, because in this kind of world, a good life is a balanced and a virtuous life, not a single-minded pursuit of income. Okay, if these are the factors that supposedly generate happiness, community, good mental and physical health, good governance, and since Denmark and the other Nordic countries top the happiness rankings, let's take a look at how they address those factors. Let's start with the social safety net. Mike Viking again.

There is obviously universal health care. There's also free university education. In fact, now it's up through university. I mean, along from the lower level, too. It's always. Yeah. Yeah. So so heavily subsidized kindergarten, primary school free, high school free and university free.

And you get a government grant, and that creates also a lot of social mobility. As does health care not being tied to a job, which we have mostly in the States. Exactly. Danes also work fewer hours. On average, 27.6 hours per week, compared to 34.4 in the US. To Helen Russell, moving here from Britain, that was a big change. There's no stigma to clocking off. People work mainly from 8 till 4 in offices.

There's no stigma to leaving at 4 because you've got to go and pick up your kids from daycare, you've got to go and make supper, or you just need to get on with your hobbies. Denmark strives toward egalitarianism on the gender front and its parental leave policies are famously generous. So there's 52 weeks, both parents can share it between them and you can defer, I think it's 13 weeks of this for, I believe it's up to eight or possibly nine years. So I have a friend whose family are, she has two children and the youngest one is now five, but she's taking 13 weeks off next year to go on a big trip around Australia. And I was outraged by this. I think, oh my goodness, isn't this sort of taking the

mick a little bit? She said, no, it's perfectly acceptable here. So yeah, it's just a different mindset, I guess. The basic idea of social democracy is to pay attention to social cohesion, to provide ample social goods like health care available automatically for all, education at all levels available for all, vacation time available for all. Jeff Sachs argues this strong social support in the Nordic model contributes to a number of healthy outcomes. The life expectancy is higher. Our obesity epidemic does not exist in those countries. Our opioid epidemic does not exist in those countries. There is also a high level of trust towards the government. And that goes hand in hand with the Nordic countries being at the low end when it comes to corruption or perceived corruption.

We have a different perception of the state. So what I see from over here, you feel you need to be protected from this thing. Is that a fair assumption? It's a fair assumption for a significant fraction, at least, of Americans, let's say. Not all, certainly. And people in the Nordic countries will feel that the state protects us from things. The high level of social security is one element that there is a notion that if you fall, you will be picked up. So I think we see more the state on our side and helping us create good conditions for good lives. Scandinavia also gets high marks on interpersonal social trust. So if you ask Danes and Norwegians and Swedes, do you feel that most people can be trusted

or can't you become too careful when it comes to strangers? Right. Three out of four will say yes, you can trust most strangers. The global average is one in four. So you may have heard of, there was a story in New York a few years ago of a Danish woman who was there who left her child sleeping outside in a pram, which is what you do in Denmark, and was arrested for child neglect. And lots of people in Denmark didn't understand why it was such a fuss because in Denmark people trust most people. And this plays into everything. You're not anxious if you trust the people around you.

You're not scared they're going to rob you to put food on their table. And have you become more trusting as well? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I don't want to reveal too much about where I live, but I regularly forget to lock car and or house. But considering the very high level of support in Denmark for citizens from prenatal really until literally after death. My question, which is maybe unanswerable, is would you say that the very high level of social trust is a result of such a generous social security system or the cause of it? That's a really interesting question. And it's something that academics in Denmark are still very much grappling with. Some of the economists that I spoke to for the Year of Living Danishly put it that actually these high levels of trust have been here that predate the social services and the social welfare system. Other people argue it's the other way around.

There's something interesting about the experience of living Danishly that increases your levels of trust. So immigrants to Denmark also end up adopting Danish values or their levels of trust rise as the experience of being around Danes and being in this environment starts to sort of filter in and bed down. So it's a real debate, actually. There's a bit of both. Russell enumerates several other factors that may contribute to a relatively high state of Danish happiness. Most people belong to at least a few clubs

or community groups. They spend a lot of time on fitness and outdoor activities, and they don't put too much emphasis on material possessions. Yes, it's frowned upon to flash your wealth, to flash your success. Mike Viking again. That is quite common in the Nordic countries.

So it also sort of puts a lid on conspicuous consumption. So do you believe that that is a driver, major or minor, of overall happiness? That people feel less compelled to compare themselves to others yes a minor one but i think it's one and and yeah i mean there's so many studies out there that show that inequality is bad for health for crime rates for murder rates and and all sorts of things it's really interesting so i I was literally this morning, I just come from an independent coffee bar. And there's, there's an equality there, there is not a difference between the person who is serving me coffee and the person buying the coffee. You can talk as equals, because you know that you are both probably after tax taking home

around about the same amount. And everybody's is having a sort of decent life. On the flip side, there's not the same service culture. I was just back in the UK for work and oh my goodness, everyone was so nice to me. And when I go to the States, I mean, that's even more so. And I have to remind myself, oh, they're being nice to me because there's a financial imperative. And of course, there is more of a service culture in some places than others. In Denmark, that's not the case. I mean, you don't expect bells and whistles, but I'm kind of fine with that now. There is one more Danish attribute that's said to greatly contribute to happiness. It's spelled H-Y-G-G-E. So it's pronounced Hygge.

Hygge. Well done. So I think the pronounced hygge. Hygge. Well done. So I think the best explanation of what hygge is, is the art of creating a nice atmosphere. So it's about togetherness. It's about pleasure. It's about warmth. It's about relaxation.

And that is a key cornerstone of Danish culture. To Danes, hygge is what freedom perhaps is to the Americans. But I gather there are also, you know, physical components of it that are specific. A lot of candles or good lighting and good pastries and so on. Pillows. So because hygge is about an atmosphere, lighting is important. Lamps are important. Candles are crucial. So Danes burn twice as much candle wax as number two in Europe, which is Austria. Viking is the author of an international bestseller called The Little Book of Hygge.

And I receive a lot of letters from readers saying, I've been having hygge all my life. I just didn't know there was a word for it. So I think what we did with hygge was we gave a word or language for people to appreciate something they were already doing. It's in every area of Danish life. And I'm working with the UNESCO right now to get it put on the World Heritage Intangibles list. Studies show that if you are practicing hygge,

it's a bit like self-kindness, but without the woo, and it makes you nicer to the other people. And this has a ripple effect out into society. So it really does contribute to happiness. Coming up after the break, what if all that hygge just isn't happening for you? If everybody around you feels that life is great, then that could create a stronger contrast and maybe you start to blame yourself. And how do Denmark and its neighbors feel about sharing their happiness, especially with immigrants? Scandinavia has, yeah, we love our social democracy, but it's just for us. That's coming up right after this. If you want to hear more Freakonomics Radio, you can find every episode going all the way back to 2010 on the Stitcher app and at Freakonomics.com.

And you can always listen to the most recent three months worth of episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I was recently in Copenhagen speaking with Mike Viking. Seriously, his real name, Mike Viking, who is CEO of the Happiness Research Institute. I'd been hearing about all the factors that make Denmark and the other Nordic countries rank so high on the UN's World Happiness Report. The generous health care and child care

and education benefits, the strong levels of social trust, and the hygge. It was all sounding a bit too good to be true. Wouldn't you think that more governments around the world would look at the Scandinavian model and say, wow, they are thriving economically and they're thriving on a happiness and life satisfaction level. Let's just do what they're doing. Why do you think it hasn't happened even more? The price tag. So I think that the tax level is what scares politicians, but I do sense a larger and larger interest.

I get visits on a weekly basis, especially from South Korea. We do see a lot of interest in trying to understand what is it that is working so well in the Nordic countries that seems to have a positive impact on people's lives. Now, one thing that those countries do, which is unimaginable in the US context as of today, they tax themselves and tax themselves. That, again, is the economist Jeff Sachs, an editor of the World Happiness Report. And they end up paying, oh, 45 to 50% of national income. A lot of people are paying around 50%. And that is the recent British transplant, Helen Russell. I'd say most things, if you're doing your grocery shop, it's maybe 20% more.

Goods and services are very expensive. So yeah, life is more expensive. There is not very much extra when you've paid for everything. But the data show that high taxes and prices are generally considered worthwhile. Nine out of 10 Danes are happily paying their taxes. There is an acknowledgement that we collectively invest in the public good, and that is fed back to people in terms of quality of life. There is something about the taxes. When you're paying that much tax, you have to trust that this

is all going to be worth it. And like life, you know, we're all trapped by something. We have to choose what we're going to be trapped by. And for me, that seems quite a good thing to put my chips on. One counter argument is that, well, if you have that, what you don't have are the huge rewards for innovation and inventions. So there are a lot of things that we complain about in the U.S., including income inequality, including the lack of a lot of the social service network that a lot of European countries have. But we are the country that makes Apple and Google and on and on and on. It seems that there's an upside to status seeking as well as downsides. You're right in terms of accomplishment, that there isn't the same incentive, perhaps to go the extra mile that there might be in the UK and the US, I'd say. So I know that in some places of

work, for instance, if your team are working on something, but it's four o'clock, they're going to go home. And so that can be a frustration for people coming from other countries who are used to perhaps, you know, people to stay there to really impress the boss or to just do that extra bit. I think for me and from weighing up the pros and cons, that there are always trade-offs and the idea that you can have most of the people doing okay and fairly happy, well, no, pretty happy actually, that feels sort of worth it rather than a couple of tall poppies and everyone else in the gutter.

I think perhaps Danes have lower materialistic ambitions than in some countries. But in terms of having an interesting job, having a happy family, having a healthy hobby and keeping fit, I think there is a lot of sort of expectations that people want to live up to. So you've told us that Denmark and the other Scandinavian countries are relatively very high on social trust compared to the rest of the world. And you've told us that social trust drives happiness. We also know that social trust decreases when diversity increases, at least that's what a lot of literature that I've seen has to say. And we know that Denmark and other Scandinavian countries are relative to other rich countries, the US and the UK in particular, are not very diverse. How much do you think the social trust in a place like Denmark is driven by some version of homogeneity? I've read that something like 85%

of Danish citizens are not only born here, but are ethnically derived from Danes. How much of it is just a sort of comfort with belonging to a club that you belong to? It's true that there is, in some of the Nordic countries, a high level of homogeneity. In Sweden, it's much less. They've been much more welcoming to refugees and immigrants in the past years than, for instance, Denmark and Norway. But then again, I mean, if you see the level of trust that have not declined- In Sweden yet, you're saying? In Sweden, in Denmark, in Norway, in those countries that have accepted immigrants.

Has it been long enough though to know? Like with the refugees coming primarily from Syria and Iraq, it's relatively recent. That's true. And I also wonder when I see those numbers, I wonder whether those refugees are part of the survey on social trust. Do we know? They are. They are. But yeah, now it's refugees from Syria. But when I grew up, it was refugees from Vietnam. Then in the 90s, it was refugees from Bosnia. Then also in the 70s, it was not refugees, but migrant workers from Turkey.

So we've had a lot of different waves of migrants. It's not a new phenomenon. And I don't see evidence that trust have fallen in the Nordic countries in that time. I've read and heard from people who move here either as highly skilled workers or as refugees, that Denmark works great if you're Danish. Yeah. And that it's much harder. And granted, most countries are this way. But one particular complaint in Scandinavia is that even when you're being treated fairly and given opportunities,

economic and educational opportunities and so on, it can be very, very hard to break into the society. Yes. And that's what I hear also from expats living here, from my international friends, that it's very, very difficult to penetrate the social circles in Denmark and Scandinavia. So it takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of time. It's a really, really tight knit network. And it's also a very small country. And people still live down the block

from people they know from they were in kindergarten together. I believe that social, linguistic, ethnic, religious homogeneity probably is conducive to the social democratic model, but I don't believe that diversity is a barrier to it. The economist Jeff Sachs again. The 2018 edition of the World Happiness Report focused on migration and happiness. One finding, he says, jumped out at his team of researchers. People who move from a poor, unhappy, violence-filled country to a happy Nordic country become like the Nordic citizens in the country. They do carry some of the legacy of the country that they came from, but the adjustment is remarkably fast. But of course, the adjustment depends on how welcoming a new country is. It matters to go to a country where people are desirous and accepting of

in-migration. I'm happy to say that despite what might appear to be the case in Trumpland right now, Americans rank rather high on acceptability of migrants and still do, and I think that that's a wonderful thing. What I find fascinating about the social democracies, and Denmark is a good example of this. There's a very strong anti-migrant party in Denmark that is also very economically and socially left of center. So it's basically social democracy, but for the Danish people, not for migrants.

Whereas in the United States, we tend to think, and in many other countries, we tend to think of anti-immigrant also as being right-wing. But Scandinavia has, yeah, we love our social democracy, but it's just for us. It's also important to say here that Denmark, as you've seen, is by no means a utopia. Mike Viking again. First and foremost, it's important to know that the World Happiness Report, that is based on a national average.

So you will have people above that average and below that average. And the suicide rate here, for instance, is not wildly low. In fact, it's somewhere in the middle, correct? Yeah. You would expect that the happiest countries in the world have a suicide rate of zero. Although, truthfully, the data show that there is a paradox in that suicide increases with well-being and prosperity. So if you look at the U.S. states, the individual states, the higher level of life satisfaction, the higher level of suicide rates. The most compelling explanation of suicide I've ever heard about and discussed with the fellow who kind of promulgates it.

Because we don't really know that much about suicide because it's taboo. The research is very distant and so on. But he calls it the no one left to blame theory. Which is that if you have problems in life, but you've got a toxic environment or a nasty government, you can always imagine that life will get a lot better. But if you're surrounded by happy, shiny people and you're not happy and shiny, it can be. So can you talk about that notion in a place that's so happy? So there is a term, the happiness-suicide paradox, that talks about exactly that, that it might be more difficult to be unhappy in an otherwise happy

society. If everybody around you feels that life is great, that are always so happy, and you yourself feel unhappy, then that could create a stronger contrast, and maybe you start to blame yourself. And more developed countries have you know reduced the reasons why we should be unhappy have you know eliminated poverty have eliminated you know lack of education then if i have all these opportunities why am i still unhappy we start to internalize that cause and blame ourselves. Helen Russell, the British expat, has now lived in Denmark for six years. You may recall that she and her husband had been trying unsuccessfully to have children back at home. We had been trying to start a family for years, trying many different types of fertility treatment, but it never quite worked. And the only feedback I kept getting from various

medical professionals was, oh, you know, we don't know what it is, but you're quite stressed. But everyone in London is stressed. It's city life. It's what you do. So you just carry on. Life is busy. We just carry on. Then you move to Denmark. I understand now you have not one but three children. So is Denmark also somehow a fertility engine? How did that work? Well, I am now riddled with children. You are quite right. I have a litter. Yeah, I think so. Full disclosure, child number one, little red. I found out I was pregnant six months after moving here. And so I, he, yeah, I mean, that is a result of being more relaxed. And that is an incredible thing. Also, the work-life balance is more conducive to being relaxed enough to conceive and also to having a family here.

Women can have a career and a family because everything's shared a bit more equally between the sexes. And there is this heavily subsidized childcare. I actually had IVF for my twins who were born last year. But again, that is, it's cheaper to have IVF here than it certainly would have been in the UK. And interestingly, Denmark is one of the biggest exporters of sperm. So there's a lot of genetically Danish babies that'll be coming around the place in the next few years. This suggests a nice study for some demographer out there to see whether all those genetically Danish babies will go spreading happiness around the globe. In the meantime, Helen Russell has also adapted to the Danish style of parenting.

I do leave my children outside to sleep. Not overnight, presumably. Not overnight, no, no. I mean, I might forget one day, but no. Just for nap times. And they do sleep really well because of the fresh air, and they're all bundled up in their old-fashioned prams, Mary Poppins style. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, environmental degradation, especially the threats of climate change, have been around for a while now.

The next generation would be justified in looking back at us and asking, what were you thinking? So there must by now be a consensus over how to address it. We need to replant and save rainforests. Are you sincere about worrying about global warming? Or you're using global warming as a stalking horse for your political agenda? We have to get out of coal rapidly, period. We have to get out of oil and gas pretty quickly and be out of all three by 2050 to have that safe world. Well, that argument is so absurd on so many levels that the miracle is that

there are people who can say it with a straight face. So in the long run, I think humanity may want to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Well, then there's nuclear power. The way I see it, nuclear energy has its own problems. According to one view, there are two kinds of people when it comes to seeing our collective future. The prophets, primarily prophets of doom, and the wizards who think technology will fix everything. Is anyone right? It's next time on Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubnir Productions. This episode was produced by Max Miller and Anders Kelto with help from Alvin Melleth, and a special thanks to Denmark Radio.

Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rosalski, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, Zach Lipinski, and Andy Meisenheimer. The music you hear throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can find Freakonomics Radio wherever you get podcasts. Our entire archive is available on the Stitcher app or at Freakonomics.com, where you'll also find transcripts, show notes, etc. If you subscribe to Stitcher Premium, you'll get every episode of Freakonomics Radio ad-free, plus lots of extra bonus episodes. Just go to stitcherpremium.com slash Freakonomics.

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