Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey, it's doctor Laurie Santos here. The science says
Speaker 1: that giving a dollar away can make you feel happier
Speaker 1: than spending on yourself, and if you're in the mood
Speaker 1: to make every dollar you donate count this holiday season,
Speaker 1: the Happiness Lab has teamed up with GiveDirectly dot org.
Speaker 1: If we all pull together, we can make a huge
Speaker 1: difference to one African village in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: Kibobo, I think is a great place if people want
Speaker 2: somewhere to support people there are living in really desperate situation.
Speaker 2: They lack almost everything.
Speaker 1: Rory Stewart from GiveDirectly dot org says money from Happiness
Speaker 1: Lab listeners will go directly to the people of Kebobo
Speaker 1: in Rwanda, who'll be loved to decide on their own
Speaker 1: how to best spend it to improve their lives.
Speaker 2: Getting a little bit of cash is what will allow
Speaker 2: you to fix your house, buy a cow which could
Speaker 2: provide milk for your family, get a relative who's ill
Speaker 2: to the local hospital. These things that are genuinely life transforming.
Speaker 1: So if you can spare just a few bucks and
Speaker 1: want to join me and other fans of the show
Speaker 1: to help the folks in Cabobo, then go to this
Speaker 1: website give directly dot org slash happiness. That's give directly
Speaker 1: dot org slash happiness. Just a few dollars can make
Speaker 1: a huge difference, Happy Giving. I'm doctor Laurie.
Speaker 3: Santos and I'm Tim Harford and this.
Speaker 1: Is a crossover episode of my podcast The Happiness Lab.
Speaker 3: And my podcast Cautionary Tales. Laurie, is really great to
Speaker 3: be working with you on a couple of crossover episodes.
Speaker 3: So what did you want to cover on this one?
Speaker 1: I thought it'd be fun to talk about holidays and rest.
Speaker 3: Okay, I better warn you that we're all about learning
Speaker 3: from stories of catastrophe on Cautionary Tales, Laurie, So go
Speaker 3: on do your worst.
Speaker 1: Sure. The Happiness Lab is all about the science of
Speaker 1: happiness and how our minds tend to lie to us
Speaker 1: about the sorts of things that make us happy. And
Speaker 1: one of the biggest ways our lying minds fool us
Speaker 1: is when it comes to our free time. The Happiness
Speaker 1: science is super clear about the well being benefits of
Speaker 1: taking a break, but many of us still struggle to
Speaker 1: do that. It's why I pick one day each year
Speaker 1: to surprise the overloaded students in my Happiness class at Yale.
Speaker 1: When they arrive at the lecture hall, thinking it's time
Speaker 1: for class, they're handed a permission slip telling them surprise,
Speaker 1: today's rest day, so they need to head off and
Speaker 1: do something fun instead. The students often look a little
Speaker 1: shell shocked when they file out of the hall, but
Speaker 1: many of them report back that they've loved their unexpected
Speaker 1: time off. My students wind up hanging out with friends
Speaker 1: or exploring somewhere new on campus with someone they met
Speaker 1: leaving class. Some of them even say that this unexpected
Speaker 1: time affluence moment was one of their most memorable days
Speaker 1: at Yale. I think I'm teaching these young scholars a
Speaker 1: valuable life lesson, but I've definitely gotten some pushback. Who
Speaker 1: does Laura Santos think she is letting hundreds of students
Speaker 1: skip class they're paying a lot for their education.
Speaker 3: Well, I think you're very wise, Laurie, But what I'm
Speaker 3: hearing is a story in which they all live happily
Speaker 3: ever after, and that's not quite how we do things here.
Speaker 3: On Cautionary Tales.
Speaker 1: Tim, you promised me a cautionary tale about holidays and rest.
Speaker 3: Indeed did you ever hear the sad tale of Saint
Speaker 3: Lubbock's Day. Uh No, want to be honest, I've had
Speaker 3: I Until recently, Saint Lubbuck's Day was a jokey name
Speaker 3: for public holidays in the UK. There is no Saint Lubbock.
Speaker 3: Sir John Lubbock was the politician who in the eighteen
Speaker 3: seventies proposed a law closing the banks for four mondays
Speaker 3: a year in spring and summer. He knew that on
Speaker 3: these bank holidays other businesses would probably close too, and
Speaker 3: if he got his way, the British working classes would
Speaker 3: get an extra day off to go to the beach.
Speaker 1: That sounds pretty good to me.
Speaker 3: It sounds great, although of course there were all the
Speaker 3: objections you might expect from commercial interests. Victorian Britain, remember,
Speaker 3: also gave us the character of Ebenezer Scrooge, the man
Speaker 3: who grumbled on Christmas Eve to his hard working employee
Speaker 3: Bob Cratchett. You'll be wanting the whole day off tomorrow,
Speaker 3: I suppose. But the laws passed, the new holidays were introduced,
Speaker 3: and for almost a century all was well. And then
Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty four Lubbock's Bank holidays came back to
Speaker 3: bite the British on their backsides. The first bank holiday
Speaker 3: of the year was damp and dismal.
Speaker 1: I mean, is that all that unusual in the UK?
Speaker 3: Not really, Lourie, But on this particular day the bad
Speaker 3: weather caused trouble in the small coastal town of Clacton
Speaker 3: on Sea. The baby boomers were teenagers then, with money
Speaker 3: in their pockets and some worried no sense of how
Speaker 3: to behave. Unable to sunbathe on the beach, the bank
Speaker 3: holiday visitors decided instead to fight. The battle lines were sartorial.
Speaker 3: The mop topped, suit wearing Italian scooter riding mods took
Speaker 3: on the greasy haired, leather clad bikers the rockers. The
Speaker 3: clashes fed a paranoia amongst grown ups that bed sired
Speaker 3: a generation of hooligans, spoiled, entitled and rebellious, and thanks
Speaker 3: to bank holidays, able to descend en mass to normally
Speaker 3: genteel resort towns to wreak havoc. On subsequent holiday mondays,
Speaker 3: more riots erupted, politicians weighed up rushing through new laws,
Speaker 3: were detention camps the answer or punishment floggings. The news
Speaker 3: papers were in little doubt that the nation was only
Speaker 3: another bank holiday away from anarchy. One headline almost reddished
Speaker 3: the prospect, saying the break from work had become a
Speaker 3: day of terror. On the final bank holiday of the summer,
Speaker 3: police leave was canceled. Officers instead gathered by an Air
Speaker 3: Force base outside London, where the Royal Air Force would
Speaker 3: fly them to wherever violence flared next to reinforce the
Speaker 3: doubtlessly outnumbered local police.
Speaker 1: I love this story, Tim, but is there a lesson
Speaker 1: in there about how to lead more fulfilling lives?
Speaker 3: Uh? Not really, It was just this weird moment in history.
Speaker 3: Everybody lost their minds about teenage fashion easters fighting on
Speaker 3: bank holidays, and then everything was fine again.
Speaker 1: In that case, the story might be a cautionary tale,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't really work for the Happiness Lab. Do
Speaker 1: you have any other tales of disaster that actually teach
Speaker 1: us something about being happier and less stressed?
Speaker 3: Yes, Laurie. Let me take you back to a sunday
Speaker 3: in the nineteen twenties in the Soviet Union. If you
Speaker 3: stand outside a factory, peering through the window or pressing
Speaker 3: your ear to the door, you see nothing and hear nothing.
Speaker 3: The factories are empty, the tools lie idle the machines,
Speaker 3: what few machines there are are silent. Sunday is a
Speaker 3: day of rest for everyone. But this won't do. Russia
Speaker 3: had been a backward nation, a poor agricultural economy full
Speaker 3: of illiterate peasants exploited by an inbred nobility. But the
Speaker 3: brave new Soviet Union it needed to industrialize fast, Like
Speaker 3: the British and the Americans. Workers were cheap, but machines
Speaker 3: were expensive. To let them gather dust each Sunday just
Speaker 3: seem absurd. Not that anyone wanted to abolish rest days naturally,
Speaker 3: not the brave Soviet laborer, whose sweat lubricated the wheels
Speaker 3: of industrial progress, must be allowed to regain his strength
Speaker 3: from time to time. So what could be done? Enter
Speaker 3: an economist named Yuri Laren. In May nineteen twenty nine,
Speaker 3: Laren proposed a brilliant, bold, and extremely odd plan to
Speaker 3: reshape the calendar. And since Laren worked for Joseph Stalin,
Speaker 3: that brilliant, bold and extremely odd plan soon became the
Speaker 3: new reality for Soviet workers. When the workers arrived at
Speaker 3: the factory gates, each was handed a slip of colored
Speaker 3: paper green, orange, purple, red, or yellow what did the
Speaker 3: color signify. It signified which day off you'd get to
Speaker 3: take for the rest of your working life. September twenty ninth,
Speaker 3: nineteen twenty nine, was scheduled to be the Soviet Union's
Speaker 3: final Sunday. After that, a five day working week. Everyone
Speaker 3: would get a day off every five days. The green
Speaker 3: slip workers would get one day off together, the orange
Speaker 3: slip workers would get another, and so on. And of
Speaker 3: course that meant that on any given day, four out
Speaker 3: of five workers would show up for work. The factories
Speaker 3: and the machines could operate three hundred and sixty five
Speaker 3: days a year. Yuri Laren system was named near Prevka,
Speaker 3: the continuous work week. Outside the Soviet Union, newspapers published
Speaker 3: cartoons depicting Saturday and Sunday being shot.
Speaker 1: You can see the appeal of Neprevka, especially to a
Speaker 1: Soviet economist in the nineteen twenties. It seems like a
Speaker 1: great idea, as long as you see to abstract notions
Speaker 1: and avoid the rather gnarly specifics of real people. Before Nipreva,
Speaker 1: Soviet workers would have taken Saturday and Sunday off, but
Speaker 1: many only got to rest on Sundays. Switching to the
Speaker 1: continuous five day week made things more equal and gave
Speaker 1: many workers even more rest days and continuous work meant
Speaker 1: those valuable machines and factory floors would no longer stand
Speaker 1: idle for days at a time. They could now be
Speaker 1: used all year long. But the problem with the idea
Speaker 1: becomes kind of obvious when you take a second to
Speaker 1: think about real people's lives. If everyone was resting on
Speaker 1: different days, how could a sports team meet to play
Speaker 1: a morning game or acquire get together to sing. What
Speaker 1: if one person was a yellow and their spouse was
Speaker 1: a green, What is there for us to do at
Speaker 1: home if our wives are in the factory, our children
Speaker 1: at school, and nobody can visit us, complained one worker.
Speaker 1: What Indeed, Tim's tale of Niprevka has something important to
Speaker 1: teach us about time off today. Yes, taking time to
Speaker 1: rest in play is important, but it's also just as
Speaker 1: important to make sure you have time off when everyone
Speaker 1: else is resting and playing warring mods and rockers. Notwithstanding,
Speaker 1: these days, we talk a lot about making sure we
Speaker 1: have some me time, But could we be undervaluing the
Speaker 1: importance of having some we time. We'll find out when
Speaker 1: the Happiness Lab crossover with cautionary tales.
Speaker 3: Comes back from the brink, We're Back. Yuri Larin's Neprevka
Speaker 3: project seems like a historical curiosity, but modern writers have
Speaker 3: started to pick up on the story and to draw
Speaker 3: lessons from what was one of the most extraordinary attempts
Speaker 3: ever made to reform the calendar. Writing in The Atlantic
Speaker 3: in twenty nineteen, Judith Shulevitz pointed to the plight of
Speaker 3: low income workers who had their hours set unpredictably and
Speaker 3: at short notice by a capricious, seeming algorithm. The hours
Speaker 3: might be too short to pay the bills or exhaustingly long,
Speaker 3: but they might also be in a prevca hours reasonable
Speaker 3: enough when viewed in isolation, but desynchronized. This desynchronization makes
Speaker 3: it impossible for people to socialize with friends, to join clubs,
Speaker 3: or participate in community activities, or even to see their
Speaker 3: own partners. The economist Heather Boushi, in her book Finding Time,
Speaker 3: scrutinizes the plight of these workers. Although some people are
Speaker 3: compensated very well for working unusual hours, and others find
Speaker 3: that those hours fit perfectly with their own needs, that's
Speaker 3: not typical. The majority of workers with a non standard schedule,
Speaker 3: are making less money than average. They're all so likely
Speaker 3: to be working in these jobs, not by preference, but
Speaker 3: because they couldn't find anything with more normal hours, and
Speaker 3: the experience can be grim. You have to show up
Speaker 3: whenever the boss says to show up, often at short notice.
Speaker 3: If you say you're not available, that's a mark against you,
Speaker 3: and soon enough you might find yourself looking for another job.
Speaker 3: To see an example of just how much trouble these
Speaker 3: capricious schedules can cause, let's meet Jeannette Navarro, a Starbucks barista.
Speaker 3: Navarro loved being a barista. Upbeat, determined, and persistent. Navarro
Speaker 3: had charmed her way into the job, was dealing with
Speaker 3: a three hour commute across San Diego on the bus,
Speaker 3: and was looking to provide some stability for her four
Speaker 3: year old son, Gavin. But the hours at Starbucks just
Speaker 3: kept changing with just a few days notice, thanks to
Speaker 3: a scheduling algorithm design to move staff into precisely the
Speaker 3: right place at precisely the right time. From the point
Speaker 3: of view of the business, Particularly dreaded was cloapening when
Speaker 3: your shift had you closing the Starbucks branch at night
Speaker 3: and also opening it the next morning just a few
Speaker 3: hours later. Tiring at the best of times, extremely exhausting
Speaker 3: if you also have a long commute, and if you're
Speaker 3: trying to get childcare both for a late night and
Speaker 3: an early morning, a nightmare. In a powerful article in
Speaker 3: New York Times, reporter Jody Cantor showed the unpredictable scheduling
Speaker 3: playing havoc with Jeanette's life. She was endlessly trying to
Speaker 3: find weekend or evening childcare for Gavin at short notice,
Speaker 3: which meant calling in favors and putting relationships under strain.
Speaker 3: Jeanette was living with her aunt, but after one too
Speaker 3: many arguments, she moved in with her boyfriend instead. The
Speaker 3: boyfriend had been supportive, but he too lost patience. Jeanette's
Speaker 3: need for last minute childcare was making it impossible for
Speaker 3: him to realize his own dreams of going back to school.
Speaker 3: As for Jeannette's hopes of completing her own degree, it
Speaker 3: was simply impossible.
Speaker 1: Canter's piece was published in twenty fourteen. It made a
Speaker 1: huge splash and immediately prompted Starbucks to change its scheduling policy. But,
Speaker 1: as Kanter explained in her article, almost every major retailer
Speaker 1: and restaurant gene uses some variant of the same scheduling software.
Speaker 1: Today's low income workers all over the Western world are
Speaker 1: coping with scheduling that's so antisocial it makes Naprevka seem
Speaker 1: positively humane in comparison. But what's even stranger is that
Speaker 1: today there's also a group of privileged people, folks with
Speaker 1: more autonomy over their time than ever before, who are
Speaker 1: somehow managing to inflict a kind of Napreevka on themselves.
Speaker 3: Yes, a couple of years after Judith Schulevitz published her
Speaker 3: reflections on Neprivka in The Atlantic, Oliver Berkman's book Four
Speaker 3: Thousand Weeks pointed out that people at the other end
Speaker 3: of the economic ladder might be trapped in an apprevca
Speaker 3: of their own, making the hybrid workers, the freelancers, and
Speaker 3: above all the digital nomads of Instagram, possibly people like you,
Speaker 3: certainly people like me. These people all had unprecedented control
Speaker 3: over where and when they worked. They could write code
Speaker 3: in a Bermuda beach cottage, they could handle their emails
Speaker 3: from a summer house near Walden Pond, or on a
Speaker 3: mundane level, they could take a yoga class instead of
Speaker 3: hitting the morning commute. All very pleasant, but, as Berkman
Speaker 3: pointed out, if you insist on absolute freedom over when
Speaker 3: and where you work, you risk exercising that freedom all
Speaker 3: by yourself. When we all worked nine to five at
Speaker 3: the office, we could all bond together in the canteen,
Speaker 3: meet up for a drink after work on Friday, and
Speaker 3: feel confident that not only would we be free on Sunday,
Speaker 3: but that all our friends would be too. Now our
Speaker 3: schedule is out of step with everyone else's. You can
Speaker 3: do what you want, but good luck finding someone who
Speaker 3: happens to be free to do it with you. But
Speaker 3: maybe that's fine. After all, the digital nomad can dodge
Speaker 3: the lines for everything from the dentist to Disneyland, avoiding
Speaker 3: the rush hour traffic and the peak priced airfares. There's
Speaker 3: a certain luxury in avoiding the crowds. Half a century
Speaker 3: after Yurilarian's Niaprevka was introduced, a very different economist in
Speaker 3: a very different setting started musing this question. The economist's
Speaker 3: name was Thomas Shelling. Shelling puzzled over topics ranging from
Speaker 3: how to quit smoking to how to make nuclear deterrence credible.
Speaker 3: Stanley Kubrick asked Shelling for advice before directing Doctor Strangelove,
Speaker 3: a comedy about nuclear armageddon. Shelling was that sort of thinker.
Speaker 3: So what did Shelling have to say about scheduling the weekend.
Speaker 3: Well Over the course of the twentieth century, Americans were
Speaker 3: working gradually shorter hours. By the late nineteen seventies, it
Speaker 3: seemed that a four day work week might one day
Speaker 3: be commonplace. Maybe maybe not, said Shelling. But if it
Speaker 3: did become commonplace, here's a question, which day off should
Speaker 3: we take? Should everyone take Friday off, or maybe Wednesday?
Speaker 3: Or maybe we should all choose our own day. Let
Speaker 3: me quote from his nineteen seventy eight book Micro Motives
Speaker 3: and Macro Behavior. The day you'd prefer to have off
Speaker 3: may depend on what days other people have off. A
Speaker 3: weekday is great for going to the dentist, unless the
Speaker 3: dentist takes the same day off. Friday is a great
Speaker 3: day to head for the country, avoiding Saturday traffic unless
Speaker 3: everyone has Friday off. Tuesday is no good for going
Speaker 3: to the beach if Wednesday is the day the children
Speaker 3: have no school. Staggered days are great for relieving the
Speaker 3: golf courses and the shopping centers, but it may demoralize
Speaker 3: teachers and classes to have a fifth of the children
Speaker 3: officially absent from school each day of the week, and
Speaker 3: may confuse families if the fourth grader is home on
Speaker 3: Tuesday and the fifth grader on Wednesday, and the children
Speaker 3: cannot very well go to school the day that the
Speaker 3: teacher isn't there, nor can the teacher go to the
Speaker 3: dentist on the day the dentist takes off to go
Speaker 3: to the beach with his children. And in fact, Shelling
Speaker 3: had some of the same concerns as Yury Larin, even
Speaker 3: though he didn't have the same affection for central planning.
Speaker 3: While the poor workers of the Soviet Union were upset
Speaker 3: that they all had different rest days, Shelling was worried
Speaker 3: that in an affluent society, we might all end up
Speaker 3: taking the same day off, probably Friday, even though it
Speaker 3: would ease congestion if we were able to spread those
Speaker 3: breaks around. Where's Uri Laren when you need him? And
Speaker 3: actually there's some evidence that Shelling had a point. After
Speaker 3: the pandemic, many office workers are working from home a
Speaker 3: couple of days a week, and they're usually choosing Friday
Speaker 3: as the homeworking day rather than say Wednesday.
Speaker 2: Bah.
Speaker 1: Wait, Tim, doesn't that make sense?
Speaker 3: Well, in some ways it makes perfect sense, Laurie. But
Speaker 3: Ury Larin would be tearing his hair out. Now we
Speaker 3: have these expensive blocks, expensive public transit, expensive roads, and
Speaker 3: rather than spreading out our use of them, office workers
Speaker 3: are generally coming into work on Wednesday and staying home
Speaker 3: on Friday, which is exactly what Shelling was talking about
Speaker 3: in the nineteen seventies. So, Laurie, I have a question
Speaker 3: for you. What does the science of well being tell
Speaker 3: us about taking a break? Should we be trying to
Speaker 3: coordinate with everyone else or is there a particular pleasure
Speaker 3: in taking a vacation while everyone else is still at work.
Speaker 1: Well, I have a lot of thoughts about that, Tim,
Speaker 1: and you can hear all about them after the break.
Speaker 3: We're back.
Speaker 1: I'm doctor Laurie Santos of the Happiness Lab, and this
Speaker 1: is a crossover episode with Cautionary Tales with Tim Hartford. So, Tim,
Speaker 1: you wanted to know what the evidence tells us about rest,
Speaker 1: holidays and happiness.
Speaker 3: I did. I did, And in particular this idea of
Speaker 3: whether we should be taking a break at the same time.
Speaker 1: Well, sadly, there's not much research on that, but there
Speaker 1: is a little bit. One of my favorite studies on
Speaker 1: this came out of Terry Hartigg's lab. He's a psychologist
Speaker 1: in Sweden and he was super interested in this question
Speaker 1: of whether or not Swedes are happier on holidays when
Speaker 1: everyone's taking a holiday. Sweden is an awesome spot to
Speaker 1: study this because they get five weeks of holiday, something
Speaker 1: that folks like me in the United States would kill for.
Speaker 1: The government allows them to take it whenever they want.
Speaker 1: They're not sort of scheduling it so that people have
Speaker 1: to take it at certain times. And because Sweden's super cold,
Speaker 1: many Swedes tend to take the holidays during the summer months.
Speaker 1: And what's cool about that is that lots of Swedes
Speaker 1: are on holiday at the same time. They're all taking
Speaker 1: their vacation time like in the same few months together,
Speaker 1: and so Hardigg was interested in whether or not that
Speaker 1: affected the Swedes' mental health, and he decided to study
Speaker 1: this using a pretty funny measure. He actually looked at
Speaker 1: the government's distribution of SSRIs, these antidepression medications, during different
Speaker 1: times of the year, and he tried to look at
Speaker 1: the correlation between the release of SSRIs and people's vacation time.
Speaker 3: So what do they find.
Speaker 1: Well, what he found is that there's this huge correlation
Speaker 1: between when people are taking SSRIs and when they're on vacation. Namely,
Speaker 1: they take less SSRIs when they're on vacation. The lowest
Speaker 1: month of SSRI use is during July, when everyone's kind
Speaker 1: of taking holiday. And their interpretation was this idea that
Speaker 1: when everybody's on holiday together that forms this buffer against stress.
Speaker 1: We get a lot of social connection, we get to
Speaker 1: hang out with the people we care about, and we're
Speaker 1: just kind of feeling less depressed.
Speaker 3: It makes sense, of course, you do wander. You know,
Speaker 3: July in Sweden is a lot more pleasant than January
Speaker 3: in Sweden. I'm sure they tried to adjust for that,
Speaker 3: but I wonder whether there are other countries that have
Speaker 3: lessons to teach us as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, another one of my favorites is the lessons that
Speaker 1: come out of Denmark. Danes have this interesting story where
Speaker 1: over time they've developed this much shorter work week, but
Speaker 1: it's actually pretty recent. It started after World War Two,
Speaker 1: around the time that the Danes were getting more into
Speaker 1: like industry rather than agriculture, actually wanted to employ more people.
Speaker 1: But to do that they had to start employing more women, who,
Speaker 1: at least historically, were the ones doing a lot more
Speaker 1: of the childcare. And so the Danish government said, okay, okay,
Speaker 1: we'll make the work week much shorter so that women
Speaker 1: and men can get home and do more childcare. Will
Speaker 1: kind of cut off time around four o'clock so everyone
Speaker 1: can go home early, and that led to this really
Speaker 1: interesting situation where the Danes wound up getting more free
Speaker 1: time off, but importantly more free time off when everyone
Speaker 1: else was having the same free time off. Everyone was
Speaker 1: off in the afternoons, and what seemed to happen over
Speaker 1: time is that the Danes wound up taking much more
Speaker 1: time to be social. Historically, Danes have many more social
Speaker 1: clubs and kind of like athletic groups than most other countries,
Speaker 1: and that's in part because they have time to get
Speaker 1: together around four o'clock where everybody's off of work, so
Speaker 1: you can set up your choir, you can set up
Speaker 1: your soccer club, you can kind of hang out with
Speaker 1: one another because everybody has free time at the same time.
Speaker 3: And do we know how happy the Danes are compared
Speaker 3: to other com is if those comparisons make sense.
Speaker 1: Well, the research seems to show that the Deans overall
Speaker 1: are pretty happy. Historically, they're often at the top of
Speaker 1: the so called World Happiness Report. Sometimes they get beat
Speaker 1: out by Finland, but most of the time Denmark is
Speaker 1: pretty high at the top, and many folks have sort
Speaker 1: of looked to Denmark as one of the happiest countries
Speaker 1: in part because of their social practices. So I think
Speaker 1: they might be onto something with this time off together
Speaker 1: sort of situation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, very interesting. Of course, the problem always with this
Speaker 3: sort of thing is that there are all kinds of
Speaker 3: systematic differences between countries, not just their vacation rules, but
Speaker 3: all sorts of other things. So maybe we should be
Speaker 3: looking at companies within the United States that have different
Speaker 3: vacation policies. Your professor at Yale, Laurie, I don't know it. Yale,
Speaker 3: the undergraduates go home for the summer, so you're all
Speaker 3: kind of taking the same kind of break at the
Speaker 3: same moment. And I know different corporations are experimenting with
Speaker 3: this idea of a company holiday. Do we know anything
Speaker 3: about whether that works?
Speaker 1: Well, this is the kind of thing that I think
Speaker 1: economists are looking at a lot more days. In fact,
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one was listed as the Year of
Speaker 1: the company wide Vacation. It's the year that many of
Speaker 1: these huge tech companies decided to try an experiment where
Speaker 1: they gave everybody at the company time off together. So
Speaker 1: this was places like LinkedIn and Bumble, a few very
Speaker 1: big healthcare companies, And what people have reported so far
Speaker 1: is that this experiment went pretty well. Employees really like
Speaker 1: the fact that when they're not working, nobody else is working.
Speaker 1: Their boss isn't working, their team isn't working, and that
Speaker 1: means when they get back from holiday, they don't come
Speaker 1: back to a whole inbox flooded with messages telling them
Speaker 1: the stuff that happened when they were out. They're not
Speaker 1: getting these sort of team messages and emails while they're
Speaker 1: on holiday, so there's no real temptation to kind of check.
Speaker 1: And so from the employee's perspective, they really liked being
Speaker 1: off when everybody else at the company was off at
Speaker 1: the same time.
Speaker 3: I really like that. It makes perfect sense. I suppose.
Speaker 3: The other thing about it is that if you are
Speaker 3: going to say everybody in the company is going to
Speaker 3: take the first week of August off like everybody the
Speaker 3: company really has to plan ahead to make that work,
Speaker 3: whereas if you just say, oh, you know, you can
Speaker 3: take you can take some time off, and everyone can
Speaker 3: just go, oh, well, we'll sort of figure it out,
Speaker 3: and they kind of don't figure it out, and in fact,
Speaker 3: what happens is people log in to their email from
Speaker 3: the beach and they don't take a proper holiday and
Speaker 3: they're not doing their job right. So maybe part of
Speaker 3: what's going on here is just this forward planning to
Speaker 3: actually organize to make it work.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that's a big part of it. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think when you leave and you know that that
Speaker 1: project is done, you know because the final date that
Speaker 1: you submitted it is there. When you know there's no
Speaker 1: chance that somebody really needs you for something, I think
Speaker 1: it means that people can kind of let their hair
Speaker 1: down and relax a lot more. You're not worried that
Speaker 1: something's happening at work that really needs your attention because
Speaker 1: everybody's gone.
Speaker 3: And I suppose this tells us something about this time
Speaker 3: of year as well, that we have in the winter,
Speaker 3: Thanksgiving in the US, Christmas in many parts of the world,
Speaker 3: and these are holidays where part of The point of
Speaker 3: the holiday is everyone's doing it at the same time.
Speaker 3: You know, it's not just a day off or week off.
Speaker 3: It is this shared ritual, this shared experience. I love Christmas.
Speaker 3: I know economists are not supposed to really like Christmas.
Speaker 3: I personally, I really I'm really into Christmas. I love it.
Speaker 3: And it's partly just like everyone's into Christmas. Everyone's doing
Speaker 3: Christmas at the same time, and that's fun. I don't
Speaker 3: know whether there's any research on this. You know, we're
Speaker 3: all trying to do our shopping at the same time,
Speaker 3: we're all trying to book flights to go home for
Speaker 3: Thanksgiving at the same time. That causes a problem, Like
Speaker 3: I kind of feel it's worth it.
Speaker 1: This is a domain where I think it's really hard
Speaker 1: to get at the happiness benefits from taking time off
Speaker 1: together because Christmas is a complicated time for people's mental health, right.
Speaker 1: It's a time when people are processing grief. It's a
Speaker 1: time when we're supposed to be happy. So I'm kind
Speaker 1: of not feeling great. It makes me feel especially bad.
Speaker 1: I love that you love Christmas, team, but Christmas is
Speaker 1: not necessarily one of my favorite holidays. In fact, it's
Speaker 1: one of the times that makes me think that Shelling
Speaker 1: might have been right. Then maybe we should all be
Speaker 1: flying that same week together, especially when it's sort of
Speaker 1: cold and snowy in the US. But maybe that's just me.
Speaker 3: Well, I suppose one of the overarching conclusions that we've
Speaker 3: got to draw from the research on happiness is that
Speaker 3: there are big individual differences, and you can have a
Speaker 3: look at averages and say, oh, this kind of thing
Speaker 3: often makes people happy, But in the end you also
Speaker 3: have to understand yourself and understand what works for you
Speaker 3: as an individual.
Speaker 1: I think that's exactly right. Although that said, I think
Speaker 1: there are some domains in which we really know there
Speaker 1: are certain kinds of things that, at least based on
Speaker 1: the data, seems to make most people happy. And one
Speaker 1: of the big ones is social connection, right, just feeling
Speaker 1: that you're not exactly that lonely.
Speaker 3: So tell me about that. I see a lot of
Speaker 3: dramatic claims about loneliness. What does the research tell us
Speaker 3: about that?
Speaker 1: Well, some of those dramatic claims is that loneliness is
Speaker 1: really bad for our health. Some folks like the Surgeon
Speaker 1: General and the US have quoted statistics like being lonely
Speaker 1: is as bad as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, that
Speaker 1: it's twice as risky as obesity for your overall health.
Speaker 1: Some of those claims are a little bit overblown, but
Speaker 1: my sense is that pretty much every available study in
Speaker 1: the field of positive psychology suggests that being social is
Speaker 1: pretty good for your happiness. The more you spend time
Speaker 1: with other people, and the more you spend time, especially
Speaker 1: with people you care about, the happier and more satisfied
Speaker 1: with your life you tend to be.
Speaker 3: I'm really enjoying this conversation, Laurie. I like the fact
Speaker 3: that I can just ask any crazy old question and
Speaker 3: you've got You've got the ansection. Let me let me
Speaker 3: throw another one at you. Okay. So digital nomads, Okay,
Speaker 3: they can work wherever they like. They can work whenever
Speaker 3: they like. Any clues as to whether that's actually good
Speaker 3: for their mental health or whether they're kind of fooling themselves.
Speaker 1: Well, this too, I think, is another domain where there's
Speaker 1: relatively little work, but the work that's out there suggests
Speaker 1: an interesting conclusion. I think this is some lovely stuff
Speaker 1: by Rog Chowdery at Harvard Business School, and he's been
Speaker 1: making this distinction between working whenever you want versus working
Speaker 1: wherever you want. You know, when we think of digital nomads,
Speaker 1: we think often of both together. Right, you know, you're
Speaker 1: off working at a beach, and you can do so
Speaker 1: at any time you'd like. But Chowdery is basically finding
Speaker 1: that really the thing that seems to matter for happiness
Speaker 1: is the wherever part, not the whenever part. Why is
Speaker 1: that the case. Well, if you get to choose where
Speaker 1: you want to work, that means you can make sure
Speaker 1: that you're living close to family members or you're living
Speaker 1: close to friends. If you get to choose where you work,
Speaker 1: you can cut down on your commute time. Often these days,
Speaker 1: when people report that they're working from home, they're saving
Speaker 1: on average four point five hours a week just in
Speaker 1: commuting time. And if you then use those hours to
Speaker 1: do something social. You hang out with your kids, you
Speaker 1: hang out with your friends, or if you exercise, that
Speaker 1: can be a huge boon for people's well being. And
Speaker 1: so I think when we start to think about the
Speaker 1: benefits of being a digital nomad, we're really thinking about location, location, location,
Speaker 1: and not timing.
Speaker 3: Okay, so let's talk about the control that people have
Speaker 3: over their time. The autonomy. One of my favorite psychological
Speaker 3: studies is about office design. Should you have a messy desk,
Speaker 3: a tidy desk, a really minimalist office, or lots of
Speaker 3: pot plants and pictures and so on, and what the
Speaker 3: researchers who did that study found it was basically a trick.
Speaker 3: None of it matters. What matters is whether you feel
Speaker 3: you've got control, So like who actually decides whether that's
Speaker 3: a pot plant. If you get to decide, you feel
Speaker 3: good about the pot plants, and if someone else is
Speaker 3: imposing this pot plant on you, you hate the pot plant.
Speaker 3: So autonomy actually turns out to be much more important
Speaker 3: than the things that we think are important. And I
Speaker 3: couldn't help but think of that study when hearing the
Speaker 3: story of Jeanette Navarro and her absolute lack of control
Speaker 3: over her scheduling.
Speaker 1: Well, the science is pretty clear on this. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think this is really almost like a basic fact
Speaker 1: of human psychology, which is that we like having control
Speaker 1: over what's happening to us, and our perception of control
Speaker 1: seems to matter a lot. Their study is, you know,
Speaker 1: from the nineties and so many different domains, whether it's
Speaker 1: control over what's happening in the workplace, which is what
Speaker 1: we're talking about, but also control over your treatment and
Speaker 1: medical context. Kids control over things in schools makes them
Speaker 1: happier and more productive at schools. Our perceived control seems
Speaker 1: to matter a ton when it comes to both our
Speaker 1: satisfaction but also in some cases are productivity. And I
Speaker 1: think that that's something that bosses and employers need to
Speaker 1: be paying attention to. Just giving people a little bit
Speaker 1: more perceived control isn't just going to make them happier
Speaker 1: and more satisfied, maybe even healthier. It's probably going to
Speaker 1: make them work better and faster too.
Speaker 3: Starbucks and these other companies who are using these scheduling algorithms,
Speaker 3: they're not really thinking through the costs they're imposing on
Speaker 3: their employees. And I wonder now post pandemic labor markets
Speaker 3: are a lot tighter. It's actually quite difficult to get
Speaker 3: people to do a lot of jobs, and companies are
Speaker 3: struggling to figure out how do we recruit people, how
Speaker 3: do we minimize turnover? And I something tells me they're
Speaker 3: going to start to figure this out, that hey, maybe
Speaker 3: our algorithm should take the brunt of interruptions and uncertainties,
Speaker 3: and it shouldn't be the employees because the company can
Speaker 3: actually absorb those costs more easily than the individuals.
Speaker 1: And I think companies don't realize how beneficial it might
Speaker 1: be just to their bottom line to absorb some of
Speaker 1: those unhappiness costs that come up with unpredictable scheduling. There's
Speaker 1: this lovely paper that came out of the University of
Speaker 1: Oxford from Jan Emmanuel Deneb's group that shows that happier
Speaker 1: workers wind up not just being more productive, but companies
Speaker 1: that have happier workers wind up earning more. They're very
Speaker 1: bottom line, you know, how much you know they're kind
Speaker 1: of giving back in the stock market. That winds up
Speaker 1: being determined at least in part by how happy workers are.
Speaker 1: And so I think this is a time when companies
Speaker 1: are going to start paying more attention to the happiness
Speaker 1: of their workers. They're going to start realizing it matters
Speaker 1: for their bottom line. And I think this is something
Speaker 1: that not just companies have to start paying attention to.
Speaker 1: I think governments should also start getting involved in this
Speaker 1: unpredictable scheduling. These days in the US, we have all
Speaker 1: these conversations about minimum wage and making sure people have
Speaker 1: a living wage, but there are studies that show that
Speaker 1: unpredictable hours have a worse impact on mental health than
Speaker 1: low wages. I'd love to see the same conversations that
Speaker 1: are happening about minimum wage start happening about unpredictable scheduling
Speaker 1: and the mental health costs that comes from that as well.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Lourie. You have been extremely patient
Speaker 3: with all of my questions holidays and rest and well being.
Speaker 1: But wait, Tim, I still have a question for you.
Speaker 1: What happened to Neprevka in the end?
Speaker 3: Ah, Now, that is a good question. It's unclear whether
Speaker 3: the Soviet authorities realized quite how disruptive Npreevka would be,
Speaker 3: and if they did, it's not clear whether they thought
Speaker 3: the disruption was a bug or a feature, because, after all,
Speaker 3: families were a bourgeois institution. But it wasn't long before
Speaker 3: the problems with the system became overwhelming, and on the
Speaker 3: first of December nineteen thirty one, a sixth day of
Speaker 3: rest common to all was introduced, and in the summer
Speaker 3: of nineteen forty the seven day week, including Sunday, was resurrected.
Speaker 3: So even Stalin could change his mind, and I wonder
Speaker 3: whether we can change ours lri Santos, thank you so
Speaker 3: much for joining me, and.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining me.
Speaker 2: Tim.
Speaker 1: Let's do this again soon. In fact, I have an
Speaker 1: idea I want to discuss with you, and I'm pretty
Speaker 1: sure you probably have a cautionary tale for me on
Speaker 1: the subject.
Speaker 3: Well, I usually do have a cautionary tale on any subject.
Speaker 3: Dr Laurie Santos hosts The Happiness Lab.
Speaker 1: And Tim Hartford hosts Cautionary Tales. Both podcasts are productions
Speaker 1: of Pushkin Industries and are available wherever you get your podcasts.