Why does John Helliwell, retired UBC economics professor, former Mackenzie King visiting professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard, get invited to address elite groups of thinkers and policy makers around the world to make them sing:
The more we get together, together, together,
The more we get together, the happier we’ll be.
When your friends are my friends and my friends are your friends,
The more we get together the happier we’ll be?
A simple answer is that people are happier after singing that song than before. But that’s not the only reason. Helliwell uses it to demonstrate the fact that countries and organizations where people are connected are happier places.
“Trust in neighbours is the single most important factor adding to life satisfaction,” he says.
According to Helliwell, economists gave up trying to measure happiness 200 years ago. As a result, they settled on measuring GDP as a surrogate for life satisfaction, to the point where making it grow has become the top priority of our federal and provincial governments and every business organization in sight.
Its flaws are obvious, but overlooked. Author Woody Tasch illustrated them effectively in a recent talk in Vancouver. If you walk to work, you contribute nothing to GDP, he said. If you cycle – you contribute a little; take transit – a little more; drive and you contribute a lot. But if you drive and have a horrible accident resulting in hospitalization, a permanent handicap and divorce – you make a heroic contribution to GDP growth.
GDP measures everything except what makes life worthwhile.
The movement away from GDP dependence to “Genuine Progress Indicators” has been bolstered by economists like Helliwell agreeing on a way to measure happiness: it’s as simple as asking people to rate their life satisfaction on a scale of one to 10. That has now been done all over the world, revealing that the happiest countries are Denmark, Finland, Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland and Canada.
The next step is to look at what those countries have in common. Income levels are definitely a factor, but they’re not the most important factor.
The most important factor adding to life satisfaction (cue the song) is trust in our neighbours. In the countries with the highest life satisfaction levels, 95% of the people have someone they can count on in time of troubles. In the bottom countries, about half do.
Although half the factors contributing to life satisfaction depend on material wealth, the other half that depend on social connections are rarely mentioned or measured.
“If you don’t count what counts,” says Helliwell, “it won’t count.”
How does this relate to business? The main event in most people’s lives is their job, and people’s life satisfaction is hugely dependent on how much they trust their manager where they work. According to Helliwell, the single most important variable in explaining differences in life satisfaction between individuals is the extent they think their manager can be trusted. He says that when a person moves up one point (out of 10) in trust in management it improves his or her life satisfaction as much as a one-third increase in income. Those who rate their managers 10 out of 10 in trustworthiness have life satisfaction ratings (8.4/10) higher than the averages in the world’s happiest countries.
The Centre for Well-Being in London, U.K., lays out five proven actions individuals should take if they want to increase their life satisfaction:
- connect with others;
- be active;
- take notice of what’s going on around you;
- keep learning, stay curious; and
- give to others.
What’s clear from this and from the research of Helliwell and his colleagues is that we’re misguided to rely solely on GDP increases for increased happiness.
Other measures that deliver bigger improvements in our lives have to be tracked and pursued even more eagerly than our lust for wealth.