The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - How to Make America's Young People Happier Again

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

The US is sliding down the world happiness rankings - but it's the unhappiness of young people that's really dragging down the average. What has happened to make Gen Z so sad? And what can be done to turn the situation around? Jan-Emmanuel De Neve (director of Oxford University’s Wellbeing Research Centre) has been analyzing the figures for the World Happiness Report. He offers advice to young people and parents, and looks at what happy young Lithuanians can teach the rest of the world.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When the team behind the annual World Happiness Report finds that Finns are happier than Danes, or that Canadians are happier than Americans, those broad results hide a ton of nuance. We've been unpacking some of the report's more interesting details in our last few episodes. But today, we're going to tackle one of the most striking findings in this year's report. What's been happening to young people's happiness over the last few years? And the picture is pretty complicated. The good news is that youth happiness has been rising in certain parts of the world. But the bad news is that some of the wealthy nations out there have seen worrying declines. And that includes the young people

where I live in North America. But the big question is why? And what can be done to halt this awful slide? If anyone can help us figure it all out, it's Jan-Emmanuel Deneuve. Hey, Laurie. I'm a professor of economics and behavioral science at the University of Oxford, where I also lead the Wellbeing Research Centre. He's also one of the co-authors of the World Happiness Report and the lead author of the chapter that focused specifically on Gen Z. This year's report, we focused in on the age categories and my team and I, we've really worked hard on child and adolescent wellbeing. And so the way we define child and adolescent, it is up for debate, but we've essentially put it as between 10 and 24, so late adolescence, because there's still some neurological development happening at these later stages of late adolescence. And so it also

was convenient because that's where the data sort of starts. The earliest subjective well-being data starts around age 10, thanks to the Children's Worlds data set. And then we do have the Gallup World Poll, and that runs from about 15 years of age all the way to 24. So it was also convenient to some extent to make sure that we have these age cut-offs. And so usually the World Happiness Report is often focused on adult well-being. Why is it important to look at well-being in children and adolescents? Oh, I was absolutely adamant on the editorial board to start thinking more seriously about child and adolescent well-being, because as you say, the World Happiness Report, which does the world's rankings of what the happiest populations are, but they were really

18 plus. And so at some point, and we obviously knew with COVID putting a spotlight on child mental health, that we had to take child and adolescent well-being way more seriously. But there's always been a lack of data. And the Gallup World Poll, our workhorse, if you will, for the rankings, only starts really from late adolescence onwards. So it was a massive effort, and we waited, in a way, for the PISA data. The OECD releases the PISA data, but that only happens once every four years or so. And so that, combined with two other datasets, Children's Worlds and HPSC, allowed us to start piecing together the global map of child and adolescent well-being. But to your question together the global map of child and adolescent well-being. But to your question of why it matters, child and adolescent well-being matters so much because it's the best predictor of how you will be doing as an adult. Duh. And so mental health as a child or

as an adolescent is the best predictor of life outcomes and quality of life or life satisfaction as an adult. And one particular study that I care much about, not just because I'm a co-author on it, it's about 10 years ago in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, Andrew Oswalt and I published a paper where we show that adolescent well-being, and we were able to get data from the American National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, and we found that at different ages around adolescence, their well-being at those ages was most predictive of the same individuals' earnings as they were growing up. What we found is that ages, I think, 12, 15, 19, and 21, it's a panel study. So it's the same 15,000 American youth that have been tracked over time.

This was started in the early 90s. And they continue to be followed with surveys all the way into their 30s. So we have their well-being when they're adolescents. And we have their sort of adult outcomes, including how much they're earning age 30 and above. And what we found was that their levels of well-being as adolescents was a massive predictor of how they would be doing later in life, even as measured through their earnings.

Now, one could say, well, maybe it's because happy kids are from richer families and socioeconomic status is higher for these youngsters. But we were able to control for that in a nifty way, if I may say so, which is in that sample of American youth of about 15,000, there were about 3,000 siblings. So what we did is introduce what we call sibling fixed effects or family fixed effects, where we would start looking at the differences between the siblings' well-being and seeing how explanatory that is of the differences in the future' well-being and seeing how explanatory that is of the differences in the future earnings of the siblings.

So say, Laura, you and I are sister and brother, not unfeasible, and we would be looking at your well-being, my well-being, looking at the differences between them, and then see whether that can explain differences in our later earnings and labor market outcomes, if you will, when we're 30 and above. And lo and behold, it did. And so it's kind of like if you and I were brother and sister, but I was less happy, maybe I was more depressed, even though we grew up in the same house, probably went to the same schools and so on, I'd be less happy as an adult and I'd be earning less as an adult too.

Precisely. And it's quite significant. So this is old data, but it was thousands of dollars already back in those days when the study was run. So we really need to understand like kid mental health because it's having these important predicted outcomes. But my understanding was always that the story was that overall kids tended to be happier than adults. So walk me through the kind of typical pattern is like happiness researchers have seen it about what happens to age across the life course, what we kind of used to think happened. Well, typically, and we still find it mostly to be the case around the world, is what you will know better than anyone else, is the U-shaped relationship between age and well-being. So essentially, we start at quite high in terms of our well-being.

We're happy as kids. We're happy as we can be as kids. And in fact, in the report, this to me was insight for me is just how happy kids really are. So if you look at the earliest ages that we have data for in life satisfaction, they start like at nine out of 10 as an average in some countries in terms of life satisfaction. So we start really happy and then we slide down the U-curve towards the midlife crisis, which typically late 30s, early 40s with the pressures of life coming through, mortgages to be paid off, small kids to be dealing with and the prime of your careers and the pressures of that. And then you sort of like things brighten up again, kids leave, you have the benefit of having kids, but without the negativity around having to deal

with it day in, day out, your expectations become more realistic and you start climbing up the other side of the U-shape between age and wellbeing. That has broken down in certain societies. So the big insight coming through in this year's World Happiness Report with a focus on age is that in North America, the US in particular, needless to say, and to a lesser extent in Western Europe and Britain, you find that the first element of the U-shape is no longer there. It's completely flattened. And in the US, it's even reversed, where youth, in this case, below 30 or below 25, depending on which data set you look at, they start lower in terms of their self-rated quality of life, their well-being, lower than the

adults. And that's really disconcerting. And that trend has started, what is it, 10, 15 years ago, but sort of in 2018, it sort of flipped where you see that the youngsters in America, below 25 in this case, are less happy than the adults. That's nowhere else to be seen. And this is something that really affected me a lot, right? This is one of the reasons that I started my happiness class at Yale is that, you know, I was looking at college students who I remember back when I was in college in the 90s. I remember them being, you know, like they weren't like happy all the time, but not the rates of depression and anxiety that we're seeing in our current students. And I just felt like there was an enormous shift there. It sounds like, at least with the North

American data, that's being borne out in the report. Absolutely. So what your famous experience there is borne out in the data as never seen before in this way. And that trend that you picked up way back when you launched your famous class has continued and actually exacerbated during COVID and hasn't recovered since either. For the first time in the World Happiness Report, we've done this test to see if you were to split the population, youth, older, and everyone in between, if you were to do a ranking just on youth populations around the world, the US would drop to 63rd. 63rd. 63rd in the world. We're usually in the top 20. Yeah, actually, like in the top end of the top 20 normally is the population as a whole, but because of youth falling off a cliff in terms of their well-being, the general population in the U.S. we talked about earlier, where youth mental health is actually predicting

something about what those young people are going to be experiencing later on, not investing in the youth of today being 63rd means we're likely to be 63rd into adulthood and into many decades to come. That is absolutely true. So not only is there an urgent need to do something because you can, but also because you have to. Because as you say, the predictive power of child and adolescent well-being and mental health will track throughout people's life course. And that doesn't bode well for the future.

So I think one of the big puzzles, though, is that, yes, this is the trend that we're seeing in North America. This is the kind of thing that I saw in my college students in the U.S. But my understanding is this doesn't seem to be the trend that we're seeing around the world. Correct. Absolutely. So this is one of the other big we're seeing around the world. Correct. Absolutely. So this is one of the other big insights coming out from the World Happiness Report. And we've really put the word world into the World Happiness Report because of this, is we've pieced data together from the global south, for example. And unlike North America and Western Europe, to some extent, you find in places like sub-Saharan Africa,

you find that youth has actually increased their self-rated well-being. So they find the quality of their lives is higher these days than it was before. And that's, in a way, good news. It shows that this is not a universal thing. It shows that this can be reversed as a negative trend in North America and the U.S. in particular. And I think that's really important to understand that globally there are massive regional differences. And so talk about what could be causing these differences, because this isn't just kind of, you know, a subtle pattern. Like we're just seeing these extreme differences

in how unhappy North American and to some extent, Australian and New Zealand teens are, but how much happier, you know, folks are in the global South and even in Europe. So like what's going wrong in North America? Well, before we dig into North America, I think the reason why you have sort of a convergence, really, it's not like youth in sub-Saharan Africa is happier than youth in, say, Belgium, where I'm from, or the United Kingdom.

It's that they're sort of catching up, and Western Europe and North America are coming down. So there's, if you will, a global convergence to some extent. And we've got an amazing figure in the World Happy Sport Chapter 3, where you see that quite clearly. We see North America, Western Europe come down, Central and Eastern Europe come up, sub-Saharan Africa come up, and some regions in Asia come up as well. And I think that global convergence is probably a result of the global inequalities reducing. So we always talk about inequality rising, and that's certainly the case within countries, and especially's certainly the case within countries, and especially in North America and Western Europe and Australia and New Zealand.

But globally, you see actually a reduction between countries in wealth and income. And I think that's partially also behind this convergence that we see in well-being and in youth well-being in particular. So in some ways, it's awesome that the youth of these parts of the world are kind of getting happier over time. But when we look at North America, what factors are causing North American kids and kids in Australia and New Zealand to feel so unhappy these days? the right direction. And so we can point to the inequalities within society in the United States, for example, rising, which then obviously have downstream consequences on people's mental health and well-being and opportunities for youth from less privileged backgrounds. We can talk about polarization, politics tearing people apart, social fabric being in the U.S. being torn apart, communities being torn apart within families, youth and

older generations or between youth, brothers and sisters, those discussions falling apart. And then I think there's no way around that. We also need to look at technology. You can't get around the fact also that the slide in youth well-being coincides with the coming up of social media and how people use social media. So that can have positives and negatives, but if people use it passively, people who are young and vulnerable and what they use in terms of social media and for how long. And so we had the privilege of speaking with Vivek Murthy, the US Surgeon General recently. He noted data that people now spend on average in the United States about four and a half hours a day on social media. And that's not even accounting for work on your computer or Google or whatever. It's really just social media. And that's not even accounting for work on your computer or Google or

whatever. It's really just social media. So with the US falling to 63rd position, if you were to just look at youth below 30, that is really a shame. And I would challenge everybody in the United States, the society, its government leaders, to not punch below its weight by this much. Because the objective dimensions that you have in place, wealth, health, and much else, you should be doing a lot better for you. What can we do for our young people? And what can they do for themselves?

Jan has plenty of suggestions, right after the break. If social media, driven by the big tech firms that dominate our economy, is to blame for the unhappiness we see in young people across North America, Western Europe, and as far away as Australia, there's probably not much we can do about it, right? Well, Oxford professor Jan-Emmanuel Deneuve holds out a bit more hope. Technologies have come around. They tend to help and be helpful, but with certain boundaries in place that evolve over time as we better understand the impact of these technologies. So an obvious one that we owe to Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, is he made the parallel

between cars. And at first, cars were driving around the streets with huge numbers of traffic fatalities as a result because the cars weren't safe enough, we weren't wearing our seatbelts. So over time, we realized that this is a good technology but needs specific limitations in place. And then they were slowly but gradually put in place. And now we're all benefiting from mobility

in a relatively safe way as a result of this co-evolution between technology and social norms. And the same could be done here with social media, I think. This can be a co-creation where everybody benefits from these new technologies, but with certain guardrails in place. And so the idea is that as a society, as parents, as people, we can sort of advocate for those guardrails. We can, you know, push the government to say, hey, what does the seatbelt look like for Facebook, for TikTok or something like that? What does maybe a speed limit look like for maybe the amount of time you're on these kinds of things and so on?

Like if we push for that, then we can get maybe the benefits of technology with like less of the limitations. Precisely. And so we need to think carefully about how we harness the positives of social media and make sure that these virtual connections ultimately lead to physical connections amongst people. Because we also heard from the U.S. Surgeon General that in his tour around these colleges, he was talking about sort of a change of culture where kids in high schools come up to him and say, look, but we don't have a culture anymore of speaking to each other. And let that sink in for a moment. That's pretty bad. And it also makes sense because if you now walk into a lunch cafeteria in a high school, people will be behind their screens. And so it's much harder to stroke up a conversation between each other and bond as human beings and not just through virtual means. So we need to think very carefully as a society to harness the good elements of technology and make sure that social media puts the social, frankly, in social media. You know, this is something that I saw like writ large when I was working with students

at Yale. I remember one kind of moment where I was thinking like, wow, the youth are really struggling with their social connection and they're turning to technology to like solve it. We had this kind of competition on campus for like a new app, right? You know, like all these schools kind of do these like tech competitions. And one of the potential apps that won the competition that I was looking at at Yale was this app that was called Let's Get a Meal. And the idea was like, you go to the dining hall and you're kind of scared to talk to people, but you go and let's get a meal, which is kind of like Tinder for the dining hall. And you say, you know, I could want to get a meal with somebody who would

want to get a meal with me. And you sort of swipe and find like, oh, I'll eat with that person. And like the older folks who are judging this competition, like me, were like, wait, but it's the dining hall. Why don't you just like sit down with someone that's like a hundred students that you all should really know because they're like in your same dorm. Like, just talk to somebody. But the students really felt like they needed a tool, a technological tool to like connect and just talk with somebody in their lunch cafeteria. I think that speaks to what Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, told us is that that culture has changed. It's now not easy to sort of reach out

to other people in the cafeteria in person. We need to bring it back into people's comfort zone to be able and willing and actually be able to reach out to human beings in person and not necessarily need the technology enabling of that when people are literally sitting in the cafeteria. But this idea raises a certain hypothesis, which is that the way that technology is affecting social connection is in some sense worse for youth in North America, in Australia, New Zealand, versus in Europe and in Africa. Do we know that that's the case?

We need to, I mean, it's an empirical question you're asking, so we need to find out data of how much time they spend. And obviously in the US, we now know it's about four and a half hours a day. My guesstimate is that we'll be slightly less in the global South or Central and Eastern Europe. Then the question is also not just how much time they spend on the social media, but also what kind of social media and then how people are using it. Is it a passive use or is it an active use, which is also very different. So passive use is not to be recommended, but an active use of social media where you actively reach out to people, actively talk about yourself and connect with

others can be beneficial for people's wellbeing and mental health. So it's hard to say there is something, this is quite quirky, but we ran an extra analysis to try and understand this. And North America, obviously, is the U.S. and Canada. But Canada is split between the Francophones, Quebecois, and the English or native English Canadians, which are then obviously closer with the U.S. counterparts who look at sort of U.S. slash Canadian English spoken medium. And there's something really striking there that could point us in the direction of thought, which is Quebecois youth have seen a drop, but by no means as large as the English-spoken Canadian youth. And that was obviously in line with the American youth. And so John Halliwell, my wonderful colleague, and really the heart and soul of the World Happiness Report has noted that and sees it as suggestive of the fact that the

English slash American media is perhaps more dominated by negative news or calls that out in more conflictual ways than, say, the more international global francophone way of news access. And so this may not be social media, but more how news is presented to youth in the world. In the Francophone world, it might be less conflictual, less negative, speaking less to our negativity biases in terms of news than it is in the English-spoken world in North America. So there's an interesting hint there of something going on that will not explain everything, but it's quite striking, we thought. And it fits with the thing that you were saying earlier, which is, you know, that many of the changes in the U.S. are about political polarization. that will not explain everything. But it's quite striking, we thought. And it fits with the thing that you were saying earlier,

which is, you know, many of the changes in the U.S. are about political polarization. And if you have a news media that's kind of biased towards pulling that out, and we have youth that have phones in their pockets that are dinging every time some politician says something mean or, you know, that negativity bias can get stroked. It can get overwhelming and dominates. And it's really sad that then it doesn't allow any space

for positive news. And if you think about, you know, just like the way college was, news was back when I was in college, you know, it was just so different then, right? I could pull up a newspaper and read something terrible, but then I would put the newspaper down and I could go to the library and hang out with my friends. Again, it wasn't like dinging with a notification in my pocket about something terrible that was happening in the world. And when I just think about the kind of anxiety that can come from that theft of my attention and that constant negative information, it just must feel so different for the youth of today. It certainly does. And the algorithms behind social media are obviously optimized to get our attention.

our attention. And as you know, while we're hardwired to be more attentive to negative things that are potential threats or issues that are alarming rather than positive news. And so the algorithm tries to seek our attention and then obviously does it by pinging us with negative news because they know that we'll get our attention more easily than positive news. So here too, maybe we should start nudging or providing frameworks in place to maybe balance this out a bit more. Or we can do this ourselves. We can untick these automatic notifications, which are typically negative news. We can perhaps subscribe to more positive news sources.

And I think I've actually heard there's a new journal that is meant to be mostly trying to balance out towards positive news. Maybe we can subscribe to that. We'll find out about when dogs are being found. We'll find out about the World Happiness Report and the good things that are happening, not just the bad things, etc., etc., etc., to help us ourselves regain our sanity in that way. So let's say you're a parent listening to this, maybe even a parent in North America, for example,

watching these trends and just feeling really worried. Are there particular strategies or practices you could suggest for parents for how they could reverse the trend, maybe not in their whole country, but maybe in their own community or in their own family? I think as parents who are really concerned, and probably rightly so, what they need to do is, I think, try and understand their kids first and foremost, because their kids are good kids, but they're in a tough, complex situation. And not because of them, because of society around them making it very difficult. So the social media that tries to really attract all of their attention and does everything possible with the most brilliant designers and software engineers designing algorithms to really try and keep them hooked to the screens. There's AI automation that is making the future of work look both interesting, but also difficult and complex.

I mean, as a youth today, think about choices you need to make for, say, studies. You might be saying, oh, I'd love to be a lawyer and start legal studies. But by the end of your four or five years of law school, everything you've learned could be obsolete because, say, chat GPT and some legal version of it. you've learned could be obsolete because they chat GPT in some legal version of it. So there's so many uncertainties that kids live with today and so many technologies trying to get their attention. So I think the first thing that parents need to do really is to try and understand the complexity with which they live. And I love this advice because, you know, honestly, even with my Yale students, sometimes I get people who react like, oh, what's their problem? You know, those snowflakes, like they really can't handle it. But I think when you look carefully at the actual societal struggles that young people are facing today, like it makes

sense that you're freaked out and feeling anxious about what's happening in the world of work. It makes sense that you're freaked out and anxious about political polarization and inequality we see, you know, at least in the United States. And so I love this idea that what parents need to start with is just to recognize like, it's tough out there for young people today. It's very tough out there. And so they need to start with listening to their own children, rather than trying to boss them around and put these hard limits in place and understand the pressures they're under. And if they do that, then I think they'll understand, for example, that there's lots of peer pressure. So for example, if you say to your child, you cannot have an iPhone or an iPad,

or you can't go onto this particular app, then your child may actually be missing out on important things happening in their own school community. And this then leads to a second thought that parents could perhaps do, is to coordinate with other parents or their local school to see, hey, if there are specific peer pressures, or if some people have access to something and others do not, and that puts sort of inequalities in place that are really harmful, then can there be a coordinated approach amongst the parents of kids that are friends or in the same class? Or can they work at the school boards to say like, hey, can we have a norm or a

reference point or something that we would recommend as a school or the parents of a whole club of school friends? And I think this is really important because it really is not trying to intervene on, say, your kids' particular social media use or the fact that they're on TikTok all the time. It's actually working in their community to try to get these norms changed around, which makes it easier for the individual to end up engaging in practices that might be healthier for people's happiness. Exactly. And some of the folks listening to the Happiness Lab right now might themselves be in the category of folks that you've put in there. You know, what is it, 10 to 25 is your definition of youth. If there's a teenager listening right now, what advice might you have for them as an individual for how to kind of fight some of these trends?

I think the first thing is to understand, again, that you are living in a complex situation, that your attention is being fought over, and that you should not let yourself be had, if you will, by the brilliant software engineers of these social media platforms. Take agency over your own time, follow Laurie's principles around. Listen to the rest of the Happiness Lab episodes. Exactly. And apply these principles about setting your own boundaries and not letting yourself be consumed by the big social media platforms. And by all means, try and reestablish a culture of connection. And I know it's changed. There's no longer a culture of speaking to each other, but make efforts to get out of your comfort zone and do so. And if I may, one very specific practical piece of advice is,

one thing we've seen in the well-being science is that it's ultimately all about social connection. And when you do good things for other people, pro-social behaviors, as we call it in the industry, but really benevolent acts like volunteering, donating small amounts, helping strangers in need, talking to strangers,

that doesn't just help the people on the receiving end. But we've now shown over and over again in large studies with causal inference that this also helps yourself. And so by all means, try and do good things for other people. And you'll see it shouldn't be the goal in and of itself, but you'll see that will help improve your own well-being too. And so one of the reasons I've loved your chapter on the World Happiness Report is that it kind of calls out the trends that I was seeing in North America. But I think it also provides us with a lot of hope, right? Like it isn't just the case

that youth mental health is going down all over the world. If anything, what we're seeing is like there are possibilities for improving things. They involve changes and they involve both societal changes, like maybe making things more equal and also individual changes, like engaging in more social connection. But there's hope there. The trend isn't just like a downward slope forever. We can all take agency and change these things. Exactly. And you mentioned social connection, and I think that's probably the real key.

And again, putting social in social media and connecting in person. And this is a bit silly to say, but if you think about moving from ill-being to well-being, it doesn't take much. It takes moving from I to we, and you from ill-being to well-being, it doesn't take much. It takes moving from I to we, and you move ill-being to well-being. And that's just not just symbolically or figuratively, but that's for real. And the more I've studied well-being, and I know you've done the same, Laurie, it's always about ultimately social capital, the social fabric of society, your own quality social connections. So yes, by all means, do social media, but make sure it's with people that you actually connect with in a

way that works for your well-being. And in real life. And in real life. Actually, I'm not reminded, your colleague now, Nick Chrysakis and James Fowler way back, they did some of the first studies of social media around Facebook. And they looked at sort of connections on Facebook and numbers of connections. And then they really cleverly looked at are these connections that are sort of quite remote or quite close? And the way they did this is by looking at the pictures you were posting, are the people you were tagging actual people that you were meeting also in real life? And so that sort of became a proxy for qualitative social connections rather than sort of more distant connections that are more virtual in nature. And they found a big difference between having actual ties with people being tagged together with you in photos, circulating social

media, than having lots of other friends that weren't actually part of your actual physical surroundings and environment. And so that I think is a big hint. It's an old study, but it was ahead of its time. And so, so far we've been talking about kind of what's gone wrong in North America, but I love the World Happiness Report youth data because it's really showing that something actually much more positive is happening in the global South and in Europe. And so I want to talk about the positive trends in those countries. You know, what do we think is changing that's actually making people happier in those parts of the world? So I think what's happening in, say, sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Asia, and especially Central and Eastern Europe, because, by the way, you should know that if you were to do a ranking of countries just based on youth in the world,

rather than just the general population of countries, it'd be Lithuania on top for the below 30s. And that's really striking. So the Central and Eastern European countries have really come to the fore on that front. That's what's driving, obviously, their general rise in the rankings as well into the top 20, really. And so that's exciting.

And we should look at those cases in a bit like a positive psychology approach where rather than focusing in on what's going wrong in America with youth, maybe we can learn something from what's going right in, say, Lithuania or in other parts of the world. And so in particular, sub-Saharan Africa, we see that youth, below 25 in this case, is rising. Adults are rising as well, but the delta, the difference between youth and adults, is increasing. So youth are proportionally getting happier. And that's exciting. And this is

obviously the exact opposite, the mirror image of what's happening in the United States. And so why? And so why? I don't know is the honest answer, but I think it will have to do with something we touched upon earlier, which is the global convergence in terms of income. So globalization, so being an economist, we do think about the economics of trade, global trade, globalization. And it's probably behind much of the inequality within countries,

but it has effectively reduced inequality between countries. And so it has lifted lots of people out of poverty. And for example, China having become the, less so now, but about 10, 20 years ago, because of globalization, became sort of the factory of the world. Well, it brought a lot 20 years ago, because of globalization became sort of the factory of the world. Well, it brought a lot of wealth, half a billion people rose out of poverty,

and it's the same across Africa, parts of Asia, etc. It's probably most striking in the context of Central and Eastern Europe, because you'll remember in the early 2000s, the Central and Eastern European countries joined the EU. And that meant a lot of wealth transfer from Western Europe to Eastern Europe. So think Romania, Lithuania, and the other Baltic nations, etc. Poland. And probably a lot of hope among the youth, right? Exactly. Who are thinking about their job prospects in a different way now.

So suddenly from being a Polish youth in Poland looking for jobs there, the whole EU opened up to you as essentially a way of travel and job opportunities. And then these wealth transfers through the European Union's funds and subsidies, if you will, from the Western richer countries in Europe to the not so rich Eastern European countries also meant a certain degree of convergence in economic GDP per capita levels. What's interesting here is that in Eastern Europe, there has always been a foundation of redistribution. For good or bad reasons, they were in the orbit of communism or socialism.

So that meant that there's always been sort of a DNA of redistributing wealth to some extent, which isn't there in other countries. So the reason why I'm emphasizing this is, one of the reasons why the Scandinavian countries do so well is because they're wealthy. But more importantly, they redistribute their wealth and there's an equality there, which then also feeds into the welfare state. There's other wealthy countries out there. The United States, for example. Amongst others.

The U.S. amongst others, where there's a lot of wealth. So GDP per capita, the average wealth is huge, but it's not equally distributed. So that then also feeds into well-being inequalities. Probably particularly well-being in young people, right, who are looking at the next generation and their economic prospects and so on. Exactly, and are not seeing the same prospects or are not as looking forward to the future as previous generations were. Just to finish the thought,

so what could be driving, say, Central and Eastern Europe is not just sort of a wealth transfer, a convergence between west and eastern europe in terms of wealth but then also the foundations were in place in eastern europe to build a welfare state and redistribute this to a large extent so that everybody sort of benefits from the rising tide if you will and i think that will probably be if you will the main driver behind i think um my youth well-being in those places is starting to pick up in addition to the prospect of having way more job opportunities opening up through the EU.

In addition to the sort of positive changes that we're seeing in the global south and in Europe, we're also seeing some countries that are pushing to make child happiness a national priority. So tell me about some of the successes that we've seen in those countries that really pay attention to this in particular and push for improved child well-being. So I know for a fact that in Japan, they have a whole new program around child health and well-being, and they take this very seriously, in part because they're moving towards well-being more generally, but they've also really gotten the importance of youth well-being today pays dividends over time in the later lives of these youngsters. And you see that the focus then goes into schooling, the education system. What can we do there? As you find in places like Japan,

but also China and South Korea and many other places, we're all sort of teaching to the test, the SATs in the United States, the GCSEs and the A-levels here in the United Kingdom. And that's also raising questions because if that's the only basis of sort of success is to do well on these tests. And so you see new programs being developed around, say, Healthy Minds is one of the programs that Lord Layard, Richard Layard, our mentor, has really introduced in the United Kingdom, showing and teaching people life skills in addition to STEM, science, technology, engineering, math. And what we find is that introducing life skills makes for happier, more balanced human beings. It's pretty crazy to think that we'd only focus in on the science elements or perhaps English literature and others and not teach people to live good lives, especially in the era

of social media where people need to be given a sense of what's happening on that front. A good example here on the policy front is actually is Manchester. So they have the whole school system around Manchester is part of a program called Be Well, where they are introducing essentially life skill courses and tracking thousands and thousands of students across many dozens of schools to see what the impact is on their well-being and ultimately also their performance on these test scores. Is to see that if you feel better, feel more balanced as youth, as a student, does that also improve actually your performance? So the big question here is, can we have it both? Can we have great performance on our tests and SATs and GCSEs while being and leading happier lives? I think that's so important. I mean, it's one of the reasons that I started my class at Yale, but I agree completely. Like, you know,

those are 21-year-old, you know, if we could just start that earlier when kids are 10, 11, 12, I think it would make such a difference. Anybody with young kids, mine are too young for this, but anybody I know who has kids that are now in high school know the impact of, say, high school, primary and secondary school is huge and perhaps more influential even than the parents have influence on their kids. We need to work really with the schools and the curriculum to make sure people get life skills and learn how to lead fulfilling lives. As you know, I'd love to see the fundamentals of happiness science taught to kids in more schools around the world. I mean, we do so much to educate young people about math and literature.

Why aren't we also teaching young people the happiness skills they'll need later in life? Why aren't we ensuring that they know more about how to prioritize friendships, sleep, gratitude, and doing good for others? If you're a teen, or if you know a teen, you should check out the new version of my happiness course that's just for young people. It's called The Science of Wellbeing for Teens, and you can access the course for free at Coursera.org. That's Coursera, the word course, R-A, dot org. And again, the free class is called The Science of Wellbeing for Teens. We're leaving the World Happiness Report behind for now, but we still have some happiness science treats in store for you.

On the day the report was released, the United Nations International Day of Happiness, I had the good fortune to attend the World Happiness Summit in London. Welcome to the Wahassu live version of the Happiness Lab. Where I got to speak to a medical doctor who also happens to be one of Europe's top wellness podcasters. Introduce my guest, Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, the host of the Feel Better Live More podcast. Today we're going to be talking about why medical doctors need to pay even more attention to happiness.

Wahasu audience, are you all interested in medical doctors paying more attention to happiness? Yes. And you'll get to hear more of my awesome conversation with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee next time on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.