Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to Rationalise, speaking the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense, I am your host, Masimo, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Masimo Today we're going to talk about the science and philosophy of happiness. Oh, I'm so happy. Oh, me too. We've got a lot to cover.

We're going to talk about the different things that people mean when they talk about happiness, because there's a lot of different concepts being lumped together under that label. And we'll talk about whether happiness is the sort of thing that we can even objectively measure, whether we can compare happiness between different people, between different countries or even between different periods in a single person's life. And then we'll also try to look at the question of whether happiness is a good goal to pursue for individuals and also for societies.

All of that in 45 minutes. Yes, all of that in 45 minutes. That's the magic of rationally speaking. All right.

So since we have so much time, I think we should start.

Twenty four hundred years ago, of course, taking the longest back. Right.

So the reason I want to go back there briefly, obviously, we're not going to stay there too long. It's because for the ancient Greeks, particularly, of course, the usual suspects, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and all those people, that was the crucial question of philosophy. And in fact, that was even the crucial question of ethics. So these days, we talk about ethics and morality as dealing with questions of right and wrong. So, you know, you have to return to ethics.

You have can't you have all this stuff? But for the ancient Greeks, if you walked up to Aristotle, for instance, and and told him that that's what you meant by ethics, you would have looked at you with a strange look in his eyes and said, what are you talking about? It's not that the Greeks were not interested or were not aware of differences between right and wrong. It's just that they didn't think that they were that important in terms of philosophical pursuit.

Deep philosophical pursued question was how are you supposed to live your life now? They came up with this concept of the word in Greek is eudaimonia, which literally means good demand, by the way, having a good deman and eudaimonia, loosely translated as happiness or well-being or flourishing, you know, or all of the above.

Really, the reason I say that translates loosely because for the Greeks it did have these these ethical implications. That is, eudaimonia is not just the the life you should live, you want to live is the life that you ought to live, the life that you should live if you are a normal, functional human being. Hmm.

So did they take that to be self-evident, that the life, you know, life of flourishing is life that you should live or no arguments, but now that the ancient Greeks really took anything self-evident in this particular case?

Yes, there are several arguments about why one shouldn't have that kind of life rather than another. We probably don't have time to get too much in details. But but the most famous one of the most famous ones is in the Republic, Plato's Republic, where Gluckman, one of the minor characters who usually talks to Socrates and says, yes, Socrates, you're right, in that case poses the question of why should we pursue an ethical life for a particular kind of life as opposed to, you know, sex, drugs and rock and roll of the Gluckman didn't quite put it that way.

And Socrates, Dusko, going to an interesting discussion there of why this should be and Plato makes Socrates connect that to also what a good state is. After all, the republic is about good government, you know, the ideal state. And there's this interesting connection between the idea that Plato has that that there is a deep connection between having a good society, a fair society or a thriving society on the one hand, and having a good life as an individual.

On the other hand, the two were seen as two aspects of the same thing, and that one causes the other or that they each cause and then one can be used as a model for the other candidate to be in synchrony.

So anyway, the Greeks had this idea of eudaimonia. They also realized they were particularly stato that there was a problem. Risala was a very good observer of human nature and he realized that although even though we know that we need to do certain things, that we ought to do certain things to be happy in the eudaimonia sense of happiness. We also are constantly dragged back by our human nature, in particular by what he called a crisis, which which means the weakness of the will.

So, you know, the typical example is I know that it would be better for me not to eat that double cheeseburger and it would be, in fact, better for me to go exercise at the gym. The problem is it takes a lot of energy to go exercise in the gym, a lot of willpower, and it takes a lot of willpower not to eat a double cheeseburger. So I may end up in fat doing the latter and not and not the first.

And for Aristotle, the the struggle for human beings was was this idea that we know what's best for us in the long term, a life term, lifelong happiness. But we are constantly struggling against the immediate the temptation from the immediate reward.

You know, I think the idea that we know what's best for us in the long. Run. It's an interesting one, because the the recent empirical study of happiness, happiness studies, it's usually referred to our happiness science, has actually come out with a lot of counterintuitive findings. I should also mention that this is a pretty young field.

Interestingly, despite the fact that the Greeks were studying or were talking and debating about happiness and what makes a happy life thousands of years ago, psychology as a field has only come to the problem relatively recently. So traditionally, psychologists have studied psychological problems and the profession that's been about trying to identify and fix things that are going wrong with our psyche.

So there's a huge body of research on depression and anxiety and so on.

What causes them, how to treat them. And then there's this new movement in the field that says, OK, instead of just trying to reduce negative things like depression and anxiety, let's also try to figure out how to increase positive things like happiness while being all those all those concepts.

The movement was really spearheaded by a psychologist named Martin Seligman, who gave it the name Positive Psychology, and it's become hugely influential in the last 10 years.

You've probably noticed the spate of books about happiness that's come out recently. I think one of them stumbling on happiness was a pick of mine. And one of our repeat guests here. I'm recently speaking, Jennifer Michael Hecht has written a book called The Happiness Myth.

Yes. Although she was fairly skeptical, if I recall, of happiness research. Sure.

Yeah. And I don't want to complete all of this as being positive psychology in particular, because there's a lot of researchers who are just interested in studying happiness. You don't actually who aren't actually interested in making prescriptions. Right.

But so let's talk about some of the findings, whether tentative or certain, that have come out of the recent Field of Happiness study is one of the more counterintuitive and somewhat controversial findings is that is the idea of happiness set points that people have these built in these set points due to genetics, meaning that even when very good or very bad things happen to them, their happiness will go up or down initially. But then it pretty quickly returns to the level of happiness that they had before the big event occurred.

And the typical examples are winning the lottery and becoming a paraplegic. So if you ask people to predict how happy they would be one year after each of those events, people predict that they would be very happy, a year after winning the lottery and very unhappy a year after becoming paralyzed.

But then if you actually ask actual lottery winners and paralysis victims, a year after those events happened, they're about as happy as other people, right?

Yeah, that's fairly obviously counterintuitive finding. Now, some of the research I looked into suggests that there are different components of variation for happiness between different people. So we're now talking about not the average happiness in the population or the average happiness degree in a lifetime, in a person's lifetime, but variation in happiness among the general population. And I found this particular finding interesting. Um, the results seem to show that about 50 percent of the differences in happiness among people are due, in fact, to their sort of set points.

Do some as you know, there is some discussion with the set point is really a set point. What it's very actually to some extent during lifetime. But let's assume the more or less it is the fifty percent figure.

Is that from studies of twins comparing the lifetime happiness of twins who grew up in different environments, they used several data points.

I'm not sure that there was twins in that. Now there's not enough studies of variability. These are just studies of variance, statistical variance in the population. So so these are correlative studies essentially saying, OK, well, people, once you account for, say, at that point, how much of the remaining variance in happiness is explained by other factors? Oh, I think that's a typical approach in social sciences that doesn't deal with whether these are genetic basis or not, which would be the question asked by heritability.

I mean sort of twin studies.

I think I know they have done twin studies where they compared twins and found similar levels of happiness despite very different circumstances.

I know they have. But in this case, this is not a matter of that that I'm referring to or not addressing the question of whether the Setpoint or other causes of happiness are genetically based, in part genetically based or not. The question is more generally is, well, what are the factors that explain difference in differences in happiness among people? So about 50 percent that, as I said, apparently is due to the Setpoint, as you were saying, you know, people bounce back to whatever level they had after even after major events in other 10 percent is is the result of circumstances that people find themselves in and 40 percent are is result.

40 percent of the variance in happiness is the result of activity of activity that people do in order to increase their own happiness. OK, so the idea is therefore that if you want to increase your happiness, you can't probably change your Setpoint by much, because for whatever reason, it is in fact that there is not much that the circumstances have to do. The specific circumstances in which you find yourself have to do with your degree of happiness unless. Are extreme circumstances mean, obviously, somebody is, you know, being tortured, even Aristotle said, you know, in order to be to pursue eudaimonia, you have to have to be free of certain constraints.

And one of the constraints is you have to be reasonably healthy and reasonably wealthy and so on and so forth. If you're really dirt poor or in pain all the time, it's hard to imagine how can you be happy. But given that that setting that aside, the major thing you can do, therefore, is in fact to increase to to engage in purposive activities that are going to increase your overall level of life satisfaction. And that does have a significant effect because it accounts for about 40 percent of the of the variation.

The question, of course, is, well, what kind of activities?

Right. Right, exactly.

And I think it's important to note that the the findings about circumstances not affecting your happiness that much over the long run, they're looking at the circumstances that people actually find themselves in.

But they're but that doesn't actually leave out the possibility. It doesn't rule out the possibility that there are there are situations that you could actively pursue that would make yourself happier if you knew the right situations to put yourself in.

Right. And in terms of the activities that you're referring to.

I've found some examples from the field of positive psychology that seem empirically to actually improve people's happiness over long periods of time, things like thinking about what you're grateful for.

So actually focusing on the good things instead of just neglecting them after they happen, seeking out and forgiving people who've done you wrong, pursuing meaningful personal goals is a big one.

And there was one study in which they asked people to reflect on their strengths, their the skills that they had, that they're most that they're best at, and they're the traits that they're happiest with and then then do a different thing every day or every week that actually employs those skills or or uses those traits.

And in the study, they gave people the instruction to do this for one week, but then they check back with them one month and six months later to see if there any lasting effect of happiness. And for those things, there was there there wasn't as much of a lasting effect for other possible happiness, increasing activities.

Yeah. So one of the the findings of that research actually, again, would not have surprised Aristotle because at all. Because the general idea seems to be that if you want to be happy, you don't just go after pleasure. That's what psychologists often refer to as the Dolnick treadmill. The idea that if you just want, you know, short term things that increase your your pleasure, whatever, those may be, buying a second car, buying a new whatever it is that you feel good about doing, those are never those always give you a very short term boost.

And then you go back to the to the base level. And that's why, as I said, they call it the treadmill. It's essentially keep you keep running just to keep in the same place. Those don't seem to have any effect on long term happiness. What does seem to have an effect, those are the things that you're talking about, which are more about mindfulness, about thinking about what you know, doing things and thinking about things that make your life meaningful.

Again, this was exactly the contrast between the crazier and eudaimonia that Aristotle was talking about, which which I find very interesting.

There is something that I wanted to bring up in in this regard that I that I found interesting, too, which is let's go back for a second again to the ancients and there for for a reason that actually connects again with recent research. So another of the ancient philosophers who wrote a lot about happiness was Epicurus. And for epicures, friendship was a crucial component of being happy that you simply cannot conceive of somebody having a happy life in the sense of eudaimonia life without having a good, solid network of friends.

And we're not talking about Facebook friends. We're not talking about, you know, thousands of people that you barely know or don't know at all. We're talking about actual, you know, close friends with whom you interact on a regular basis, although Facebook friends might actually increase happiness.

Don't just assume that they don't, because I would be willing to bet that if someone looked at that empirically, it had some effect.

Well, you answered that both from the study, because I would be very skeptical of any long term. I mean, I suspect that the Facebook friendships are more along the lines of the hedonic treadmill. You have to have more and more and more interaction of that sort. But they don't really change things in the long run unless we're talking about. Depends also on how you use Facebook, of course, unless you're talking about that small subset of people. For instance, the way I use Facebook on my personal pages, I only have friends who actually I know personally and have deep ties with or members of my family, in which case Facebook simply becomes an extent, an extension of regular interactions with your real friends.

But the thousands of friends so-called that you have from Facebook. I really. Doubt that they're going to give you anything in terms of long term meaning? Well, I have a lot of friends on Facebook who I've never met in real life, but but I have these really interesting conversations with them on my Facebook wall whenever one of us posts that link and so on.

And I feel like that actually it's not the same. It's just a different thing from real life friendships, but it's still positive.

Anyway, I totally agree. But but that's not what I was talking about. Right. So so that kind of category, I have the same effect as well. I enjoy having these these very long conversations with complete strangers that often point out interesting things to me. But that's not a case of friendship, certainly not in the sense in which Epicures was talking about. It's simply a case of intellectual activity, of another of another type. Yeah.

Although I do feel sort of a connection with people who really think like me and who really are interested in the same things that I'm interested in having that opportunity to interact with them anyway.

I mean, we just we just found that we have different psychologies in terms of connectivity. But anyway, back to Epicurious.

So he said, for instance, it is impossible to leave a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and just leave without leaving a pleasant life. And by pleasant life. You love life with friends and family. Practice what you preach because he's garden, which is his school, wasn't essentially a co-op of friends. There were living together and eating together, sleeping together and so on and so forth.

Now, the reason I mention this is because there is a connection with with recent recent research in coming to science and psychology. And this is something that really caught my attention recently in preparation for a chapter of a new book that I'm writing. And this is research that was done by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler. It's fairly controversial. But when I looked into it, the results are fascinating. So what they did was to they looked at a number of human behavioral traits that spread among friends following the same dynamics as an infectious disease.

In other words, if you do something, your friends are going to start at a much higher chance of actually doing the same thing. And this can have both positive effects and negative effects. So, for instance, if you develop obesity at some point in your life, you're close friends now have irrespective of other factors. So once you control for other factors, a whopping 57 percent chance of doing the same. Not only that, but even friends of your friends would be affected.

They're going to have it in a rate of 20 percent. More likely, they're going to be 20 percent more likely of developing obesity and so on and so forth. The same is true for smoking. For instance, your friends are going to have 67 percent chances of quitting if you do if you quit their friends, a 36 percent chance of winning if you quit and so on. And that applies to alcoholism, depression and even happiness itself was if you are happy, your friends are much more likely to be happy.

This is interesting because the dynamics is interesting. Spreads like a disease, which means that it's very it's a very powerful way of answering your your friends and network not only mood, temporary mood, but in fact sort of more long term health, both physical and and otherwise. But again, it goes back to the idea that we are fundamentally social animals, as Aristotle again pointed out, and that therefore a huge component of our happiness depends on our social interactions, except for those of us who are psychopaths, of course.

Yeah, I think I mean, that's really interesting. And I've heard about that in other contexts before.

But I think it's tricky to use because now we should get into the question of measuring happiness, because people's self reports of happiness are seem to be really sensitive to the social, to the culture in which they live and the the attitudes about happiness in that culture.

I mean, that could be their country, but it could also be there are social groups and so on.

So, you know, it's not clear that if you live in in a culture that really values happiness, in which happiness is seen almost as a virtue, in which you're expected to be happy, it's not clear that that's that's really going to allow us to make objective measurements of how happy people are compared to, say, a culture in which reporting that you're happy would be seen as a sign of selfishness or of laziness that you're not, you know, working hard and sacrificing for the collective right now.

That's true.

There are ways, however, around it. I mean, certainly, one, we we don't want to claim that this research is anything like, you know, fundamental physics in terms of precisions of what they actually do. But there are a couple of ways around it. So one way around that, of course, is that you don't use the word happiness to begin with. Use it either use cultural appropriate terms that vary from culture to culture or more generally, in fact, better.

You simply ask the person how you know, how they think about their life, how they rate the quality of their life, how to rate the, you know, the contentedness, whatever, whatever their terms like on a scale of one to 10.

Right. Or something like that. But although even that is vulnerable to what I've heard called the squishing effect, in which if you if you and I each rate our happiness as being a seven out of 10, there's no guarantee that we're actually experiencing the same level of happiness. So maybe I'm imagining a scale where 10 means you're content most of the time, whereas maybe you're imagining a scale in which ten is like the happiest person who's ever lived. So to you, seven might represent a higher level of happiness than a seven does when I say it.

Yeah, that's correct. Now, the way around that that has been tried in a few studies is to measure physiological correlates. Oh, interesting. Like what?

Like stress levels and which you can measure with blood samples or even with, you know, continuous electrical measurements, that sort of stuff.

And it turns out that do some very, very good relationship between self reported long term happiness and stress level. Obviously, it's an inverse relationship, meaning that the more the happier you think you are about self reported happiness is, the lower it is the level of stress at the individual level. And this seems to be also valid across cultures. That is, you can actually make predictions just based on stress measurements about the average level of surfboarding happiness in different countries.

Interesting.

You know, that reminds me of a study by someone named Dan Brown, who he was comparing people working in a quiet office to people working in a noisy office.

And they both reported equivalent levels of stress. But the people in the noisy office showed elevated levels of epinephrine and they performed worse on certain tasks, like they were less persistent in solving difficult puzzles. So it seems like there was some experiential difference between the two groups, but not a difference that they had conscious access to, which I think gets at the question of whether it's actually possible for us to be mistaken about how happy we are, you know. So on the one hand, happiness seems like the sort of thing that's only defined in terms of your perception.

So, like, it wouldn't make any sense to say I'm happier than I feel I am any more, that it would make sense to say that cake is actually more delicious than it tastes, you know, but but the fact that although I could be looking more delicious than it is right now, you're right.

Absolutely. And that is an interesting question. Again, that has been addressed in philosophy for a long time, which is, you know, does it make even any sense to say that somebody could be mistaken about what makes them happy? And for Aristotle, the answer was unquestionably yes. Of course, you can be mistaken because she reflected on what what it is that makes that makes meaning for a meaningful life for you now. But anyway, that answer doesn't imply that there is only one correct answer to the question of what makes for a happy life.

That's that's a common mistake in some readings of the philosophical literature that it's not, Aristotle was saying, look, there is only one way to be happy. Here it is. And I'll tell you what it is. It was very conscious of the fact that there are different paths to eudaimonia or if you were Buddhist, there are different paths to enlightenment, I suppose.

Um, but but the thing is, there are also many wrong paths. And so the idea is that it's not that anything goes that that there is a sort of a random distribution of things and whatever makes you happy when anything goes. The idea is that there are there is a variety of numbers of ways of getting to eudaimonia, but there is also a large number of ways that you don't. And that the purpose, again, of sort of a philosophical investigation that goes over is total or modern psychological research is to try to figure out what some of these factors are.

I want to bring one up because we cannot talk about happiness without talking about money. The question is, of course, does money, in fact buy you happiness? There is empirical research these days that actually tells you that the answer is yes and no. It depends.

So the first so I'm going to I'm going to bring up a couple of actual data and then maybe we can talk about what that might mean.

So the first one is an observation, for instance, that is valid across Western countries. But I have the data for the United States in particular, the gross domestic product of the United States has steadily increased from 1978 to 2008. In fact, I have the numbers. It went from two point three to fourteen point four trillion. And yet measures of self reported happiness have stayed essentially the same throughout the year to that throughout that period, while, in fact they were climbing before.

So that means that the interpretation of this and this has been replicated in several in several other countries, this interpretation is that there is some correlation between GDP and self reported satisfaction of life and happiness, presumably because if people tend to be too poor, they are unlikely to be happy with their life. But beyond a certain point, the two complete disconnect because everybody happiness depends not just on, you know, wealth or income, but it depends on other things.

And those other things have brought the United Nations to produce a different kind of statistic in.

In the last several years, which they call the Human Development Index and the Human Development Index actually included, includes not only the GDP of a country as a measure of wealth, but it also includes a measure of health which can be quantified by a variety of number of parameters, including access to health, of course, as well as education.

And so those are the three parameters the United Nations found that when combined, they actually make for very good predictor of whether, you know, the average level of happiness.

But but the other interesting statistic about money and happiness is this. Researchers have been able to find to quantify that the effect of extra income on self reported happiness. And this is this is, again, data from the US. And the results are, I think, pretty amusing. It turns out, for instance, that every extra one thousand dollars correspond on average to an increase in a five point zero zero to on a social science index of happiness where the balance between zero and one.

So it's, you know, two per thousand right now to put that in context, because the numbers percent don't seem to they're difficult to to analyze. But to put it in context, it means that if you make an extra one hundred thousand dollars a year, your happiness will increase about the same quantity that separates married from unmarried people, where married people usually are happier or employed from unemployed people. Where you employ people usually are happier. Of course, if you're unemployed and I give you a hundred and a thousand dollars, that makes perfect, perfect sense why you would be happy.

But the idea is that so money does in fact improve self reported happiness in a way that is comparable to other indicators, such as being married or not being married, but only in fairly large quantities. Because, you know, a hundred thousand dollars is not a small, small chunk of change, even by the standards of American society. So that's why I said earlier that the answer to the question of whether money buys you happiness is, well, yes and no.

It depends on what we're talking about right now.

That's really interesting for a number of reasons. Partly, I think it's I've long been skeptical of the idea that people that people self reported happiness is actually a good measure of how happy they feel. There's a lot of evidence that suggests that it's not.

And so we get this this self-fulfilling effect where if people are under the impression that something is going to make them happier, say, being married or having kids, if you if you think of those things as being evidence that you've succeeded, that your your life is on track, then then when people ask you, especially when they ask you the sort of broad zoom out, look at your life kind of question, like how happy are you overall with your life?

It just seems logical to me that you would be more likely to to say, yes, I'm more satisfied with my life. But that but that that might not actually correspond on a, you know, experiential basis to being happier day to day than people aren't. You're right.

That reminds me of a survey a few years ago that had to do with sexual satisfaction in women of different religious background. I read about this and it turned out that Southern Baptist women were the most sexually satisfied.

And, of course, you would say really write something about it. So that's that's another thing.

That's the effect of people's expectations of how good a life they could be having. Right.

So you mentioned the case of having children. Now, the case of women, children is interesting because the last time I looked into the data there, there's two interesting components to interesting things going on, which, again, remind me a lot of the distinction that sort of Aristotle and his friends were making.

And that is, as it turns out, having children in class increases the your your self reported happiness on a long term, meaning that people tend to be satisfied when they like the idea that they have children. But when they're asked to report on a moment to moment happiness, how are you feeling right now? They tend to feel much more miserable than people that don't have children. Now, that seems like a contradiction, but it isn't because it really has to do with the difference, which is crucial between moment to moment feelings about your life and sort of what do you think when you think of your life as a project, as as a long term thing, that certain things, certain and goals that you want to you want to achieve?

Again, I think that the analogy there with going to the gym is as pertinent. You know, when I go to the gym on a moment to moment basis, and if you ever ask me at that moment, you know, how do you feel? Well, I'd rather not be doing this, but how do I feel in general about the fact that I that I exercise regularly and I get some certain kinds of benefits, you know, physically and otherwise?

Well, I feel very good about my general decision of taking that course of action.

Well, but with the case of going to the gym, there shouldn't be much of a discrepancy between your moment to moment happiness and your overall happiness, because really you actually enjoy going on treadmill.

Well, no, no. I mean, well, but if the researcher, you know, in this hypothetical experiment, we're doing it properly, he would be he would be asking you about your experiential happiness. Not. Just when you're at the gym, I mean, the reason you go to the gym is not to be happy, right? Then it's to be happy overall. No, no, that's that's what I meant was that when I'm on the treadmill, I curse myself and I say, what the heck am I doing here?

I don't like this. I don't enjoy it. But if you ask me, well, then why you do it? I said, well, because overall it does make me feel fat. Right.

But the interesting thing with the parents was that, I mean, you would think that if they are getting benefits from taking care of their children, even when they're not doing the dirty work, like changing diapers and, you know, settling squabbles, that that those benefits should show up somewhere in the in the experiential data that, you know, they should get some benefit.

You know, overall, throughout the course of of all of these, you know, day to day measurements added up over time.

And yet it doesn't actually seem like they come out ahead of the non parents, even though they report being overall more satisfied with their life.

Well, I don't see that's the that's interesting because I don't think they should it up, because if they're measuring two different things, they shouldn't adapt if if day to day, if moment to moment happiness actually measures your your instantaneous feelings of something, but your instantaneous feelings are not, in fact, related, or at least not necessarily related to the way in which you think about your life in general, then actually I don't expect a summation of individual moments to to adapt to life.

I mean, literally does, but not in the way in which you look at it. I wonder what your your impression about this, however, because there's some more interesting that I found recently about this.

So people looked the researchers looked at the what they call the the structure of self reported happiness. That is OK. It's interesting to ask people what are they happy or not in the long term and so forth. But then the more interesting things is when you're trying to figure out statistically what are the best predictor of those people's response. And so here is a summary of a few. And I think this will give us some more food for thought. First of all, women tend to be happier than men.

Number one, not a lot, but a significant, statistically significant amount, predictably. Of course, wealthier and healthier and more educated people tend to be happier. Married people are happy than Americans. As I said earlier, again, on average in the United States, whites are more happy than any other ethnic group. Exercising and eating food apparently is associated with happiness, while being fat has a negative relation with subjective well-being. And having children in your household, as we just said, was one one in did add meaning to someone's life, has a surprisingly negative effect on unhappiness, or at least surprising for some people.

Now, that being said, it also turns out that men and women, although women's happiness is, as I said, are higher than men, men's and women's happiness seems to be affected pretty much by the same factor and pretty much the same way in direct contradiction to this pop culture idea is that, you know, men are from Mars and women are from another planet and so on and so forth. Now, as it turns out, exactly the same kinds of things and make men happy, make women happy, the same sort of statistical structure to it.

It's just that apparently women enjoyed more for whatever reason. They are actually happier with their own with their own life.

Interesting. So out of those those, uh, predictors, you think there is something that we couldn't have predicted based on, you know, sort of common sense, or is there something actually surprising about this? Because, you know, to me, wasn't that surprising that wealthier, healthier and more educated people tend to be happy?

It's like, OK, it's nice to know the numbers, but it's not particularly surprising. On the one hand. On the other hand, for instance, the idea that, you know, having children makes you aren't happy that go that's going to go against sort of common sense.

I mean, that is that is surprising. And I think, you know, to stick up for the more obvious. Well, in other news, the sky is still blue findings.

You know, that there's there's it's kind of a thankless job doing research that leads to obvious, you know, kind of common sense conclusions. But you still have to do it because sometimes you get the non common sense conclusions. You have to do the research to separate the one from the other.

And that's, by the way, that's not just true in psychology, the joking matter among organismal biologists who are not ecologists is that ecology is the elucidation of the obvious. So now, of course, I just lost all of our ecology listeners on that one.

OK, now what about the fact that so remember that when I when I said earlier on the Plato thought that there was a connection between individual and sort of societal structure and happiness. Turns out, again, that there seems to be data supporting that. That idea is counterintuitive. That might be the researcher I looked into. For instance, you know, there's all this stuff that that ranks nations as being more happy or less happy. Right. So I'll give you a list of these things.

I mean, but then the interesting question again is, what are the predictors of these degrees of happiness and happiness?

Now, turns out that the latest survey for which I have the data, which I think is from a couple of years ago, the happiest nations are.

Ireland, Switzerland, Mexico. Interestingly, the United States, Great Britain, New Zealand, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, you might have noticed a disproportionate amount of European and particularly northern European countries in this turns out the most unhappy places in the world.

They all come from the same geographical area Russia, Bulgaria, Latvia, Croatia, Hungary and Macedonia. So it's all of the Eastern Bloc. It's at the moment is the most unhappy place in the world, which is interesting. But then the question is, well, OK, so what makes a difference?

What are the predictors of these of these differences?

And it turns out that by and by and large and major predictors of these differences are low unemployment and low inflation that increases people's happiness, low inequality at a structural societal level, strong welfare states, high public spending, low pollution, high levels of democratic participation, and a strong network of friends which would make epicures particularly happy.

So the idea is that that we actually start having getting a pretty good look in terms of empirical support to the kinds of things at a societal level that makes people happy, which don't seem to be very different from the kinds of things that make people individually happy. And again, that would not have been a surprise, probably.

I read one comment from a happiness researcher who said that you basically, if you're a happiness researcher, you can't not be liberal, which sounds vindicated by your data. Yeah, exactly.

And it seems to me that what I just described, this is the classic northern European social, social, liberal society. It's low again, unemployment, inflation, low inequality, strong welfare and so on and so forth. Another interesting thing that I that I thought was this struck me, this one actually in some sense, it's sort of counterintuitive. And this is the relationship between life satisfaction and age. So what happens to people of different age? And it turns out that it's a it's a complex relationship, but it's essentially it's a U.

Shaped function, which means that people tend to hit a minimum of happiness with their life at some point in the middle, but that middle. And so they tend to be much happier earlier on when they're very young and continue living much happier also when they're older. Now, the interesting thing is that the United States and European countries have the exact same U. Shaped function, but it's shifted in the United States, the most unhappy age of pantry's 40, while in Europe the most unhappy age to be.

I'm 54, so there is 14 years difference between the two. I have no idea why there is that difference, why Americans hit bottom earlier than Europeans could come up with so many narratives, including the American focus on youth and beauty.

But that will be interesting. And that's that's a testament, especially for me.

I'm curious if there's like a distinct drop off at 40 now.

I looked at it attributed to people's psychological views about that round number. No, I looked at the data. It really looked like it looks like a very small you function. But the bottom is, in fact, of that function is in fact, at forty four for Americans during your parties is interesting. And that could be, of course, tested empirically. We had a comment or who asked about the views of someone named Pascal Bruckner, who's he's a French intellectual, and basically he argues that the modern focus on happiness is actually oppressive.

So basically, he says to a French like that, I'm sure he said it with a phone powered on his Gallic lips and a cigarette dangling from his fingers.

So he basically says being happy and fulfilled now has become this duty in modern society. And so we feel guilty and inadequate if we're ever unhappy.

It reminded me of this Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin says, here I am happy and content, but not euphoric. So now I'm no longer content. I'm unhappy. My day is ruined. I need to stop thinking while I'm ahead. Exactly.

Well, I mean, the point is interesting in a limited sense. I think that is it is true that if it becomes especially in the United States, it could become sort of a societal expectation that, you know, you have to be happy, particularly because you have so many things in particular because you have access to so many resources and somehow you're not because, you know, whatever your set point is, love, for instance, or your personal circumstances or you're not working mindfully, edit and so on and so forth, then of course, that can get you into a spiral of of increased unhappiness.

And of course, that also doesn't take into account, you know, more or less pathological situations. And so depressed people tend to be obviously unhappy, but they also tend to be much more realistic about what's going on in life as opposed to the happy people. Happy people tend to tend to have what it's called an optimist bias. So, you know, I don't think that there is necessarily a big problem, particularly actually in European societies. In American societies, there's always much more of a street level of expectation of high expectations about one's, you know, the American.

The whole idea of the American dream is that things have to improve constantly. A few years ago, there was an interesting survey comparing Americans and Europeans attitudes toward both their current status, their current level of satisfaction and what they were expecting for the future. And the striking difference was that Americans tend to be very optimistic about the future, but very discontent about their current situation. And for Europeans is exactly the other way around. They are not particular optimistic that things will get better in the future, but they're pretty happy about where they are right now.

So it's, um, it's an interesting distinction between the two difference between the two countries, huh?

No, I basically agree with you.

I do think that there is some some truth to the idea that focusing on happiness is a is misguided just in that it seems like.

Pursuing happiness is not actually, I mean, actively pursuing happiness, that conscious goal in mind is not actually the best way to achieve happiness. I think it was John Stuart Mill who said, ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so the only chance is to treat not happiness, but some end external to it as the purpose of life. So basically, we all need to just figure out together, philosophers, psychologists, everyone, what are the things that make you happy and then pursue those things and forget about the fact that our ultimate goal is happiness.

That's not that we'll be happy. It's a little mental mind jujitsu.

Sounds good to me. All right. We are out of time.

So let's wrap up this action and move on to the rationally speaking, PEX. Welcome back. Every episode, Julie and I pick a couple of our favorite books, movies, websites or whatever tickles our national fancy. Let's start with Julie.

Thanks, Matthew. My pick is the book called Discover Your Inner Economist. It's by an economist at George Mason University named Tyler Cowen. He's best known for writing the blog Marginal Revolution, which is just this fantastic. It's one of my favorite blogs. It's about economics, but it's about lots of other things as well. Tyler is really a polymath.

And so the book is all about applying the basic principles of economic reasoning like incentives and diminishing marginal returns and comparative advantage, applying those principles to your everyday life.

One of the other things that I love about Tyler is that he's even more obsessed with food and cooking and dining than I am.

In fact, he really has a whole separate blog called The Ethnic Dining Guide to the D.C. Metropolitan Area. So if you live down there, you should check it out. And so my favorite part of the book was his section on how to get as much enjoyment as possible from dining out and cooking.

So I'll give you just a couple of examples of his tips when you're eating out in your city. He says your best bet is to pay attention to relative rents. So you want to look for restaurants in low rent neighborhoods that are close to high rent neighborhoods. So that's going to mean that their costs are lower, but they're close enough to where the foodies live that they'll be catering to the high food standards. So in Manhattan, there are better restaurants on 9th Avenue, which is far on the West Side or on First Avenue, which is far on the east side than there are on Fifth Avenue, which is right in the middle.

And even turning the corner can make a difference. So in Manhattan, the avenues go north south and they're generally busier than the cross streets and therefore they have correspondingly higher rents. So if you look for restaurants and the cross streets, you're going to find a better deal and also likely to find better food.

That's also good advice for buying an apartment in Manhattan, as it turns out. There you go to want to go to the exact same area.

So and the teller also says if you want to do a food tour, if you want to be a food tourist and some other country, he suggests aiming for countries with high inequality.

So the reason for that, the United States is about to pick them. So there you go. All right. We didn't liberal politics, not in this part of the episode. So the reasoning for that was if you want to support an amazing cuisine, it helps to have a wealthy upper class who is the market for that cuisine, but also a poor underclass who's willing to work for relatively low wages.

I don't know the parents. I don't know that I want to hear this. OK, fine.

So Tyler says both Mexico and Haiti are exemplars of cuisine in the Western Hemisphere. And then, by contrast, he says France, the reason that France has been slipping gradually from its spot at the top of the fine dining hierarchy is because of the high wages and the really stringent labor laws in France that have pushed up the cost of running a restaurant.

Of course, the French are not aware of that, but my paycheck is much darker than yours. Unfortunately, it is an article along a very long article, but definitely worth reading that appeared in The American Scholar. And you can find that Americans Got a Dog by Harriet Washington. Harriet Washington is the author of Medical Apartheid The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present. She won the seven National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.

Her most recent book is called Deadly Monopolies The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself. And this article is we'll give you as many reasons you could possibly dream of to be skeptical and even cynical about Big Pharma. It is a really in-depth commentary about how drug makers not only compromise doctors by buying them out and this sort of stuff, but they also undermine top medical journals and skew medical research. It is one documented case after another of Big Pharma basically buying the publication of certain results of the non publication of results that are not favorable.

The idea is that even major journals in the medical field, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and so on and so forth, have repeatedly run afoul of publishing things. They should not have been published or not publishing things that should have been published. So it's a really in-depth commentary. As I said, once you read it, you will have, unfortunately, plenty of ammunition to be skeptical of Big Pharma.

I wouldn't suggest that just on those grounds you turn to the placebo effect of homeopathy, but it certainly will open your eyes about how modern medical research it's got, essentially to be largely a matter of marketing and very increasingly little a matter of science. Very interesting.

Thanks, Massimo. We are all out of time. So this concludes another episode of the rationally speaking podcast. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.