The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie SantosWe'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).
Pushkin. It's a heinous act, and we're all victims. It's a terrible menace to society, one that's eroded our trust and made our futures less bright. Given the shadow at 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 indoors 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 nineteen fifties have died.
Was it suburbanization? Was it women are going to work? Was it we're all too busy? I mean a lot of 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.
Just listening on a keybole.
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.
He was a tiny town. The richest person in my class lived three or four blocks. Were forest kidded by 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 gone downhill. We become more and more in 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 had, But what if our minds are wrong, What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from all really make us happy. The good news is that understanding the science of the money can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos.
If you graf many majors of not only in social capital, but economic equality and political comedy, getting along and so on, they all go down since the nineteen sixties.
Robert was born back in nineteen forty one, 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 seeing our youth through golden paye. So I spent a lot of time actually trying to be sure I have 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 sixty 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 nineteen fifties, so he decided to look at the earlier records. What was social capital like in World War Two, during the Great Depression, or even before World War One, and.
If you do that, you can see it's all one big, inverted you 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 capit in the late eighteen hundreds.
America was in a pickle back in the eighteen eighties.
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 eighteen hundreds 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, 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 eighteen eighties, the first person singular went out by a landslide.
We were very much in an eye 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.
In Vanning public philosophy at that time, it was something called social Darwinism natural selection.
Better if if we don't help poor people.
Because I'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 fast 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 WII.
Read in truth 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 one percent of people thriving while much of the other ninety nine percent is still struggling.
America in eighteen ninety looked a lot like America right now, extremely polarized, extremely unequal, extremely self centered, and extremely socially isolated. And then something happened around nineteen ten, 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 nineteen hundred, the ratio of eye 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 lack. Even if we're ourselves doing fine, we have other loeases other people.
This urged argues led people to start banding together in clubs and 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 Wii rather than the eye 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 pgaight meetings, we were focused on the Wii. 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 dual 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 WII rather than the eye, and that means we need people at the top to start taking social capitals 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 WI society, you need to look further back in time than the nineteen fifties and way before the Gilded Age of the eighteen eighties. 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 p sue 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 Laird 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 bathe is to maximize 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 Laird talking about 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 day 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 criteria many people thought was equivalent to well being, and that has sorted of 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 econo 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 close down as they have been, that's not good for crime. And then old people's centers or mixtage censers, where people regularly get together in the 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 see the benefits of these investments very very differently. Lord Laird 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 in their 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.
No one, it 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 fifteen cigarettes a day. That damage could be reduced if government's 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. He thinks governments should prioritize building plazas and parks where people can connect.
Power planning it's very very important in determining whither are spaces where people naturally come together and talk to each other and can walk around and say it some shots 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 of bringing folks together. But just as Robert Putnam saw an upswing in community spirit after the Gilded Age. Lord Laird's senses a growing interest in happiness economics in many nations.
And we're now in a really interesting situation in Britain where wellbeing is coming up to the floor because the party which will probably elect to the next election is committed to making well being an equal goal with GDP for its government.
And note that Lord Laird 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 owned policies which create the most well being per dollar spent. Now, my dollar spent it means not in a dollar spent at the beginning of the process, but minus a dollars saved as reults of spending the initial dollar coat effectiveness. This is a sort of wellbeing mantra when it comes to public policy.
That's right. Public investment in improving well being can actually save government's 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 residents associations can reduce crimes and help towns run more efficiently.
We need to make this case full 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 nineteen thirties. 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 Laird'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 when I realized it was my senator, and I was like, yes, it's 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 every while, 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 David for goodness sex. This is not the normal experience of any academic bowling alone.
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 fellowship, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack, and a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.
The events of nine to eleven diverted the conversations that I and so many people were having about social capital. The play of third places suddenly didn't seem so important.
The victims were in airplanes or in their offices, secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers, moms and dads, friends and neighbors.
Only later would scholars argue that it was the exact right time to start boosting trust and social capital. Since nine to eleven, the decline in social capital has become even steeper. Surveys reveal that trust in government is at a sixty year low. Since twenty eighteen, our faith in journalists, police officers, and even school principles 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 nineteen seventies.
I had a real sense of place growing up. I grew up in a 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 a routine to life in Weathersfield that was very much angered in that place, and it was a routine that you couldn't easily replicate somewhere else because of the things we were doing in Weathersfield were unique to Weathersfield.
Some of the ritual 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 there are things about growing up in the seventies 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 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 twenty 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 is 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 healthcare 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 healthcare. And what the Certain 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 costs 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 solution 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, you know, 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 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 healthcare, it's had less money left over to do this 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 forty hours away 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 a US 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 them 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 it was the sort of robber barons and the consolidation of power and commerce one hundred years ago, and we have adjusted as a nation. That's the magic is 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 I was reading Robert Putnam's research back in the late nineties. 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 me 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 then damist 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 Vines 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, Doctor Laurie Santos
