The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Make America Happy Again

Episode Date: November 20, 2023

We're distrustful, unequal and isolated. That's according to the figures showing a decline in happy community feeling since the 1960s. But can we do anything to regain the healthier communal lives enjoyed by many of our parents, grandparents or great-grandparents? We talk to a hopeful trio - an economist, a political scientist and a US senator - about how we can reduce social isolation, temper political division and prioritize the kind of mixing and meeting that makes neighbors into friends.    Further reading:   Robert Putnam Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.  Lord Richard Layard Can We Be Happier? Evidence and Ethics and Wellbeing: Science and Policy (co-authored by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve).See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. our trust and made our futures less bright. Given the shadow it casts on so many aspects of our daily lives, you'd think there'd be a federal task force assigned to investigate the threat, kicking in doors to stop the ongoing assault. Sadly, that's not happening. But one dogged detective has been on the case for decades. Who done it? Who killed social capital? Political scientist Robert Putnam thinks social capital is the glue that holds a happy society together. But the bonds of trust and friendship he knew growing up in the clubs, leagues,

and unions of the 1950s have died. Was it suburbanization? Was it women going to work? Was it we're all too busy? I mean, a lot of different hypotheses. There were other suspects on the scene, too. Television had begun keeping us at home rather than out in the world mixing with our neighbors. And these days, our tablets and smartphones have lulled us into believing we can get all the social interaction we need online.

Robert grew up when TV was a rarity, and iPads were the stuff of science fiction. Back then in Port Clinton, Ohio, residents hung out in person all the time. It was a tiny town. The richest person in my class lived three or four blocks from the poorest kid in my class. In the last episode, we explored Robert's research on the importance of so-called third places. We saw that spending time with people in teams, clubs, and other venues outside of our homes and workplaces not only makes us happier, but can also boost the trust we have in our fellow citizens. Building this kind of social capital even helps society work better.

It benefits everyone in a community. It was exactly this positive cycle that Robert enjoyed as a kid. I grew up when America was the maximum of we society that we've ever seen. And my whole life has been going downhill. We've become more and more an I society. And I really wish that weren't true. I wish I could figure out a way to reverse that. Or at least pause it. These days, we assume the pursuit of happiness comes down to the individual.

We tend to focus on things like self-care and me-time. I want to stay home and watch a movie alone at my convenience. Or, I'm going to skip that meeting because I deserve some personal downtime. Robert's work has shown that focusing on the we can offer huge benefits for our well-being. But, as we'll see in this episode, doing that more effectively may require a huge change, not just to how we behave as individuals, but also to how we run our cities and communities. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.

But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. If you graph many measures of not only social capital, but economic equality and political comedy getting along and so on, they all go down since the 1960s. Robert was born back in 1941, and he feels very lucky to have grown up in what he considers a golden age of social capital, a period of so much weed time. Every day, Robert's dad ate breakfast at the same local spot

with the same fellow diners. Robert spent his formative teen years on a Port Clinton bowling team, whose members came from many diverse communities and neighborhoods. I'm constantly at risk of seeing that town walls and risk of seeing our youth through golden days. So I spent a lot of time actually trying to be sure I had the facts right. And the facts are pretty shocking. Many of our third places, those spots other than home or work where we can mix and form friendships,

are in terminal decline. By neglecting our clubs and associations and neighborhood hangouts over the last 60 years, it seems that we've really beaten social capital down almost to the point of extinction. But it turns out this pessimistic view isn't the whole picture. Robert realized he didn't really know what was happening to social capital before his childhood in the 1950s. So he decided to look at the earlier records. What was social capital like in World War II,

during the Great Depression, or even before World War I? And if you do that, you can see it's all one big inverted U curve. One side of that curve tells us what we already know, that social capital now is low. But the opposite side of the graph revealed something somewhat surprising. America had experienced a similar slump in social capital in the late 1800s. America was in a pickle back in the 1880s. We were very unequal.

We were very divided politically. We were very polarized. We were very disconnected from one another. Robert wanted to quantify just how much America in the 1800s was an I society rather than a we society. So he turned to an online database that had digitized a bunch of written material from different time periods. It's got cookbooks and detective stories and children's books and everything you would see if you went into a bookstore.

And therefore, it's a good measure of what ordinary people are reading and writing about. Searching this archive can tell you when different ideas were fashionable or when particular historical figures were in vogue. But Robert wanted to measure something more subtle. He needed a specific search term to test what ordinary people were reading and writing about their sense of community. What if we compared the ratio of the first person plural to the first person singular? Robert decided to compare our use of the word I to the use of the word we. And back in the 1880s, the first person singular won out by a landslide.

We were very much in an I mood. We were very much focused on what was good for us individually rather than what was good for all of us together. That era after the Civil War and Reconstruction became known as the Gilded Age. It was a time of rapid and often disconcerting technological change, a period of bitter arguments about immigration, democracy, and social justice. The prevailing public philosophy at that time was something called social Darwinism. Natural selection, better if we don't help poor people

because that'll just speed up the process of development of the human race. This ethos allowed a small group of elite men, the so-called robber barons, to amass vast wealth while workers enjoyed little security from the fruits of their labor. And the philosophy back then was that if workers didn't like that, well, they should start their own business empire.

From the top to the bottom of Gilded Age society, the eye was celebrated over the we. Red in tooth and claw, bad to help poor people, good to... Be as selfish as possible. Yeah. I'm guessing that some of this may sound depressingly familiar. I mean, arguments about social justice and inequality?

A 1% of people thriving while much of the other 99% is still struggling? America in 1890 looked a lot like America right now. Extremely polarized, extremely unequal, extremely self-centered, and extremely socially isolated. And then something happened around 1910, and all those graphs began to go in the right direction. The first sign of this change

was in that written archive Robert analyzed. After 1900, the ratio of I to we words began to shift. More and more writers began talking about the collective good rather than the individual. They essentially said, what we've inherited from our parents is a society that's really out of whack. Even if we're ourselves doing fine, we have obligations to other people. This urge, Robert argues, led people to start banding together in clubs, in associations, in teams, and in unions. Americans got more involved in charities and civic bodies and in politics. Citizens began pressuring their elected officials to use the we rather than the I to shape policies.

Things in America were getting better and better. We were economically growing. We were equal. We were taking care of each other. We were attending PTA meetings. We were focused on the we. We were like. We were taking care of each other. We were attending PTA meetings. We were focused on the we. We were like this amazing country. Robert calls this change the upswing. It's a phenomenon that he thinks should give us a lot of hope about the fate of society and social capital today. The upswing reveals that our great-great-grandparents faced pretty much the same problems we have today. And they were able to make the cultural changes needed to successfully switch course and rebuild social capital.

You know, it does not have to be this way. And for most young people today, that is news. In the last episode, we talked about the importance of individual action in improving social capital. We extolled the virtues of becoming a joiner, of going to third places and meeting your neighbors, to build the bonds of community and trust that make us all happier. But Robert's study of the upswing shows that's only part of the solution. We also need a

cultural shift. Our entire society has to focus on the we rather than the I, and that means we need people at the top to start taking social capital seriously and to back it with policies and money. Which kind of sounds like a huge hurdle. The Happiness Lab will be right back. If you're looking for a true hero of the We Society, you need to look further back in time than the 1950s and way before the Gilded Age of the 1880s.

In fact, you need to go all the way back to the days of the American Revolution. Because just as America was being founded with a declaration to give citizens the right to pursue happiness, a British philosopher was thinking deeply about what the pursuit of happiness actually meant. And Jeremy Bentham came down firmly on the moral case for collective well-being. The greatest happiness, he wrote, of the greatest number, that is the measure of right

and wrong. I thought that was absolutely mind-blowing. As a young student, economist Lord Richard Layard loved Jeremy Bentham's work. The way we would judge our society is by the happiness of the people. The way we would want the government to behave is to maximize the well-being of the people. What are we here to do to produce the most happiness that we can in the world? Now, you might not be used to hearing a veteran economist like Lord Layard talking about concepts like happiness and maximizing well-being. When economists use words like maximizing, concepts like happiness and maximizing well-being.

When economists use words like maximizing, they're usually focused on money and shareholder value and country wealth as measured by GDP. It's not that economists are blind to the need to make people happier. They just love numbers and data. And until recently, psychologists like me couldn't give them any of those numbers or data because we hadn't yet come up with good ways to measure people's happiness. And what could you say?

Well, more or less all you could say is how much they could buy. And so how much they could buy became the criterion which many people thought was equivalent to well-being. And that has really been very unfortunate. Unfortunate because it's just not true. As I say over and over on this podcast, lots of research shows that how much money people have is not a proxy for how happy they are. You can be a blissfully happy billionaire or a downright miserable one.

But as the saying goes, if you're armed with a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. And until recently, economists were only armed with GDP. So they began to assume that increasing our wealth was the best path to happiness. The problem is that policymakers and leaders tend to listen to economists. So we wound up with government policies that confuse money and well-being. This is a terrible culture. Take Lord Laird's home country of England. He's watched politicians use economic arguments to remove funding from the places where ordinary people meet and form social capital.

Children's centers, which have been largely abolished by the present government, were very successful in bringing together mothers with young children. Youth centers, very important, and there's plenty of evidence that when they get closed down, as they have been, that's not good for crime. And then old people centers or mixed-age centers, where people regularly get together in a natural kind of way. Governments usually want to reduce debt and promote economic growth. So they conclude that however nice it might be to let parents and teens and elders meet up and become friends, it's a luxury the country can't afford.

But Lord Layard is a pioneer of a different field known as happiness economics. And that field sees the benefits of these investments very, very differently. Lord Layard argues that concentrating solely on economic growth fails Jeremy Bentham's test of right and wrong. It doesn't bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number. The things which were being measured are the things external. And you can see somebody's income. You can't see how they're feeling. And we have to move to a culture where we

take the life as experienced and the inner life more seriously. Fortunately for Lloyd Laird and other proponents of happiness economics, psychologists have now worked out how to establish if people are happy. We simply ask them. Researchers now have lots of different survey tools for measuring if people are satisfied, both in their lives and with their lives, and to find out what factors influence their answers. And of course, the results are incredibly important and so different from what many politicians think matter to people. turns out, talks about things like GDP. People are much more likely to mention loneliness, a topic that few economists or politicians have focused on, but that we now know has a huge effect on our health.

It's estimated to be the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. That damage could be reduced if governments invested in the right problem. There's money that needs to be spent, but it's not a huge amount of money. Lord Laird argues for things like tax incentives to encourage the growth of third places. spent, but it's not a huge amount of money. Lord Laird argues for things like tax incentives to encourage the growth of third places. He thinks governments should prioritize building plazas and parks where people can connect. Town planning is very, very important in determining whether a space is where people naturally come together and talk to each other and can walk around and

sit and chat and so on, or whether it's a kind of motorized social desert. These are real decisions that town planners can make. You may well look around your town and see little evidence that urban planners have given much thought to bringing folks together. But just as Robert Putnam saw an upswing in community spirit after the Gilded Age, Lord Laird senses a growing interest in happiness economics in many nations. And we're now in a really interesting situation in Britain where well-being is coming up to the floor because the party which will probably be elected in the next election is committed to making well-being an equal goal with GDP for its government.

And note that Lord Layard isn't advocating spending public money frivolously. All those usual hard-headed financial savings goals are built into happiness economics too. Our criterion for public policy is that we should be spending money on policies which create the most well-being per dollar spent. Now, by dollar spent, it means not only the dollar spent at the beginning of the process, but minus the dollar saved as well as the spending the initial dollar. Cost-effectiveness, this is a sort of well-being mantra when it comes to public policy. That's right. Public investment in improving well-being can actually save governments money. Take loneliness again.

A dollar spent giving a lonely person access to a third place could save the money that would need to be spent if that person gets sick as a result of their social isolation. And as we heard in our last episode, investing in clubs and third places like sports teams, community pools, choirs, and residence associations can reduce crimes and help towns run more efficiently. We need to make this case for investing in things which are really critical for people's well-being and will actually, many of them, save the state a lot of money. Lord Laird has been around even longer than Robert Putnam. He was born in the 1930s. I assumed he'd

be even more depressed by the current state of social capital and the lack of trust. But I was really heartened to hear him talk so optimistically about where policy is going. And then I caught myself. Lord Layard's views are well-respected in Europe, and particularly the Scandinavian countries that so often top the charts of the happiest places on Earth. But what about the United States?

Despite our incredibly high GDP, we barely hit the middle of some of those well-being metrics. Are the leaders of my country ever going to wake up to happiness economics? Hey, Senator Murphy. Thanks so much for taking the time. Yeah, absolutely. Really glad to do it. Thanks for having me be part of this. When I first saw the new national strategy, I was so excited. And then when I realized it was my senator, I was like, yes, so exciting. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

When Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam first published his findings about the decline of social capital, it sparked a huge national debate. Please be seated, everyone. Let's go. Even President Clinton wanted in. I'd like to call on Professor Robert Putnam now. Within one week, I was invited to Camp David. Camp David, for goodness sakes?

This is not the normal experience of any academic. Bowling alone. It's worth it for the title alone. I was only a grad student back then, but I also caught the Putnam bug. I started talking endlessly with friends about Robert's ideas. We even dreamt up our own outrageous plan to rebuild social capital. We'd move to some tiny coastal town and build a local cinema. But that never came to fruition. Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack

in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The events of 9-11 diverted the conversations that I and so many people were having about social capital. The plight of third places suddenly didn't seem so important. The victims were in airplanes or in their offices. Secretaries, businessmen and women, Only later would scholars argue that it was the exact right time to start boosting trust and social capital. Since 9-11, the decline in social capital has become even steeper. Surveys reveal that trust in government is at a 60-year low. even steeper. Surveys reveal that trust in government

is at a 60-year low. Since 2018, our faith in journalists, police officers, and even school principals has dropped. And young adults, those with even less experience with the sorts of third places that Robert enjoyed as a kid, are now the least willing to trust their fellow citizens. That has spurred some people to take action.

There's no doubt that my rather sudden interest in this topic of social connection is not coincidental to being a parent of teenagers. I want you to meet someone who's tackling our decline in social capital head on. So I'm Chris Murphy and I am a United States senator from Connecticut. Senator Murphy has introduced the National Strategy for Social Connection Act, a bill that would create an office within the White House charged with reducing loneliness and boosting social capital. The senator hopes it will give future generations the opportunity to build the sorts of third places that he took for granted back in the 1970s. I had a real sense of place growing up. I grew up in a pretty quintessentially suburban community right outside of Hartford.

pretty quintessentially suburban community right outside of Hartford. It had specific restaurants that you'd go to see friends and neighbors. We had rituals that would involve doing the same set of things and going to the same set of places on Saturday mornings and Sunday mornings. There was a routine to life in Wethersfield that was very much anchored in that place. And it was a routine that you couldn't easily replicate somewhere else because the things we were doing in Wethersfield were unique to Wethersfield. Some of the rituals Senator Murphy remembers may sound kind of corny to modern ears, like heading to the store with his grandparents and being treated by the owner to a cheese slice while the adults chit-chatted.

It was part of my weekend routine, going to the local grocery store, getting a free slice of American cheese, and feeling like really connected to that guy and to that store and to that business community who, you know, were so wonderfully attentive to my needs that they would give me a slice of cheese. But local stores like this are getting harder to find. Senator Murphy worries that lawmakers have failed to see the social consequences of the shopping and delivery apps that we all find so convenient. When online commerce and social media came along, government decided to convince itself that the market, the private sector, could deliver the good and withhold the bad. And that's not what happened.

Unregulated online commerce ended up wiping out our local economies, our downtowns. And so that experience I had growing up of having a relationship with your local grocer or your local deli manager that was really important to your sense of place and identity. That doesn't exist any longer. Those local grocery stores are gone. But is missing out on free cheese slices enough of a reason to create a whole new office in the heart of the United States government and to demand the sorts of policies that Robert Putnam, Lord Laird, and even Jeremy Bentham might approve of? I think it's always dangerous to get involved in blind nostalgia and things about growing up in the 70s that are not fantastic and not awesome. But I do feel like I am struggling as a parent to deliver valuable connection to my kids who are now a teenager and a preteen in the way that I had it.

And I think that's part of what has driven me to really care about this issue of connection. But the second reason is this. I also just am responsible for the people I represent and I just don't feel like they're as healthy or as fulfilled as they need to be. And I feel this constant lingering anxiety amongst the people that I represent in a way that I don't remember even when I started out in politics 20 years ago. And so I really have been engaged in the last couple of years in the search to try to figure out why people are as unhappy as they are. Why are they more anxious? Why has our conversation become more dysfunctional? And I'm convinced that part of that is that people aren't feeling as connected to each other. And there's got to be a political solution for that because there's a political consequence. And in keeping with the insights of happiness economics, Senator Murphy argues that a dollar spent on well-being today is likely to

see more dollars saved down the line. The biggest driver of the federal deficit is health care costs. And so if you are a good steward of the taxpayer dollar, then you have to care about why we're spending so much more money in this country than anywhere else on health care. And what the Surgeon General tells us unequivocally is that there is a health care cost to loneliness and isolation, that people who are lonely are logically going to be more likely to suffer from something like depression or dementia, but also from heart disease. And so there's just a dollar sign cost to isolation. Senator Murphy also thinks these social capital improvements will reduce crime.

He sees a direct link between social isolation and road rage, and even an increasing phenomenon of the modern age, air rage. TSA administrator was in my office the other day. We were talking about the biggest problems he faces. And at the top of his list was violence on planes and at TSA checkpoints. He describes a hair-trigger violence amongst passengers who travel through our airports and travel on airlines that he's never seen in his entire career. And we feel that in our daily lives,

that people just seem quicker to violent outbursts or quicker to verbal assaults on peers than they were before. And I think that is one of the consequences of a country that is just sort of searching for connection and meaning. And when you're searching in that way, maybe your first emotion is sadness, but often for a lot of people, anger is right there, not far behind. And you see that play out in a whole bunch of forums in our society today.

But isolation doesn't just cause the kind of anger that erupts when you're rushing to make your flight. Senator Murphy also suspects that many of today's hate crimes, mass shootings, and terrorist attacks ultimately stem from a lack of social capital. But I think there's no doubt that people's isolation and people's loneliness ultimately moves them into unhealthy places politically. And part of the reason that we have more extremism

in our political organization and communication, I think is because a lot of lonely, isolated people end up finding connection or finding meaning through politics, and in particular, through the extremes of both the right and the left. These are weighty and depressing problems. But the solutions Senator Murphy has proposed sound kind of fun. Rather than pushing for more cops or harsher punishments, he thinks that at least some of the answers could come from things like swimming together.

There was this small, insignificant kerfuffle on social media over the summer about public pools. And the fact that we're losing public pools and the ones we have. We had a hard time staffing this summer, in part because of funding shortages. But that caused some people on the neoliberal right to say, wait a second, why should government be involved in our aquatic life to begin with? But actually, that's over the history of time been a real great tradition of

local government is to, you know, help create, not have the sole responsibility to create, but to help create some of those places, little leagues, public pools, public parks, dog parks, where we can easily find other people who share common interests. And as funding has run short for those projects, as government, frankly, has had to push more and more money into schools and health care, it's had less money left over to do the stuff that it actually did really well a generation ago, which is just to create places and forums where people can come together.

And Senator Murphy is also committed to policies that promote the free time needed to connect as a community. What if we had a minimum wage that actually allowed people to work only 40 hours a week? What if you had time in the evenings to join a social club, a cooking class? But new funding and regulations aren't the only weapons Senator Murphy plans to deploy against declining social capital. I think government often acts best when it doesn't mandate, but where it disseminates best practices. Just as the U.S. issues guidelines for nutrition and physical activity, Senator Murphy thinks governments need to set better norms when it comes to social connection.

I don't necessarily need a set of recommendations from the government as to how many friends I have or how many clubs I should join, but maybe they should be operative on school districts, for instance. How does a school district create a schedule and a calendar that creates opportunities for parents to connect with each other and for students to connect with each other. Maybe that's really important for a school district, just like learning, reading, writing, and mathematics is. Even if you trust the happiness science, some of you listening may find these ideas a little too liberal. You may even wonder if policies like these would ever make it through a partisan Congress. I asked Senator Murphy that very question.

The loneliness epidemic really doesn't discriminate based upon your politics. And so there's just as many people who consider themselves on the right versus those who consider themselves on the left who are feeling like they're disconnected from their community and isolated. Republicans talk just as much about the health of our small towns and our downtowns as Democrats

do, breathing life back into small businesses and local business communities. That really has nothing to do with left or right. I have to admit, I was at first a little skeptical about whether a proposed bill, like the National Strategy for Social Connection Act, could gain support across the aisle. Producing this happiness lab season about the importance of social connection has convinced me that we need to make some pretty fundamental changes to how we interact with one another. But I was also worried about whether my country was ready to make those changes. My conversation with Senator Murphy, though, has made me a lot more hopeful that a new upswing might be in store. We have met these truly existential threats in the past, whether that we have this ability to diagnose the threats that are

posed to democracy and then rally the country to a solution, I think speaks to the genius of this country. This show concludes our special season on increasing social connection. But this episode has also provided me with a bit of closure too. As I mentioned before, I've spent the last two decades worried about social capital and what we can do to improve it. I can't tell you how inspired provided me with a bit of closure too. As I mentioned before, I've spent the last two decades worried about social capital and what we can do to improve it. I can't tell you how inspired I was reading Robert Putnam's research back in the late 90s. Witnessing just how badly we've taken care of our social capital since then has been devastating. Before making this series, I'd sometimes get worried that social capital had passed the point of no return and that we'd never

be able to get back to the connections our country enjoyed back in the day. But after talking to all the experts you got to meet over the season, I'm much, much more hopeful. These days, when I start to feel despair, I think back to Robert Putnam's work and a little insight he shared when we spoke, a saying told to him by a dear and wise friend. Optimism, he said, is a passive virtue. Hope, he said, is an active virtue. Hope says, I can see how it could go in that direction, and I'm going to work to make it go in that direction. That's what he means by an active virtue. So now I don't know whether I'm optimistic about America or the world now, but I am hopeful. I can see how we could get there, and I'm doing it by damnness

by preaching to move us in that direction. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Jess Shane and Alice Fiennes offered additional production support. Special thanks to my agent Ben Davis and all of the Pushkin crew. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos.