Speaker 1: Pushkin. It's a heinous act, and we're all victims. It's
Speaker 1: a terrible menace to society, one that's eroded our trust
Speaker 1: and made our futures less bright. Given the shadow at
Speaker 1: casts on so many aspects of our daily lives, you'd
Speaker 1: think there'd be a federal task force assigned to investigate
Speaker 1: the threat, kicking indoors to stop the ongoing assault. Sadly
Speaker 1: that's not happening, but one dogged detective has been on
Speaker 1: the case for decades.
Speaker 2: Who done it? Who killed social capital?
Speaker 1: Political scientist Robert Putnam thinks social capital is the glue
Speaker 1: that holds a happy society together, But the bonds of
Speaker 1: trust and friendship he knew growing up in the clubs, leagues,
Speaker 1: and unions of the nineteen fifties have died.
Speaker 3: Was it suburbanization? Was it women are going to work?
Speaker 3: Was it we're all too busy? I mean a lot
Speaker 3: of hypotheses.
Speaker 1: There were other suspects on the scene too. Television had
Speaker 1: begun keeping us at home rather than out in the world,
Speaker 1: mixing with our neighbors.
Speaker 4: Just listening on a keybole.
Speaker 1: And these days our tablets and smartphones have lulled us
Speaker 1: into believing we can get all the social interaction we
Speaker 1: need online. Robert grew up when TV was a rarity
Speaker 1: and iPads were the stuff of science fiction. Back then,
Speaker 1: in Port Clinton, Ohio, residents hung out in person all
Speaker 1: the time.
Speaker 3: He was a tiny town. The richest person in my
Speaker 3: class lived three or four blocks. Were forest kidded by class.
Speaker 1: In the last episode, we explored Robert's research on the
Speaker 1: importance of so called third places. We saw that spending
Speaker 1: time with people in teams, clubs, and other venues outside
Speaker 1: of our homes and workplaces not only makes us happier,
Speaker 1: but can also boost the trust we have in our
Speaker 1: fellow citizens. Building this kind of social capital even helps
Speaker 1: society work better. It benefits everyone in a community. It
Speaker 1: was exactly this positive cycle that Robert enjoyed as a kid.
Speaker 3: I grew up when America was the maximum of we
Speaker 3: society that we've ever seen, and my whole life has
Speaker 3: been gone downhill. We become more and more in I society,
Speaker 3: and I really wish that weren't true. I wish I
Speaker 3: could figure out a way to reverse that, or at
Speaker 3: least pause it.
Speaker 1: These days, we assume the pursuit of happiness comes down
Speaker 1: to the individual we tend to focus on things like
Speaker 1: self care and me time. I want to stay home
Speaker 1: and watch a movie alone at my convenience, or I'm
Speaker 1: going to skip that meeting because I deserve some personal downtime.
Speaker 1: Robert's work has shown that focusing on the we can
Speaker 1: offer huge benefits for our well being. But as we'll
Speaker 1: see in this episode, doing that more effectively may require
Speaker 1: a huge change, not just to how we behave as individuals,
Speaker 1: but also to how we run our cities and communities.
Speaker 1: Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to
Speaker 1: be had, But what if our minds are wrong, What
Speaker 1: if our minds are lying to us, leading us away
Speaker 1: from all really make us happy. The good news is
Speaker 1: that understanding the science of the money can point us
Speaker 1: all back in the right direction. You're listening to the
Speaker 1: Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 3: If you graf many majors of not only in social capital,
Speaker 3: but economic equality and political comedy, getting along and so on,
Speaker 3: they all go down since the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: Robert was born back in nineteen forty one, and he
Speaker 1: feels very lucky to have grown up in what he
Speaker 1: considers a golden age of social capital a period of
Speaker 1: so much weed time. Every day Robert's dad ate breakfast
Speaker 1: at the same local spot with the same fellow diners.
Speaker 1: Robert spent his formative teen years on a Port Clinton
Speaker 1: bowling team whose members came from many diverse communities and neighborhoods.
Speaker 3: I'm constantly at risk of seeing that town walls and
Speaker 3: seeing our youth through golden paye. So I spent a
Speaker 3: lot of time actually trying to be sure I have
Speaker 3: the facts right.
Speaker 1: And the facts are pretty shocking. Many of our third places,
Speaker 1: those spots other than home or work, where we can
Speaker 1: mix and form friendships, are in terminal decline. By neglecting
Speaker 1: our clubs and associations and neighborhood hangouts. Over the last
Speaker 1: sixty years, it seems that we've really beaten social capital down,
Speaker 1: almost to the point of extinction. But it turns out
Speaker 1: this pessimistic view isn't the whole picture. Robert realized he
Speaker 1: didn't really know what was happening to social capital before
Speaker 1: his childhood in the nineteen fifties, so he decided to
Speaker 1: look at the earlier records. What was social capital like
Speaker 1: in World War Two, during the Great Depression, or even
Speaker 1: before World War One, and.
Speaker 3: If you do that, you can see it's all one big,
Speaker 3: inverted you curve.
Speaker 1: One side of that curve tells us what we already know,
Speaker 1: that social capital now is low, But the opposite side
Speaker 1: of the graph revealed something somewhat surprising. America had experienced
Speaker 1: a similar slump in social capit in the late eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 3: America was in a pickle back in the eighteen eighties.
Speaker 2: We were very unequal.
Speaker 3: We were very divided politically, we were very polarized. We
Speaker 3: were very disconnected from one another.
Speaker 1: Robert wanted to quantify just how much America in the
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds was an I society rather than a WE society.
Speaker 1: So he turned to an online database that had digitized
Speaker 1: a bunch of written material from different time periods.
Speaker 3: It's got cookbooks and detective stories and children's books and
Speaker 3: everything you would see if you went into a bookstore,
Speaker 3: and therefore it's a good measure of what ordinary people
Speaker 3: are reading and writing about.
Speaker 1: Searching this archive can tell you when different ideas were fashionable,
Speaker 1: when particular historical figures were in vogue. But Robert wanted
Speaker 1: to measure something more subtle. He needed a specific search
Speaker 1: term to test what ordinary people were reading and writing
Speaker 1: about their sense of community.
Speaker 4: What if we.
Speaker 3: Compared the ratio of the first person plural to the
Speaker 3: first person singular.
Speaker 1: Robert decided to compare our use of the word I
Speaker 1: to the use of the word we, and back in
Speaker 1: the eighteen eighties, the first person singular went out by
Speaker 1: a landslide.
Speaker 2: We were very much in an eye mood.
Speaker 3: We were very much focused on what was good for
Speaker 3: us individually rather than what was good for all of
Speaker 3: us together.
Speaker 1: That era, after the Civil War and reconstruction, became known
Speaker 1: as the Gilded Age. It was a time of rapid
Speaker 1: and often disconcerting technological change, a period of bitter arguments
Speaker 1: about immigration, democracy, and social justice.
Speaker 3: In Vanning public philosophy at that time, it was something
Speaker 3: called social Darwinism natural selection.
Speaker 2: Better if if we don't help poor people.
Speaker 3: Because I'll just speed up the process of development of
Speaker 3: the human race.
Speaker 1: This ethos allowed a small group of elite men, the
Speaker 1: so called robber barons, to amass fast wealth while workers
Speaker 1: enjoyed little security from the fruits of their labor. And
Speaker 1: the philosophy back then was that if workers didn't like that, well,
Speaker 1: they should start their own business. Empire from the top
Speaker 1: to the bottom of Gilded Age society. The eye was
Speaker 1: celebrated over the WII.
Speaker 3: Read in truth and claw bad, to help poor people good, to.
Speaker 1: Be as selfish as possible. Yeah, I'm guessing that some
Speaker 1: of this may sound depressingly familiar. I mean, arguments about
Speaker 1: social justice and inequality. A one percent of people thriving
Speaker 1: while much of the other ninety nine percent is still struggling.
Speaker 3: America in eighteen ninety looked a lot like America right now,
Speaker 3: extremely polarized, extremely unequal, extremely self centered, and extremely socially isolated.
Speaker 3: And then something happened around nineteen ten, and all those
Speaker 3: graphs began to go in the right direction.
Speaker 1: The first sign of this change was in that written
Speaker 1: archive Robert analyzed. After nineteen hundred, the ratio of eye
Speaker 1: to we words began to shift. More and more writers
Speaker 1: began talking about the collective good rather than the individual.
Speaker 3: They essentially said, what we've inherited from our parents is
Speaker 3: a society that's really out of lack. Even if we're
Speaker 3: ourselves doing fine, we have other loeases other people.
Speaker 1: This urged argues led people to start banding together in
Speaker 1: clubs and associations. In teams and in unions. Americans got
Speaker 1: more involved in charities and civic bodies, and in politics.
Speaker 1: Citizens began pressuring their elected officials to use the Wii
Speaker 1: rather than the eye to shape policies.
Speaker 2: Things in America were getting better and better.
Speaker 3: We were economically growing, we were equal, we were taking
Speaker 3: care of each other, we were attending pgaight meetings, we
Speaker 3: were focused on the Wii. We were like this amazing country.
Speaker 1: Robert calls this change the upswing. It's a phenomenon that
Speaker 1: he thinks should give us a lot of hope about
Speaker 1: the fate of society and social capital today. The upswing
Speaker 1: reveals that our great great grandparents faced pretty much the
Speaker 1: same problems we have today, and they were able to
Speaker 1: make the cultural changes needed to successfully switch course and
Speaker 1: rebuild social capital.
Speaker 3: You know, it does not have to be this way,
Speaker 3: and for most young people today that is news.
Speaker 1: In the last episode, we talked about the importance of
Speaker 1: individual dual action in improving social capital. We extolled the
Speaker 1: virtues of becoming a joiner, of going to third places
Speaker 1: and meeting your neighbors to build the bonds of community
Speaker 1: and trust that make us all happier. But Robert's study
Speaker 1: of the upswing shows that's only part of the solution.
Speaker 1: We also need a cultural shift. Our entire society has
Speaker 1: to focus on the WII rather than the eye, and
Speaker 1: that means we need people at the top to start
Speaker 1: taking social capitals seriously and to back it with policies
Speaker 1: and money, which kind of sounds like a huge hurdle.
Speaker 1: The Happiness lab will be right back. If you're looking
Speaker 1: for a true hero of the WI society, you need
Speaker 1: to look further back in time than the nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: and way before the Gilded Age of the eighteen eighties.
Speaker 1: In fact, you need to go all the way back
Speaker 1: to the days of the American Revolution, because just as
Speaker 1: America was being founded with a declaration to give citizens
Speaker 1: the right to p sue happiness, a British philosopher was
Speaker 1: thinking deeply about what the pursuit of happiness actually meant,
Speaker 1: and Jeremy Bentham came down firmly on the moral case
Speaker 1: for collective well being. The greatest happiness. He wrote, of
Speaker 1: the greatest number, that is the measure of right and wrong.
Speaker 5: I thought that was absolutely mind blowing.
Speaker 1: As a young student, economist Lord Richard Laird loved Jeremy
Speaker 1: Bentham's work.
Speaker 5: The way we would judge our society is by the
Speaker 5: happiness of the people. The way we would want the
Speaker 5: government to bathe is to maximize well being of the people.
Speaker 5: What are we here to do to produce the most
Speaker 5: happiness that we can in the world.
Speaker 1: Now, you might not be used to hearing a veteran
Speaker 1: economist like Lord Laird talking about concepts like happiness and
Speaker 1: maximizing well being. When economists use words like maximizing, they're
Speaker 1: usually focused on money and shareholder value and country wealth
Speaker 1: as measured by GDP. It's not that economists are blind
Speaker 1: to the need to make people happier. They just love
Speaker 1: numbers and data. And until recently, psychologists like me couldn't
Speaker 1: give them any of those numbers or day because we
Speaker 1: hadn't yet come up with good ways to measure people's happiness.
Speaker 5: And what could you say, well, more or less, all
Speaker 5: you could say is how much they could buy, And
Speaker 5: so how much they could buy became the criteria many
Speaker 5: people thought was equivalent to well being, and that has
Speaker 5: sorted of been very unfortunate.
Speaker 1: Unfortunate because it's just not true. As I say over
Speaker 1: and over on this podcast. Lots of research shows that
Speaker 1: how much money people have is not a proxy for
Speaker 1: how happy they are. You can be a blissfully happy
Speaker 1: billionaire or a downright miserable one. But as the saying goes,
Speaker 1: if you're armed with a hammer, everything starts to look
Speaker 1: like a nail. And until recently, economists were only armed
Speaker 1: with GDP, so they began to assume that increasing our
Speaker 1: wealth was the best path to happiness. The problem is
Speaker 1: that policymakers and leaders tend to listen to economists, so
Speaker 1: we wound up with government policies that confuse money and
Speaker 1: well being.
Speaker 5: This is a terrible culture.
Speaker 1: Take Lord Laird's home country of England. He's watched politicians
Speaker 1: use econo arguments to remove funding from the places where
Speaker 1: ordinary people meet and form social capital.
Speaker 5: Children's centers, which have been largely abolished by the present government,
Speaker 5: were very successful in bringing together mothers with young children.
Speaker 5: Youth centers very important and there's plenty of evidence that
Speaker 5: when they get close down as they have been, that's
Speaker 5: not good for crime. And then old people's centers or
Speaker 5: mixtage censers, where people regularly get together in the natural
Speaker 5: kind of way.
Speaker 1: Governments usually want to reduce debt and promote economic growth.
Speaker 1: So they conclude that, however nice it might be to
Speaker 1: let parents and teens and elders meet up and become friends,
Speaker 1: it's a luxury the country can't afford. But Lord Layard
Speaker 1: is a pioneer of a different field known as happiness economics,
Speaker 1: and that field see the benefits of these investments very
Speaker 1: very differently. Lord Laird argues that concentrating solely on economic
Speaker 1: growth fails Jeremy Bentham's test of right and wrong. It
Speaker 1: doesn't bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number.
Speaker 5: The things which were being measured are the things external,
Speaker 5: and you can see somebody's income, you can't see how
Speaker 5: they're feeling. And we have to move to a culture
Speaker 5: where we take the life as experienced and the in
Speaker 5: their life more seriously.
Speaker 1: Fortunately for Lloyd Laird and other proponents of happiness economics,
Speaker 1: psychologists have now worked out how to establish if people
Speaker 1: are happy. We simply ask them. Researchers now have lots
Speaker 1: of different survey tools for measuring if people are satisfied
Speaker 1: both in their lives and with their lives, and to
Speaker 1: find out what factors influence their answers and of.
Speaker 5: Course, the results are incredibly important and so different from
Speaker 5: what many politicians think matter to people.
Speaker 1: No one, it turns out, talks about things like GDP
Speaker 1: people are much more likely to mention loneliness, a topic
Speaker 1: that few economists or politicians have focused on, but that
Speaker 1: we now know has a huge effect on our health.
Speaker 1: It's estimated to be the equivalent of smoking fifteen cigarettes
Speaker 1: a day. That damage could be reduced if government's invested
Speaker 1: in the right problem.
Speaker 5: There's money that needs to be spent, but it's not
Speaker 5: a huge amount of money.
Speaker 1: Lord Laird argues for things like tax incentives to encourage
Speaker 1: the growth of third places. He thinks governments should prioritize
Speaker 1: building plazas and parks where people can connect.
Speaker 5: Power planning it's very very important in determining whither are
Speaker 5: spaces where people naturally come together and talk to each
Speaker 5: other and can walk around and say it some shots
Speaker 5: and so on, or whether it's a kind of motorized
Speaker 5: social desert. These are real decisions that town planners can make.
Speaker 1: You may well look around your town and see little
Speaker 1: evidence that urban planners have given much thought of bringing
Speaker 1: folks together. But just as Robert Putnam saw an upswing
Speaker 1: in community spirit after the Gilded Age. Lord Laird's senses
Speaker 1: a growing interest in happiness economics in many nations.
Speaker 5: And we're now in a really interesting situation in Britain
Speaker 5: where wellbeing is coming up to the floor because the
Speaker 5: party which will probably elect to the next election is
Speaker 5: committed to making well being an equal goal with GDP
Speaker 5: for its government.
Speaker 1: And note that Lord Laird isn't advocating spending public money frivolously.
Speaker 1: All those usual hard headed financial savings goals are built
Speaker 1: into happiness economics too.
Speaker 5: Our criterion for public policy is that we should be
Speaker 5: spending money owned policies which create the most well being
Speaker 5: per dollar spent. Now, my dollar spent it means not
Speaker 5: in a dollar spent at the beginning of the process,
Speaker 5: but minus a dollars saved as reults of spending the
Speaker 5: initial dollar coat effectiveness. This is a sort of wellbeing
Speaker 5: mantra when it comes to public policy.
Speaker 1: That's right. Public investment in improving well being can actually
Speaker 1: save government's money. Take loneliness again. A dollar spent giving
Speaker 1: a lonely person access to a third place could save
Speaker 1: the money that would need to be spent if that
Speaker 1: person gets sick as a result of their social isolation.
Speaker 1: And as we heard in our last episode, investing in
Speaker 1: clubs and third places like sports teams, community pools, choirs
Speaker 1: and residents associations can reduce crimes and help towns run
Speaker 1: more efficiently.
Speaker 5: We need to make this case full investing in things
Speaker 5: which are really critical for people's well being and will
Speaker 5: actually many of them save the state a lot of money.
Speaker 1: Lord Laird has been around even longer than Robert Putnam.
Speaker 1: He was born in the nineteen thirties. I assumed he'd
Speaker 1: be even more depressed by the current state of social
Speaker 1: capital and the lack of trust. But I was really
Speaker 1: heartened to hear him talk so optimistically about where policy
Speaker 1: is going. And then I caught myself. Lord Laird's views
Speaker 1: are well respected in Europe and particularly the Scandinavian countries
Speaker 1: that so often top the charts of the happiest places
Speaker 1: on Earth. But what about the United States? Despite our
Speaker 1: incredibly high GDP, we barely hit the middle of some
Speaker 1: of those well being metrics. Are the leaders of my
Speaker 1: country ever going to wake up to happiness economics? Hey,
Speaker 1: Senator Murphy, thanks so much for taking the time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely really glad to do it. Thanks for having
Speaker 4: me be part of this.
Speaker 1: When I first saw the new national strategy, I was
Speaker 1: so excited. And when I realized it was my senator,
Speaker 1: and I was like, yes, it's so exciting. The Happiness
Speaker 1: Lab will be right back. When Harvard political scientist Robert
Speaker 1: Putnam first published his findings about the decline of social capital,
Speaker 1: it sparked a huge national debate.
Speaker 2: Please be seated every while, let's go.
Speaker 1: Even President Clinton wanted in.
Speaker 5: I'd like to call on Professor Robert Putnam.
Speaker 3: Now, within one week, I was invited to Camp David
Speaker 3: David for goodness sex. This is not the normal experience
Speaker 3: of any academic bowling alone.
Speaker 2: Worth it for the title alone.
Speaker 1: I was only a grad student back then, but I
Speaker 1: also caught the Putnam bug. I started talking endlessly with
Speaker 1: friends about Robert's ideas. We even dreamt up our own
Speaker 1: outrageous plan to rebuild social capital. We'd move to some
Speaker 1: tiny coastal town and build a local cinema, but that
Speaker 1: never came to fruition.
Speaker 6: Today, our fellowship, our way of life, our very freedom
Speaker 6: came under attack, and a series of deliberate and deadly
Speaker 6: terrorist acts.
Speaker 1: The events of nine to eleven diverted the conversations that
Speaker 1: I and so many people were having about social capital.
Speaker 1: The play of third places suddenly didn't seem so important.
Speaker 6: The victims were in airplanes or in their offices, secretaries,
Speaker 6: businessmen and women, military and federal workers, moms and dads,
Speaker 6: friends and neighbors.
Speaker 1: Only later would scholars argue that it was the exact
Speaker 1: right time to start boosting trust and social capital. Since
Speaker 1: nine to eleven, the decline in social capital has become
Speaker 1: even steeper. Surveys reveal that trust in government is at
Speaker 1: a sixty year low. Since twenty eighteen, our faith in journalists,
Speaker 1: police officers, and even school principles has dropped. And young adults,
Speaker 1: those with even less experience with the sorts of third
Speaker 1: places that Robert enjoyed as a kid, are now the
Speaker 1: least willing to trust their fellow citizens. That has spurred
Speaker 1: some people to take action.
Speaker 4: There's no doubt that my rather sudden interest in this
Speaker 4: topic of social connection is not coincidental to being a
Speaker 4: parent of teenagers.
Speaker 1: I want you to meet someone who's tackling our decline
Speaker 1: in social capital head on.
Speaker 4: So I'm Chris Murphy, and I am a United States
Speaker 4: Senator from Connecticut.
Speaker 1: Senator Murphy has introduced the National Strategy for Social Connection Act,
Speaker 1: a bill that would create an office within the White
Speaker 1: House charged with reducing loneliness and boosting social capital. The
Speaker 1: senator hopes it will give future generations the opportunity to
Speaker 1: build the sorts of third places that he took for
Speaker 1: granted back in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 4: I had a real sense of place growing up. I
Speaker 4: grew up in a pretty quintessentially suburban community right outside
Speaker 4: of Hartford. It had specific restaurants that you'd go to
Speaker 4: see friends and neighbors. We had rituals that would involve
Speaker 4: doing the same set of things and going to the
Speaker 4: same set of places on Saturday mornings and Sunday mornings.
Speaker 4: There was a a routine to life in Weathersfield that
Speaker 4: was very much angered in that place, and it was
Speaker 4: a routine that you couldn't easily replicate somewhere else because
Speaker 4: of the things we were doing in Weathersfield were unique
Speaker 4: to Weathersfield.
Speaker 1: Some of the ritual Senator Murphy remembers may sound kind
Speaker 1: of corny to modern ears, like heading to the store
Speaker 1: with his grandparents and being treated by the owner to
Speaker 1: a cheese slice while the adults chit chatted.
Speaker 4: It was part of my weekend routine, going to the
Speaker 4: local grocery store, getting a free slice of American cheese
Speaker 4: and feeling like really connected to that guy and to
Speaker 4: that store and to that business community who you know,
Speaker 4: were so wonderfully attentive to my needs that they would
Speaker 4: give me a slice of cheese.
Speaker 1: But local stores like this are getting harder to find.
Speaker 1: Senator Murphy worries that lawmakers have failed to see the
Speaker 1: social consequences of the shopping and delivery apps that we
Speaker 1: all find so convenient.
Speaker 4: When online commerce and social media came along, government decided
Speaker 4: to convince itself that the market, the private sector, could
Speaker 4: deliver the good and withhold the bad. And that's not
Speaker 4: what happened. Unregulated online commerce ended up wiping out our
Speaker 4: local economies, our downtowns, and so that experience I had
Speaker 4: growing up of having a relationship with your local grocer
Speaker 4: or your local deli manager that was really important to
Speaker 4: your sense of place and identity, that doesn't exist any longer.
Speaker 4: Those local grocery stores are gone, but.
Speaker 1: Is missing out on free cheese slices enough of a
Speaker 1: reason to create a whole new office in the heart
Speaker 1: of the United States government and to demand the sorts
Speaker 1: of policies that Robert Putnam, Lord Laird and even Jeremy
Speaker 1: Bentham might approve of.
Speaker 4: I think it's always dangerous to get involved in blind nostalgia,
Speaker 4: and there are things about growing up in the seventies
Speaker 4: that are not fantastic and not awesome. But I do
Speaker 4: feel like I am struggling as a parent to deliver
Speaker 4: valuable connection to my kids, who are now teenager and
Speaker 4: a preteen in the way that I had it, and
Speaker 4: I think that's part of what has driven me to
Speaker 4: really care about this issue of connection. But the second
Speaker 4: reason is this, I also just am responsible for the
Speaker 4: people I represent, and I just don't feel like they're
Speaker 4: as healthy or as fulfilled as they need to be.
Speaker 4: And I feel this constant lingering anxiety amongst the people
Speaker 4: that I represent in a way that I don't remember
Speaker 4: even when I started out in politics twenty years ago.
Speaker 4: And so I really have been engaged in the last
Speaker 4: couple of years in the search to try to figure
Speaker 4: out why people are as unhappy as they are, Why
Speaker 4: are they more anxious, Why has our conversation become more dysfunctional,
Speaker 4: and I'm convinced that part of that is that people
Speaker 4: aren't feeling is connected to each other. And there's got
Speaker 4: to be a political solution for that because there's a
Speaker 4: political consequence.
Speaker 1: And in keeping with the insights of happiness economics, Senator
Speaker 1: Murphy argues that a dollar spent on well being today
Speaker 1: is likely to see more dollars saved down the line.
Speaker 4: The biggest driver of the federal deficit is healthcare costs,
Speaker 4: and so if you are a good steward of the
Speaker 4: taxpayer dollar, then you have to care about why we're
Speaker 4: spending so much more money in this country than anywhere
Speaker 4: else on healthcare. And what the Certain General tells us
Speaker 4: unequivocally is that there is a health care cost to
Speaker 4: loneliness and isolation. That people who are lonely are logically
Speaker 4: going to be more likely to suffer from something like
Speaker 4: depression or dementia, but also from heart disease, and so
Speaker 4: there's just a dollar sign costs isolation.
Speaker 1: Senator Murphy also thinks these social capital improvements will reduce crime.
Speaker 1: He sees a direct link between social isolation and road
Speaker 1: rage and even an increasing phenomenon of the modern age air.
Speaker 4: Rage TSA administrator was in my office the other day.
Speaker 4: We were talking about the biggest problems he faces, and
Speaker 4: at the top of his list was violence on planes
Speaker 4: and at TSA checkpoints. He describes a hair trigger violence
Speaker 4: amongst passengers who travel through our airports and travel on
Speaker 4: airlines that he's never seen in his entire career. And
Speaker 4: we feel that in our daily lives, that people just
Speaker 4: seem quicker to violent outbursts or quicker to verbal assaults
Speaker 4: on peers than they were before. And I think that
Speaker 4: is one of the consequences of a country that is
Speaker 4: just sort of searching for connection and meaning. And when
Speaker 4: you're searching in that way, maybe your first emotion is sadness.
Speaker 4: But often for a lot of people, anger is right there,
Speaker 4: not far behind. And you see that play out in
Speaker 4: a whole bunch of forums in our society today.
Speaker 1: But isolation doesn't just cause the kind of anger that
Speaker 1: erupts when you're rushing to make your flight. Senator Murphy
Speaker 1: also suspects that many of today's hate crimes, mass shootings,
Speaker 1: and terrorist attacks ultimately stem from a lack of social capital.
Speaker 4: But I think there's no doubt that people's isolation and
Speaker 4: people's loneliness ultimately moves them into unhealthy places politically, and
Speaker 4: part of the reason that we have more extremism in
Speaker 4: our political organization and communication, I think, is because a
Speaker 4: lot of lonely, isolated people end up finding connection or
Speaker 4: finding meaning through politics, and in particular through the extremes
Speaker 4: of both the right and the left.
Speaker 1: These are weighty and depressing problems, but the solution Senator
Speaker 1: Murphy has proposed sound kind of fun. Rather than pushing
Speaker 1: for more cops or harsher punishments, he thinks that at
Speaker 1: least some of the answers could come from things like
Speaker 1: swimming together.
Speaker 4: There was this small, insignificant kerfuffle on social media over
Speaker 4: the summer about public pools and the fact that we're
Speaker 4: losing public pools and the ones we have we had
Speaker 4: a hard time staffing this summer in part because of
Speaker 4: funding shortages. But that caused some people on the neoliberal
Speaker 4: right to say, wait a second, you know, why should
Speaker 4: government be involved in our aquatic life to begin with?
Speaker 4: But actually that's over the history of time been a
Speaker 4: real great tradition of local government is to help create,
Speaker 4: not have the sole responsibility to create, but to help create.
Speaker 4: Some of those places little leagues, public pools, public parks,
Speaker 4: dog parks where we can easily find other people who
Speaker 4: share common interests. And as funding has run short for
Speaker 4: those projects. As government frankly has had to push more
Speaker 4: and more money into schools and healthcare, it's had less
Speaker 4: money left over to do this stuff that it actually
Speaker 4: did really well a generation ago, which is just to
Speaker 4: create places and forums where people can come together.
Speaker 1: And Senator Murphy is also committed to policies that promote
Speaker 1: the free time needed to connect as a community.
Speaker 4: What if we had a minimum wage that actually allowed
Speaker 4: people to work only forty hours away week. What if
Speaker 4: you had time in the evenings to join a social club,
Speaker 4: a cooking class.
Speaker 1: But new funding and regulations aren't the only weapons Senator
Speaker 1: Murphy plans to deploy against declining social capital.
Speaker 4: I think government often acts best when it doesn't mandate,
Speaker 4: but where it disseminates best practices.
Speaker 1: Just as a US issues guidelines for nutrition and physical activity,
Speaker 1: Senator Murphy thinks governments need to set better norms when
Speaker 1: it comes to social connection.
Speaker 4: I don't necessarily need a set of recommendations from the
Speaker 4: government as to how many friends I have or how
Speaker 4: many clubs I should join, but maybe they should be
Speaker 4: operative on school districts. For instance, how does a school
Speaker 4: district create a schedule and a calendar that creates opportunities
Speaker 4: for parents to connect with each other and for students
Speaker 4: to connect with each other. Maybe that's really important for
Speaker 4: a school district, just like learning reading, writing, and mathematics is.
Speaker 1: Even if you trust the happiness science, some of you
Speaker 1: listening may find these ideas a little too liberal. You
Speaker 1: may even wonder if policies like these would ever make
Speaker 1: it through a partisan congress. I asked Senator Murphy that
Speaker 1: very question.
Speaker 4: The loneliness epidemic really doesn't discriminate based upon your politics,
Speaker 4: and so there's just as many people who consider themselves
Speaker 4: on the right versus those who consider them themselves on
Speaker 4: the left who are feeling like they're disconnected from their
Speaker 4: community and isolated. Republicans talk just as much about the
Speaker 4: health of our small towns and our downtowns as Democrats do,
Speaker 4: breathing life back into small businesses and local business communities.
Speaker 4: That really has nothing to do with left or right.
Speaker 1: I have to admit I was at first a little
Speaker 1: skeptical about whether a proposed bill like the National Strategy
Speaker 1: for Social Connection Act could gain support across the aisle.
Speaker 1: Producing this Happiness Lab season about the importance of social
Speaker 1: connection has convinced me that we need to make some
Speaker 1: pretty fundamental changes to how we interact with one another.
Speaker 1: But I was also worried about whether my country was
Speaker 1: ready to make those changes. My conversation with Senator Murphy, though,
Speaker 1: has made me a lot more hopeful that a new
Speaker 1: upswing might be in store.
Speaker 4: We have met these truly existential threats in the past,
Speaker 4: whether it was the sort of robber barons and the
Speaker 4: consolidation of power and commerce one hundred years ago, and
Speaker 4: we have adjusted as a nation. That's the magic is
Speaker 4: that we have this ability to diagnose the threats that
Speaker 4: are posed to democracy and then rally the country to
Speaker 4: a solution. I think speaks to the genius of this country.
Speaker 1: This show concludes our special season on increasing Social Connection.
Speaker 1: But this episode has also provided me with a bit
Speaker 1: of closure too. As I mentioned before, I've spent the
Speaker 1: last two decades worried about social capital and what we
Speaker 1: can do to improve it. I can't tell you how
Speaker 1: inspired I was reading Robert Putnam's research back in the
Speaker 1: late nineties. Witnessing just how badly we've taken care of
Speaker 1: our social capital since then has been devastating. Before making
Speaker 1: this series, I'd sometimes get worried that social capital had
Speaker 1: passed the point of no return and that we'd never
Speaker 1: be able to get back to the connections our country
Speaker 1: enjoyed back in the day. But after talking to all
Speaker 1: the experts you got to me over the season, I'm
Speaker 1: much much more hopeful these days. When I start to
Speaker 1: feel despair, I think back to Robert Putnam's work and
Speaker 1: a little insight he shared when we spoke, a saying
Speaker 1: told to him by a dear and wise friend.
Speaker 3: Optimism, he said, is a passive virtue. Hope, he said,
Speaker 3: is an active virtue. Hope says, I can see how
Speaker 3: it could go in that direction, and I'm going to
Speaker 3: work to make it.
Speaker 2: Go in that direction. That's what he means by an
Speaker 2: active virtue.
Speaker 3: So now I don't know whether I'm optimistic about America
Speaker 3: or the world.
Speaker 2: Now, but I am hopeful.
Speaker 3: I can see how we could get there, and I'm
Speaker 3: doing then damist by preaching to move us in that direction.
Speaker 1: The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley.
Speaker 1: Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing,
Speaker 1: and mastering by Evan Viola. Jess Shane and Alice Vines
Speaker 1: offered additional production support. Special thanks to my agent, Ben
Speaker 1: Davis and all of the Pushkin crew. The Happiness Lab
Speaker 1: is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Doctor
Speaker 1: Laurie Santos