The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - What Can We Learn From the Happiest Country on Earth?

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

There are certain nations which always top the rankings in the World Happiness Report. What are they doing right, that other countries are getting wrong? And what can you do to make your home country happier? John Helliwell of the World Happiness Report explains how things like wealth, freedom and friendship combine to make a happy society - and how tiny changes in your home, neighborhood or workplace can have a huge national impact. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin podcast hosts to pretend that they were an author on this year's World Happiness Report. I asked each of them, what chapter would you write? Okay, well, this one's really easy for me. Mental chatter. Oh, yeah. I was objecting to the phrase, it's the journey, not the destination. It's the journey and the destination. It's the journey and the destination. Yes, I'll buy that. Well, the World Happiness Report 2024 is now finally out. So for the next few episodes, I'll be talking to the report's real authors about the issues they think are most pressing for the planet's well-being.

Unfortunately, many people never get a chance to learn about the full contents of the annual report because the headlines often focus on just one attention-grabbing part, the annual country rankings of happiness around the world. Which does kind of make sense. I mean, we all want to know, how's my country doing? So in this episode, I'll start by diving into those rankings to find out what they do and don't tell us about how to live happier lives. And I have the perfect guide. Hi, I'm John Halliwell at the University of British Columbia and the Vancouver School of Economics. John knows all there is to know about the infamous country rankings

because he was there at the founding of the first World Happiness Report. I've been in there right from the beginning. Starting more than a decade ago, the International Day of Happiness and its accompanying report were an attempt by the United Nations to get governments to take the happiness of people around the world more seriously and to enact policies

that would improve our well-being. And the United Nations quickly realized that ranking country-level well-being was a big thing. But how does it work? Well, the rankings are compiled from data gathered by the polling company Gallup,

which asks people around the world the same set of questions in a huge survey known as the Gallup World Poll, which is given to around 1,000 people in each country. The happiness ratings come from people's responses to a metric known as life evaluation, or the Cantrell Ladder. People are asked to rate their current life as a whole using the metaphor of a ladder, in which the best possible life would be a 10 all the way at the top of the ladder, and the worst possible life would

be a zero down at the bottom. Everyone's ratings are then averaged together into country-level happiness scores. And to make sure small fluctuations don't sway the rankings, the scientists use a three-year average for each country. But the report doesn't just measure people's life evaluations. People in each country are also asked about their emotions. They report on the positive feelings they've experienced, specifically laughter, enjoyment, and interest, as well as the not-so-positive ones, worry, sadness, and anger. And the Gallup World Poll doesn't stop there. It also includes a set of other questions that help researchers explain why countries differ in their overall well-being. And this year, researchers have discovered that six of those other questions seem to matter a lot.

What's factor number one? It's a country's wealth as measured by their GDP. That is, the total value of goods and services produced in one year divided by the total population. What's factor number two? It's a citizen's average life expectancy. This one takes into account how the nation's health plays into its happiness. The third and fourth variables involve people's ability to act freely without government intervention or corruption.

Those questions are, are you satisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life? And is corruption widespread throughout the government or businesses? The fifth and sixth factors have to do with people's social connection and generosity. People are asked, if you were in trouble, do you have friends or relatives you could count on to help you?

And also things like, have you donated money to a charity in the past month? These days, the World Happiness Report's country rankings are a big annual event. But when the report first started, John and his co-authors had no idea it would have such a huge impact. We were surprised that the first report got as much public attention as it did. To us, it spoke to a need for a broadly available set of data reflecting the quality of lives all over the world. There was nothing like that regularly available to the media and to people in general. And so we kept on producing

the report. The interest was broad and it got broader so that in each report we had a bigger take up and there was initially people. But I think that then translated into a broader interest that then encouraged governments to actually focus on well-being, all of which, of course, then requires that you build a public service that's trained in well-being science and knows how to analyze policies to deliver what's best for better lives. My understanding is the rankings have been in there since the original 2011 report, correct? There was some disagreement among our three founding editors. I didn't want to have rankings at all. I said, that's not the way in which happiness is not a zero-sum game. It's for

everybody to improve their happiness. And it doesn't matter whether they're happier or not than their neighbors. So we didn't even put in numbers. But I had to go down with my finger and count out because people wanted to know what number they were on the list. So in the next one, we put in the numbers, and the numbers have been there ever since. We use the rankings as a way, because quite

clearly it's a primary point of attention for people. They want to know how their country does and how that does in comparison with other countries whom they think of as their peers. The rankings may be what bring the original clicks, but our purpose is not to stop there, clicks, but our purpose is not to stop there, not even to emphasize those, but to dig deeper into what makes for better lives so that people can do more about their own lives and the lives of those around them and help move the arrow. This is why I'm so excited that you've taken the time to talk to us today, because I feel like sometimes when I see the news coverage of the World Happiness Report, it's just like, this is the country that's number one, and then it ends there. But I think as we dig deeper and try to understand where those rankings come from

and what we can do differently, that's the part that's going to matter so much more. I agree. And so before we kind of jump into the rankings this year, I wanted to talk about what goes into the measurements that make up the World Happiness Report. So where do these data come from? And when we're talking about happier countries, what are the specific measurements that are going into that? It's an important question to talk about because we keep emphasizing to people that this is not our opinions that they're hearing, it's their own opinions. Because what

we report are the average value of the answers to a single question, how people evaluate their lives on a scale of zero to 10. And those rankings don't tell you anything, of course. They just tell you the state of play within a country. And then the next interesting question, which we started answering in more detail, was why are these countries different? And some people treat our explanations as the primary measure, and we keep trying to remind them that what we're presenting is not our expertise, but simply telling them what people in their countries have said. What are the questions that people are answering in these surveys? Well, when I entered this field more than 25 years ago, I thought of myself as Aristotle's research assistant, because he had said millennia ago that if you want to find out what makes for a good life,

you ask people in a reflective moment to think about their life as a whole. Then he listed a lot of factors that ought to underlie that, including living a good and virtuous life. And he said, Aristotle, that positive emotions, laughter and fun were a part of that. So the emotions are important. Nobody thinks not. Did you feel anger, stress, worry yesterday? And did you feel positive emotions yesterday? Yes or no? But some people think because the World Happiness Report is called the World Happiness Report, that it's all about affective measures or emotional measures or short-term measures of people's well-being and or answer to the people who say this is all about short-term moods and it isn't a serious

business, it's all fluff, by reminding people that there are two ways of using the word happiness. One is as an emotion, how happy were you yesterday? And the other is how happy are you about something? And that could be the baggage retrieval system they have at Heathrow, or it could be anything. But the point is, it doesn't require the emotion of happiness. It's saying, how satisfied are you with that? And so the judgmental use of the word happiness is our main focus in the report. We also include, of course, the affective measure. And people sometimes, and rightly so, get confused about these two different uses of the word because we use the word both ways ourselves. But for us, it's these overall life evaluations that are of fundamental importance.

And so now that we've gotten the history of the report out of the way, let's get to the thing that I think is on everybody's mind, which is, you know, who's the highest ranked country this year? Who are you seeing coming out in the newest data as the highest on the list? Because the rankings are based on a three-year average, and Finland was pretty well ahead of the average last year. It's no surprise that Finland is in number one again. What's interesting to see is how this plays out in Finland. Frequently, the Finns say, we're not the happiest country in the world. And what they're thinking of, in part, is the other version of happiness, that they don't see all the laughter in the streets that they're used to thinking of as happiness.

But then you ask them, how is life in Finland? Tell us about it. Where are the things you enjoy and what do you value about it? It turns out they end up seeing the importance of trust, of warm social relations, of caring about each other. They're not surprised to hear that when wallets were experimentally dropped, the highest proportion anywhere, 10 out of 10, was in Helsinki. And so they see that, they appreciate it. They understand that it's maybe not that way elsewhere. They don't boast about it. That's another feature of the Finns. Some of

the Finnish researchers say that above the other Nordic countries, even though the other Nordic countries are richer and more out front in some other ways, is that they don't take themselves so seriously. They don't rank themselves with each other as much. They're less materialistic and more concerned with each other. And that's quietly okay with them. I would have to say that a country that boasted about its high position is probably not likely to sustain it long because that's not the point. And when Denmark was highest, they didn't boast about it, but they set about trying to learn the lessons from the science of happiness and spread them, not just in Denmark, but in other countries. And that's a classic Nordic way. And it's one

of the reasons why the five Nordic countries are always in the top 10, that they are also among the world leaders in untied foreign aid, in the receipt of refugees, of leading the international movements to spread well-being around the world. Those all hang together and they make a consistent package. So that's thing number one about the report that's kind of not very surprising. Finland's at the top yet again, and they're up there with all these other Scandinavian countries. Something else that's occurred in other happiness reports in the past is that there's big gaps between the top of the list and the bottom. Is that something that you also saw in the most recent report? The gap, if anything, has become a little wider. And that's, I guess, because Afghanistan is dropping further and further still. Having been last for several years, it's now further behind the rest.

One of the surprises that I saw in the report was that there are a few countries that kind of, you know, jumped up much higher than they'd been historically and a few other countries that had fallen down. And so let's talk about some of the countries that jumped up. Any big kind of like surprises in terms of who got much higher in terms of their happiness? It was nice to see Costa Rica back in the top 20. They were in the position 12 in 2013. Here they are back because they're a very good example. They're always the happiest country in Latin America. And they touch bases on all of the six factors we talk about. Another thing that we highlight this year, because we're talking especially about happiness

at different ages, is that we're seeing a continuation of the gap between Central and Eastern Europe and Western Europe, which was very big before the wall came down. It's been gradually narrowing over that whole period. And we find this year, especially for the young. So, to low the gap for the old between Central and Eastern Europe and Western Europe is still about a full point on the 10-point scale. For the young, the gap is gone. So, the young in Central and Eastern Europe are essentially the same appreciation of their lives as in Western Europe. And so there's a transition to see. The overall transition isn't complete yet, but for the young, it is. It's quite notable.

The young have become less happy in other parts of the world, especially in North America. So Costa Rica seems to be going up in their rankings, but you also identified a few countries that seem to be going down. Which were those? The drops that we know because they were going out of the top 20 was Germany and the United States. The United States just above Germany last year, just above Germany this year. But what was 15 and 16 is now 23 and 24

in both cases, especially the United States due to drops in all age groups, but especially in the young. So this is sort of pretty bad for me being from the United States thinking that my country is now no longer in the top 20. I mean, was this something that shocked the researchers or is this something that you all expected to find? The underlying trends have been there for a while. It's not COVID related.

So these things essentially are trends that started before COVID, more or less carried on the same way with only modest changes in balance during COVID. But a little bit of a surprise because that's quite a big drop, and it's similar in Canada. The drop among the young is so substantial. So if you actually look at the changes between 26 to 2010, the sort of first years of the poll, and the most recent three years, Canada and the United States have been among the biggest drops over that whole period. It's not just one year.

It's accumulating over that period because Canada was fourth and is 15th now, and the U.S.S. was 11 and it's now 23rd. So you can see those are quite big drops. So what's behind the rise and fall of these nations and the happiness rankings? What are some countries getting right and others getting wrong? The Happiness Lab will be right back. We'll be right back. One thing that makes the World Happiness Report so important is that it doesn't just measure the differences in happiness of people around the world. It also tries to determine the factors that lead to those differences in well-being.

And John says that this year, six factors have emerged as being important for the differences he and his team have observed. Those predictive factors are country GDP, life expectancy, freedom of choice, freedom from corruption, social connection, and how generous people are. I wanted John to help us better understand these factors, starting with country wealth. There's an old saying that money can't buy you happiness. But if that's true, why does GDP matter so much for a country's happiness ranking? Aristotle was quite explicit about it. You have to have the basic stuff to live on,

or it's hard to actually get a chance to enjoy and spread out. If you add on to that list of questions, not just the average level of income, but did you have enough to eat or not have enough to eat at some time in the last two weeks? The basic survival part of GDP is very important. So to move people out of a situation where they can only think about the ways to get their next meal is extraordinarily important. There's been a lot of discussion about whether at some stage the income effect starts to peter out. You get less bang for the buck as you get richer. Same with education. Education matters for well-being, but if you put in the other things

that support well-being, education itself drops out. In other words, it's a way of allowing people to provide a good life. And so education without good purpose doesn't do any good for people. Same with income, but income, like good health, is kind of fundamental as a building block for good lives. And everybody knew that before there was a World Happiness Report, so that if you asked the development agencies or anybody else say what are you after oh we're after gdp per capita healthy life expectancy but when when we get these data from people we find out well that's maybe half the story but the other half of the story is what is the social context in which people are living is there a high enough level

of trust around them we use a measure of. There's a sense of personal freedom. How free are you to make your key life decisions? Do you have someone to count on in times of trouble? That's a very limited measure of the warmth of your social connections, but it turns out to be very important. And finally, and less emphasized by Aristotle, is benevolence. To what extent? And we use donations net of the effective income, but it's very apparent that doing things ideally with others for others is very important. that we have only one year of, so it hasn't got into the basic modeling, but we find that to be very important, is whether people think their wallet would be returned.

If they lost it, actual experiments show that people answer that question. They understand the relative likelihood of a wallet return looking across countries. And a wallet return is nice because it's not just honesty, it's also benevolence because you could be perfectly trustworthy, but still not take the time out of your life to pick up a wallet and make sure it got back to the owner. But that's what people do in these high trust countries and the high ranking countries. The wallet return is very high in the Nordic countries, and it's very important. There was a survey we had that measured what people's risk was of mental health problems, being a victim of violent crime or being unemployed. And the positive effect coming from thinking your wallet would be returned if found by

either a stranger or police or especially, was way more important than the negative on people's life evaluations from those other factors, which are very important. One of the things that really seems to matter is having somebody to count on that particular metric. And interestingly, if I understand the report right, that seems to be more important than reporting that you're not lonely. It seems to be the positive effect of sort of social connection rather than the negative one. Walk through why that's so important for me.

That's a good point. And there's a new survey that was done in 2022, the MetaGallup World Connection Survey, where they measured on the same scale, to what extent are you connected with other people? To what extent are you supported by other, you're socially supported? And then to what extent do you connected with other people? To what extent are you supported by other, you're socially supported? And then to what extent do you feel lonely? On that same scale, right across the world, feelings of positive social support were twice as frequent as loneliness, despite the fact loneliness in the Surgeon General's report, and you name it, is being treated as a major crisis.

At least I personally, and I think most of our analysts would agree, it's much more important to emphasize the positives than the negatives. Because in a sense, a supportive social environment not only is twice as important as the absence of loneliness, it cuts loneliness because, of course, the best cure for loneliness is a vaccine, and the best vaccine is a friend. And so it's these positive things that should get the emphasis. And that's the way to, as it were, cure loneliness is not to wait till it happens, but to have a social environment that is supportive. And this seems to mirror something else that you've seen time again in the report, as I understand it, which is that sometimes these positive behaviors or even the

positive emotions seem to be winning out in terms of these life evaluation measures over the like negative behaviors and the negative emotions. What are some other examples of this? Well, it turns up in lots of different domains that people do value the chance to do things for other people and with other people. There were surveys in one report about how people were happier in green environments and in less noisy environments than elsewhere. And we had the authors go back to show who people were with. And who you were with at the time you were doing something was much more important than what you were doing.

So people were happier commuting with a friend than they were walking alone in a beautiful environment. Of course, the best was to be in the green environment with a friend. But that shows you the dominance of the social context over other aspects. One issue that came up in this year's report is that the Gallup World Poll has now been going on long enough that we have the potential for splitting out generational effects from age effects. You know, there is a sort of midlife low that appears in a lot of the data on an age basis. And so we have dug into that, but also trying to separate it from when people were born. And so we split the population into those born before 1965, boomers and their predecessors, those born after 1980, who were then the millennials and Gen Z, and then the

intervening group of Gen X. And then what we did, this is continuing with the benevolence theme, there was a huge increase in benevolence during the pandemic years compared to 2017 to 2019. compared to 2017 to 2019. That boost is still going on now, right through 2023. And we asked ourselves, because this is a big item of discussion, especially in the United States, whether the millennials and their successors are the me generation, the we generation, or just like other generations.

So we were able to look at this boost in benevolent behavior, and then has this boost been the same for the millennials as it has for the earlier generations? And first of all, we found that that boost is everywhere across all generations. But in terms of the me versus we generation, we find out that the millennials jumped up even more than their predecessors to help others when help was required during those COVID years. So that's a very encouraging piece of evidence to offset some of the pessimism that people seem to have about the world falling apart behind them. Oh, I love that. I love that statistic. One of the other things I was so interested in in this report is that you're actually looking at these differences across age and whether their rankings hold, not just for everyone,

but whether they hold as well for young individuals versus older individuals and so on. And so, you know, what did you see? Are the rankings pretty consistent across age or do we see some big differences? Huge differences. Canada and the United States, Are the rankings pretty consistent across age, or do we see some big differences? Huge differences. Canada and the United States, the rankings for the old are 50 or more ranks higher than for the young.

There are many other countries where the rankings for the old are 40 or more lower than for the young. So there are huge differences in these rankings across countries. And in some cases, where the young are doing very well and the old not so well, it's because every country is different in generational effects and so on. You look at the older people in countries that are part of the former Yugoslavia, where they were at each other's throats, literally, in the 1990s. The people who were alive and seeing that as adults or older children at that time are now very unhappy still. They're bearing the scars of that.

So trauma leaves its scars. And so that's one of the reasons why the old have not so quickly followed the young in some of those countries in their higher well-being. However, the young can rise relative to the old in a newer, refashioned world is grounds for some optimism. Although it may not be completely easy to pull people out and to expunge those awful memories of the past, it's possible to create new generations who are less burdened by that and help them to form their positive connections with their neighbors and with the world. So as we walk through these six factors, you know, again, being from the U.S., my kind of U.S.-centric version of this report, I'm curious which of

those you think were really going down in the case of the U.S. Like over the last few years, what of those six factors have changed in the U.S. to kind of make us drop so significantly in the rankings? Well, my guess is that the social environment within which people operate. I mean, there have been drops in trust. That's evident. It's not clear whether there have been drops in social connections or not. There have probably been drops in the warmth and trustworthiness of those social connections. We have had chapters on the corrosive effects of the social media use of certain types on young people. And we have a special chapter in this year's report on young people per se,

And we have a special chapter in this year's report on young people per se, finding that they're getting less happy once they get into middle school and carry on right through into their working careers. And some of that may be just learning about life, and some of it may be that the social media on average have not been so productive of good relations. That we know from other research lowers happiness levels. And there's an underlying negativity bias that humans have. They react more sharply and quickly to negative news. If you then combine that negativity and bias with a huge increase in the range of information sources that people have, then they may well be deluged in negative information that drives them a long way from reality.

And we know that from the wallet data, for example, because we know that it's expected wallet return that makes you happy. because we know that it's expected wallet return that makes you happy. But we also know that people underestimate the likelihood of their wallet being returned, which means that negative bias is very costly. So we're needlessly unhappy because we don't understand that the people around us are kinder and better than we think they are. Because to walk down a street, as they do in Helsinki, and see someone on the street, not as a danger, not as a stranger, but a friend they haven't met

yet. And that's very important for your happiness to think you're in that kind of environment. It's possible that what's going on in the United States, and this is true in Canada too, and also it's got its echoes in Australia and New Zealand, is that not only are more negative news there, but the young people are in some sense feeling guilty about it, whether it's the past treatments of minorities, of pre-colonial populations, treatment of the environment, any range of issues. They're feeling that they're either the victims of what others have done before them or are carrying collectively as a group the guilt for producing these things. And I suspect that's because those drops in young people's happiness are not global. They're fixed to the societies in which the social media have been

more dominant, which the distribution of negative stories about the past and lack of positive stories about the potential future have been more prevalent. But my instinct is that those two things belong in the same bag, that in fact it is this confluence of biased negative reporting and biased in the sense of not reflecting the reality in which people are living, coupled with people feeling that things are going badly in ways that they don't see any easy way of fixing. We know that natural disasters, although they're terrible, they offer immediately for most people the chance to do something to help. They rush in and help. People do want to help others. But for some of these things that people are worrying about now,

they don't see any easy way of jumping in and making a difference. And it's part of the research that we report on in the World Happiness Report is to help expose to people that the quality of their own local social environment, which is so important, is affected by their own behavior. So they should be going out with a smile and a greeting and to help other people and not presume the worst about them, but in fact, connect with them for mutual advantage. Sometimes it takes a little bit of a push to get people to think in those positive terms, but there's a big payoff. And so as I think about kind of some of these factors kind of playing in together, if you were going to create the sort of ideal country, right, you know, kind of cherry picking bits that one country is doing and kind of adding it to

another country, what would that kind of like ideal country look like? Like, what would it really build in to boost happiness as highly as possible? That's a good one. One of the things we found is that of those six factors we do measure, the top countries all do well in all of them. You can't do it on one thing. You can only do it by having a full tapestry. I think the way it could play out, you see, you don't want to have an idea that there's a recipe for being a really happy country. There are many recipes, but what has to be true about a really happy country is that people really do care about each other. They're characterized by equality, and the equality that's really important is the equality of opportunity, the equality of regard, the equality

of acceptance, the equality of access to basic services. We talked earlier about the importance of income, but as important as the kind of things you can buy with your own income, it's the kind of things we provide for each other by way of education access, education quality, health care access, peace and freedom, and a trustworthy local social environment. And some of that can be fixed up by the neighbors and improved by the neighbors. be fixed up by the neighbors and improved by the neighbors. Some of it requires an add-on of national-level institutions that permit people to connect rather than be unconnected. If you wanted me to focus on something that could be fixed in almost every country to make it a better country, it's that over the last 20 years, there's been a move driven by complaints of something going wrong, somebody being molested, somebody being shot. And all those things that go wrong are what are reported in the news. So then almost every organization now has a risk committee

and the risk committee is designed to stop things going wrong. And so they shut the kids off in schools with locked doors. They shut people in elder care facilities behind locked doors. And in the process, and this is true of almost all experiments that are trying to make lives better, that it's increasingly hard even to do the experiments. We've been running experiments mixing young children running a year of their grade six education in the middle of a care facility in Saskatoon, which breaks all the rules. You see, the modern risk aversion culture doesn't make that possible. So it takes a great deal of innovation and work even to start an experiment like that. Well, once you see those experiments in action, as we've done even through COVID,

they enrich the lives of the children and clearly for the elders who have a chance to pass on their wisdom as well as echo the laughs of the children. It gives them a reason for living, not what otherwise might be on what they would see on their screens, reasons for dying. So, to open doors for connection rather than close doors for presumed safety is absolutely fundamental. And I'm afraid in most institutions, in most countries, even the top countries, it's going in the wrong direction. So the risk prevention culture has to be entirely rethought because what the world needs is more open doors, not more closed doors. And so we have to permit people to meet until they meet, until they greet, until they learn to trust. They won't learn common cause. They won't turn the me versus you into the bigger we and the us.

And that's what's critical in any successful society. So that's something I think that is an agenda item for countries, even if they're pretty well fixed now in the rankings, that they could be doing a better job at making sure these connection doors are open and cherished. I love this. It fits so much with some of the work that we've talked about on the show with Robert Putnam and others about the kind of importance of kind of build these opportunities for building more of the social capital too. So I think sometimes when people see these rankings, especially if you're from a country that's pretty low on the list, it can feel, you know, kind of like a hit, you know, it can feel a little depressing. Are there things that countries that are lower on the list can do to maybe boost their rankings? You know, should you feel so pessimistic?

Absolutely. Some people say because the immigrants in Finland are the happiest immigrants in the world, then everybody should move to Helsinki. That's absolutely what it's not about. In a way, it's sort of forget your ranking, but learn from the report. What makes for a good life? And so much of it is so local, starting with your family, your friends, your colleagues at work and school. You can change your life in important ways, but the really important thing is to change other people's lives. So if you reach out to help others, that'll help you as well. But the ripples of that, this spillover effects of positive actions, of positive connections,

are very strong. If anything, they're stronger than the negative ones. That's to be cherished. What that means is everybody's got the option, both collectively as a country and a government, but also individually. And so for people who are pessimistic, they can't immediately turn around their main government policies, but they can turn around their neighborhoods. They can turn around what's going on in their workplace. They can turn around what's going on in their school by thinking, not complaining, what's going on in their school by thinking, not complaining, not by making angry demonstrations about something, but by building common cause to find better ways of doing things. So it's not about fighting. It's not about demanding your rights. It's about working together with the others you're living with in order to deliver something better. And that's always an option.

We see it after natural disasters. Why can't we see it after other less damaging but perhaps more corrosive things? What a great message of hope to end on. No matter where your country is on the World Happiness Report rankings, you can still do something in your home or on your street or in your workplace to help move your fellow citizens up the happiness chart. John and I have already talked about the generational splits his team has observed in country-level rankings, but this year's report devotes a lot of time to age differences in happiness. In fact, there are whole chapters on well-being trends in the young and the old this year. And so those are the two challenges

we'll be tackling next in this special season about the World Happiness Report on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.