Assembly Select Committee on Select Committee on Happiness and Public Policy Outcomes

Good. What is it? Good afternoon. It's good to see everyone. Welcome to the First Committee hearing on the newly formed Select Committee on happiness and public Policy outcomes. Want to thank everybody for being here today, especially to our panelists, many of whom, I know flew hours and hours to get here. Others are joining us virtually from thousands of miles away. The first goal for this Committee hearing is to learn more about happiness and consider possible areas where happiness and public policy intersect.

My personal interest in this, it's great that we have Roko Belic here today. My interest in this first started around 2010-2011 when I saw the film happy. I remember I was dating. She's now my wife, and she didn't understand my obsessive personality at that time. I watched that film probably 14 times within two or three day period, and she thought I was really weird. Now she just accepts it as part of who I am.

But that film sort of set me off on this sort of parallel road to. I've always studied philosophy and the pursuit of very fundamental questions. The pursuit of questions about justice and beauty and truth and knowledge have always been really important to me.

And I think, particularly within the context of this building, we sort of begin the process in a very backwards way, rather than thinking about the fundamental questions and what we ought to be focusing on in a larger aspect, we sort of function along standard operating procedures and a sense and acknowledged assumption about what people want and about what people need. And I think that's really the wrong way of going about public policy.

So this is 11-12 years in the making that I've wanted to have this Committee and that I've wanted to have this discussion. We as a state pride ourselves on being ahead of the curve on a lot of issues, whether it's climate or civil rights and those types of issues. This is an issue where this may, in fact, be the first hearing of any state government on this topic. This is a topic where we are very far behind the rest of the world on this.

We know that many European countries, many Asian countries have looked at this. Many south American countries have looked at the issue of happiness. Obviously, for 11 years, the United Nations has run the happiness index, which is always my, it's like New Year's Eve for me. It's the thing I look forward to every year. Oxford University has done incredible studies on this as well.

So this is an area where California and the United States is very far behind the rest of the world in terms of looking at this issue, and I think that's a shame. But from a California perspective, I think it says a lot about us that we're at least starting this discussion here in California. I was asked yesterday a very good question by a reporter about what would be the successes and what would be the failures of these hearings.

I think success would, we're already there to an extent. I think just having these conversations and to start addressing these conversations in a real way is a good start. I think that's a very good start. So I'm glad that we're doing that.

And I want to thank Katie Talbot, my staff, Carrie Cornwell, my chief, who have worked so hard to make sure we've gotten to this point, and to my colleagues who will be here as well, for their, including Lisa Calderon for their interest in this as well, that I consider to be a tremendous success. And it's the start of a great conversation.

We have a lot of data, qualitative and quantitative data from the UN, from Oxford on happiness and happiness outcomes and what makes people happy and what doesn't make people happy.

I think utilizing that quantitative and qualitative data and hearing from people is the greatest success we can have, and then sort of reflecting on it and producing public policy outcomes from that perspective backwards, rather than the other way around, which is the way we've been doing things, I think that would be considered a tremendous success from my perspective. We had something like 5000 bills last year. Only seven of them utilize the word happiness in them. Is that correct? I make up stats sometimes. Is that accurate?

So, yeah, we had 50,000 bills last year, and only one of them used the word happiness. It's a true stat. You can footnote me on that. But the fact that we're not focused on that very fundamental question is something that I think ought to be very disconcerting to a lot of us. And I told a story recently about teaching. When you teach, you often ask students, why are you doing what you're doing? Why are you studying this topic? Why are you interested in this?

And I think particularly in this country, there's sort of an embarrassment about vulnerability and honesty and even about sort of doing the right thing. Sometimes people will say, zero, I chose this major because it's easy, because my brother studied it, my sister studied it. And it's very rare when somebody says, I want to make the world a better place. I chose this major. I chose this profession because I want to make the world a better place. And I think I have always found that problematic.

I think people feel as though that's a silly thing to say. I would turn that around. I think it's silly to be concerned about anything other than making this world a better place. And I think studying happiness, not studying happiness is silly. I think not studying happiness, not focusing on what the purpose ultimately, our purpose as a species, our purpose as individuals, and certainly our purpose in this building, that's all we ought to be concerned about.

Because if we have everybody clothed, everybody housed, everybody has a job, and they're miserable, then we've failed at what we're trying to do. So if we don't reverse that and think about the happiness as a first principle rather than happiness as a last principle, then we are failing at the jobs that we do here in this building. So that is what I would consider a success.

A success is to have that conversation and to think about this, particularly from the standpoint, again, of qualitative and quantitative data that we have. And there's a lot out there, I think what would be considered a success, honestly, and I'll be very honest about this, would be for this to sort of devolve into sort of like new age sloppiness. There is a lot of data out there, a lot of hard data. Again, qualitative and quantitative data, and we need to rely on that data.

We need to rely on those statistics. We need to rely on what we know from psychology, from the social sciences and all of that. And I think, again, to devolve into sort of a secret language of the knowing is something that we can't do. And we so often fail, particularly in the past. I've seen that in my time in academia, for example. We need to not do that here, and I want to make sure that we do that again. I want to be data focused.

I want to be data driven, qualitative and quantitative data, focus on that data and make sure that we're approaching it from a very systematic standpoint. So that's my spiel. And now I'm going to ask my Members if they want to say anything. Lisa Calderon and Pilar Schiavo are here.

Sure. Thank you. So I'm really, really pleased to be here. And I was. Can you hear me now? Yeah. Okay. All right. So I'm really pleased to be here. And like I was saying, I was just fascinated at the whole subject matter, the topic of this Select Committee, because this is a very basic question. Right?

I mean, we all strive to be happy in our personal lives, but I think the work that we do here in this building also warrants maybe there should be a happiness component that we keep in our lens for all Californians and certainly in the policy work we do. So I'm really thrilled to be here. I'm trying not to say I'm happy to be here, but I am.

Thank you.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate the chair's leadership and vision to bring this Committee together. I was just talking to someone on the phone that I have to go sit on the happiness Committee, and they said, zero, that's a perfect Committee for you. I tend to be a pretty happy person, but I know that it really does evade a lot of people. And we have a crisis, especially amongst our youth, when it comes to mental health. And it's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking to see.

I was just talking to my daughter yesterday, and she was naming off of all of the children in her class who are suicidal or depressed. And I could not believe it. So it's a true crisis that we have on our hands right now. And I think that this is really getting to the heart of what that crisis is about. So I am happy to be a part of this Committee.

I really appreciate the focus on this, and I think that ultimately, at the end of the day, we need to be making people's lives better. That's what we're here for. And I appreciate the focus on ways that we can do that better. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Thanks to both of you. We'll have other colleagues coming in throughout the day, and we'll give them an opportunity to say something as well. So let's get started with our first panel, which will provide us an introduction to happiness as a subject. Our first panelist is the previously mentioned Roko Belic, who started this whole thing for me. He's an Academy Award nominated filmmaker.

In 2011, he co wrote, co produced and directed the award winning film Happiness Happy, focusing on happiness around the globe. Thank you for being here today.

Thank you for having me. I'm a filmmaker. I've made movies for about 30 years. I made movies about an amazing musician. I made movies about dreams. I made a movie about the Batmobile. But the movie that changed my life is a movie I made called happy. It was a study into the science of happiness. I didn't know there was a science of happiness. It just so happened that my friend asked the question, what really makes people happy?

At the time when positive psychology was beginning and we went to 14 countries around the world to discover what are the true causes of human happiness. Like Ms. Schiavo, I was born pretty happy. I figured you're either born looking on the bright side or not. I've known grumpy people my whole life. And I figured, this is kind of the lot you have. I didn't realize until I started making this film how much of happiness is actually within our control.

When I started making the film, a friend of mine asked me, she said, are you sure you should be making a movie about happiness because the world is suffering. There are kids in our communities who are going to bed hungry. There's crime in our neighborhoods, there's war. Should you really be focusing on happiness now? Isn't that a bit selfish? And it stopped me in my tracks.

And I thought she was making a very, very powerful point, because like Mr. Rendon, I also want to make the world a better place. And then I came across some research that changed the way that I think about happiness. The research essentially says that happy people are more likely to help a stranger in need. They're more likely to come up with a creative solution to a problem. If they're a student, they're a better student. If they're a teacher, they're a better teacher.

If they're an employee or an employer, they do a better job if they're happy. Happy people live healthier, more resilient and longer lives, and they're less likely to pollute or hurt my children or commit a crime. And I realize that everything that I care about, injustice, famine, war, all these things that I want to fix, that I want to help make better, are improved with increased happiness in the world. I asked Ed Diener, one of the leading researchers in positive psychology, the late Ed Wiener.

I said, you know, what's the key? There must be some sort of key. And he, you know, happiness can exist across all demographics, rich and poor, old and young, even healthy and sick. You can find happy people everywhere. He said, the one common thread amongst all happy people is that they have strong relationships. He said, you don't have to be the class clown or you don't have to have a million friends. You basically have to love someone and be loved by someone.

Happy people have more meaning in their life. They tend to experience a certain amount of play or novelty, different ratios for different people, but these are some tendencies. They tend to be grateful for what they have. And I started thinking, well, these are all intuitive. This is kind of what my grandma taught me. But at the same time, I had stopped playing for 12 years as an aspiring filmmaker. I hadn't surfed a single day in that 12 years.

I stopped hanging out with my friends, because as a worker in American workplace, you don't prioritize hanging out with friends that's not a responsible thing to do. You prioritize work. And it was only after learning about the importance of these things that I started to recalibrate my own life. Now I have children. The experience was so impactful to me.

We made a curriculum that goes along with the happy film that we're putting into schools around the country and around the world, because I want my kids to grow up building these habits for healthy and happy lives. And I want their peers to, too, because they're the ones that are going to create the world of the future. One of the questions I had making the film is, where have people gotten it right? Where is their systemic happiness? And a place like Okinawa popped up.

Happy people tend to be healthier and live longer, as I mentioned. And there are a lot of old people in Okinawa. There's actually a village there called the longevity village. People there know how to be happy and healthy and live long. And one of the things that I saw is the way that they support relationships within the community between generations. They have these traditions that bring toddlers and great great grandparents, even from unrelated families, together on a regular basis.

There's a marching band full of teenagers and young people who plays regularly and invites older people and younger people to come dance with them every Friday night. There's these sort of systemic solutions to disconnection, disenfranchisement. They're bringing people together in ways that were very inspiring to me. But actually, the place that I think holds the sort of gems for us to consider here is a place called Curitiba in Brazil. Now, Curitibais a landlocked, industrial polluted city that had basically nothing going for it.

There's no tropical beaches. There's no beautiful rainforest. It was an armpit of Brazil. It was polluted. And a young mayor named Jaime Lerner inherited the position. He was appointed, and within the first couple of days, the fishermen came to him, and they said, Jaime, we cannot feed our families because the bay is so polluted. We're catching more garbage in our fishing nets than fish.

So Mr. Lerner looked into it, and he discovered that for a few tens of millions of dollars, they could import some boats from Scandinavia and they could clean up the bay, and it might take a half a decade. This was a broke third world city. They had no money, and they couldn't afford the time that it would take to do that. And Jaime got an idea. He said, why don't you fishermen keep fishing?

Catch as much garbage as you can, and we'll pay you pound for pound what you would be paid if you had been catching fish. Within a year, they cleaned up the bay. The fish started coming back. And the experience brought the community together, not just the fishermen, but the people of Curitiba and the leadership, because they realized they could work hand in hand, find a creative solution to problem that essentially cost almost nothing and was a win win on all sides.

Curitiba is also on a floodplain like we are here in Sacramento. But unlike Sacramento, they could not afford a system of complex and expensive levees. So once again, Mr. Lerner and his team looked around. They said, what's another solution? And they realized that if they convert this floodplain into parks, if they plant enough trees, there would be a natural absorbing system for floods that would also increase public space, that would nurture relationships within the community. And they had a goal to plant a million trees.

But he didn't have the labor force, so he empowered the community, said, let's come out on the weekends. We'll buy donuts and coffee. Let's get together and do this. And it worked. And the community rallied together. Curitiba is a place with more public open space than almost any other city in the world. The reason I went to Curitiba is not because it's an industrial, polluted armpit of Brazil.

I went there because it was listed as one of the happiest cities in the world because of the work they did. These experiences brought their community together, gave them a place to play and meet and nurture their relationships, gave them some novelty and a sense of empowerment and meaning to where people believed in their communities for the first time. Jaime Lerner says that cities are not the problem. They're the solutions to the problems.

Because through cities and cooperation, we can do amazing things to nurture healthy, happy, resilient people and society. Happiness itself doesn't cost money, but it is up to us to choose to pursue it. Thank you very much.

How's this? I'm not sure if my colleagues have any questions, but I'll kick it off. You mentioned positive psychology, which is something that I've become familiar with through starting with you and your work. But can you explain to other folks what positive psychology is?

Essentially, for a thousand years, people had studied pathology g, depression and problems, psychological problems. They thought that studying happiness was impossible. And it wasn't until a few determined psychologists who said, no. There must be a way to study the other half of the spectrum started doing it roughly 35 years ago. Ed Diener is sort of known or acknowledged by many people to be the sort of godfather of this field. People recognize the value of it immediately.

And when I started making the film in 2005, there was three books that were written about happiness. Within a year or two, there were dozens. It's a relatively new field. But as you mentioned, Mr. Rendon, the data, that's what I was interested in. Everybody's had an opinion on happiness for 100,000 years.

But now we finally have data that's pointing the way to ways that are supporting the intuitive ideas that our grandparents told us and also supporting some counterintuitive ideas that go against the grain of our culture. I'm not sure if I answered the question adequately.

Yeah, you did, for sure. I appreciate that. You also mentioned the curriculum, which is. I worked in early childhood education for about 20 years. I'm always interested in that. What are you looking at? What does it look like and what age levels and those types of things. Yes.

So we have curriculum for grade schools and also high school college. So we have sort of two sets of curriculum because we realize this is making a movie can be entertaining and something to talk about with the family, but it can be extremely important for a kid's development, because at the fundamental level, it's about being aware of something that you just simply weren't aware of before. And the empowerment that people feel when they look into happiness is something that's not really in the vernacular.

It's not something we. Like I said, I kind of thought you were born grumpy. Or looking at the bright side, I thought those were the two options or somewhere in between. I didn't know how much was up to us. And the curriculum really helps empower children to recognize their own personal role and autonomy in choosing a path and choosing many paths, many decisions they make every single day that can lead to either a healthier and happier and more flourishing life, or the opposite.

Thanks. That's great. Yeah. And I think from that perspective, I've read a lot of Daniel Siegel and Mindset and Mindfulness, and to a large extent, I think it's a lot about what he calls awareness of awareness, which I think is incredibly important to virtually everything we do, from a work perspective to a family perspective and so on. I have one more question, and I want to ask my colleagues if they have questions as well. But we're a state government. We function at the 35,000 foot level.

What can we do, and also, what can we not do? How can we help to provide opportunities for happiness? And what can we do to stand in the way? What should we do to make sure we get out of the way?

These are excellent questions, and I feel like there's enough attention paid to the financial bedrock that is required. If you have no money, an extra $5,000 a year makes a huge difference. And those policies, I think, are things that people are focusing on. I believe that in the happiness side of things, simply having the conversation, starting the conversation, opening up the dialogue, that there are ways to be happy that have to do with values.

A researcher named Tim Kasser in Knox College in Illinois, he studied the difference between intrinsic goals and extrinsic goals. And people who prioritize money, power, fame, good looks, social status are less likely to be happy, whether they succeed or not, than somebody who prioritizes what he calls community feeling goals, wanting to make the world a better place, wanting to improve things, developing yourself as a person.

So these conversations don't necessarily cost money, but just being in the minds of people who are directing the conversations, I think, is the first step to give a voice to these ideas. And many of the panelists here have specific experience and have focused on some of these policy possibilities and giving them a platform to express those, whether it's in school or whether it's in government buildings like this, I think you're exactly on the right path, Mr. Rendon, and I appreciate that you're doing.

I've been, we've been joined by Assembly Members Bryan Waldron and McKinnor. I'm going to give them an opportunity in a Sec to say hello if they wish, but I believe Mr. Ramos has a question first.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. On the data that's being collected here in the State of California and districts that we represent, there's different bouts, like healthy bout where people are living healthier or longer lives. Is there data that's being collected to substantiate the happiness component, to maybe longevity of life or even economic pursuit?

Yes. If you mean is there data that correlates long life to happiness? Yes. I can't point to a specific study, but I can find it for you afterwards. And there is data, and maybe somebody else on the panel can point to that. In other words, happy people tend to live healthier. They're in the hospital less often, they get sick less often, and they actually live longer. If that answers your question, in terms of economics, you don't have to be extremely wealthy to be happy.

And if you're extremely poor, it doesn't mean you're unhappy. But there is a kind of a curve. It's not a straight line. Money to a very poor person, a little bit of money makes a huge difference. To a very wealthy person, makes very little difference. I'm not sure if I answered your question, but there is data about where that curve is, how much income is required, sort of for a base level.

And also, is there data in the early age of a person correlating with happiness, as far as how they're striving and tackling life's issues?

I don't have the answer to that question specifically. It's a good one.

No, it's great. I mean, that's why. Thank you, Mr. Chair, for putting us on this Select Committee. And I think once we find and we pull back that layer, we'll find that happiness is a correlation to early growth, to issues that we tackle. Right. And ultimately, the happiness component can lead to that long livelihood of a person. So I'm interested in seeing that data as this Committee continues to move forward.

Mr. Ramos, can I jump in? Sorry. You're bringing up a very important point, which is that essentially, there is no domain except two that I know of where happiness is not a win win on all sides. Happy people, again, healthier, they make more money, better relationships, all of these things are more productive, everything, if you're an air traffic controller, because happiness and optimism go hand in hand. Happy people tend to be a little optimistic.

You don't want the air traffic controller to say, oh, don't worry about it, they'll be fine. They won't hit. So there's a couple of tiny domains, but basically happiness, I think, and that's across age boundaries, I think, from start to finish, if you are happy, you will flourish and thrive more likely than if you are unhappy, just to support what you're getting at. Mr. Ramos, thank you so much.

Thank you so much. And thank you for your work. I haven't seen the film yet, but now I want to see it, and I also want to bring the curriculum into my daughter's class. As I mentioned, I think your point about intentionality is really important. And thinking about at the government level, how can we support policies that bring people together, like the example of bringing toddlers and seniors together.

Things that can be incentivized, I think, are opportunities for us to really think about that. One of the biggest stresses I know we don't talk about specific policies here, but I do have a homework Bill I'm working on. And what I've been finding in the research is that the top three stressor in kids lives is homework. And often, number one, and there's not a lot of intentionality around things like that. I'm moving something just to have school districts be intentional, consider the impacts in the research.

And part of it, I think, is really having that time to connect in the evening, right. For kids, they're asked to do three different shifts. They go to school and then they go to after school, and then they come home and they sit at a table and they do homework all night. And we're not asking anyone to do that. And then we're wondering why our kids are so stressed out. And it's stressful for the whole family because we don't have time to connect with our kids.

They don't have time for things that bring them joy, playing with friends, extracurricular activities, teams that they can be a part of. And so I think making sure that in our policy making, we're thoughtful about Creating space for that, that downtime has value.

It's not just wasted time, that playtime has value for kids and that family time PDF, I just learned this PDF, playtime, downtime and family time. But all of those things have value. And I appreciate the point that you're making about the ripple effects of happiness, right? You don't have kids walking into schools with guns to shoot people if they're happy.

And there's so many ripple effects when you really tackle happiness and this disconnection, crisis of disconnection that we see in our communities right now. So I don't know if there's any kind of other systematic shifts or policies that you saw and examples around the world when you were doing this, but I would love to hear them if there were others.

Well, I think you're pointing to the solution directly, which is to be aware that a child's schedule is not just in the service of them getting into a prestigious college, but also in the service of their well being, just being aware of that and then asking the appropriate questions to figure out how to optimize. That, I think is the center point of where we find a solution.

I have a 12 year old daughter and a nine year old son, and they also come home with stories about kids who are depressed and unhappy. And we don't even really have a language to deal with that. In just a couple of generations, that's already a very different thing.

I didn't experience that growing up at the same know, I grew up in Chicago and I don't know how you feel in California, but to me it's always been a place that's creative and brave and forward thinking and open to new ideas. And that's the kind of stance I think we need to really tackle this epidemic of depression and mental illness that we're seeing. And I think this room is full of people well meaning.

I think you're doing the right thing by asking these questions and then putting those questions in front of the educators who are actually creating those policies and the homework policies. And my daughter also, she was upset that she didn't have straight a pluses. She's very self motivated. But the point is she's stressed with homework and there's probably a balance that would serve her whole being a little bit better.

Thank you. Any more questions for Mr. Belic? Great. Thank you so much for being here, but also for your film, which really started this whole thing 12 years ago.

Very welcome. And this is for your child.

Oh, awesome. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Thank you. I appreciate it. We're going to go on to our next panelists. Before we do, I want to allow Mr. Bryan, Ms. McKinnor and Ms. Waldron, in alphabetical order to see if they have any comments they'd like to say. And thank all three of you for being here.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for you all coming and providing your expert testimony today. I think at first thought of this Committee, I know some folks are what does happiness matter in policy outcomes? And I think that's why a Select Committee like this is intriguing and interesting and important. We think about outcomes all the time in this building. I have one colleague who told me the other day their job is to lessen human suffering.

I think often we define our job as improving the conditions of life or the quality of life for people and thinking about how to operationalize the meaning of the work that we do. Why not include or at least attempt to understand how happiness can be one of those outcome variables, or potentially even one of the foundational variables by which those other outcomes achieve greater success. And so very interested to hear this conversation. Thank you, Mr. Chair, for starting this Committee and grateful to be here with you all.

Thank you, Mr. Bryan. Ms. McKinnor.

Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is very interesting. I didn't really know what to expect, but I am happy. So I wanted to come in where we were going to be talking about happiness and policy. But I think for us, the Members, this is a pretty stressful job. And I think as we start to create policy, as we start to do policy to make people's lives happier, we ourselves have to make sure that we're not in depression and we're in the right space.

And I think that how we do that is what you guys are talking about, making sure that we're doing policy for people, making sure that we're caring about our neighbors, making sure that our policy is uplifting folks and not chasing titles or not chasing power, because I think that's very stressful in our job. So I'm so glad to be here. Thank you for the work that you're doing.

Thank you, Ms. McKinnor, Ms. Waldron.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I was excited to be part of this Committee, having served 12 years. We always think about how can we help people. The goal should be helping people improve their lives, save lives in many ways. I've served on Health Committee for a number of years, and we're very much into quality of life issues, especially for health and health access. We're finding how much childhood traumas affect people as they grow into adulthood in so many ways.

And I work in the criminal justice space and I see people who have had experiences in their youth that have led them into the cycle of recidivism, that they're know we're working on clean environments. I grew up in the South Bronx. My parents were immigrants. To me, when the soot, sometimes the soot would come out of the incinerators of the apartment buildings, the size of newspapers and the air. I go outside and that's what I thought fresh air was.

I mean, I didn't know until we moved from there to Queens. But as a kid, you live in it and you don't realize what you're living in. Concrete, no grass, things like that. Our schools never had grass. Just the simple things of life can bring so much more joy. Just a hug, knowing that you're loved. And that's what I see when I visit prisons. People there, they just never knew what love was or any kind of empathy or compassion.

How do we open up opportunities to people so that they can access those things, health, safety, recreation, leisure time, know we as legislators. As Ms. Mckinnor said, we work on public policy, what should be our goal of public policy, and it really is for the health and prosperity of our residents, for positive outcomes, for quality of life. And if we're not achieving that in our policies, then we're failing. So I think California has a great ability to lead the way. And I thank you so much, Mr. Chairman, for putting this Committee together.

Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Waldron. And thank you, Roko. Appreciate it. Our next panelist is Emiliana Simon-Thomas, the Science Director at the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley and a leading expert on the science of connection and compassion. Dr. Simon-Thomas, thank you for being with us today.

Thank you so much for the invitation. I'm honored to be here and happy to share the perspective of the greater good science center. At the greater good, we track published scientific research on all things happiness related. I'll honor that. Sometimes it's called well being. Sometimes it's called flourishing. Sometimes it's called thriving. Sometimes it's called subjective well being. The good life. And the list goes on.

We turn findings into insights and programs and resources that people can use to improve their own lives and to contribute in beneficial ways to their communities and to society and aspirationally to the greater good. So I always like to start with why happiness? And recognize, and I think Roko also alluded to this, that humans have had a timeless interest in happiness. And whenever people are asked questions like, what's the meaning of life? Or what do you want for your children? Almost everybody spontaneously mentions happiness.

And here in the US, we have a codified, inalienable right to pursue it and defend it. So that said, there's not a one size fits all definition of happiness right? Now that all scholars use most. Think about it in a way that aligns with a definition from Sonja Lubomirsky, who wrote the How of Happiness, another early pioneer in happiness science. She defines it as the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well being combined with a sense that one's life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.

And this definition posits happiness as a broad umbrella like general characteristic of life that's different than a specific, momentary emotional experience. And it's an important distinction. This definition encompasses several long held ideas about what it means to be happy, to be lucky for a long time, perhaps happenstance happy coincidence. Happiness was about the configuration of the stars when you were born, living according to virtue, right?

That's one way that people define happiness, enjoying oneself I think, for better or for worse, that's probably the most popularly accessible way of thinking about happiness. It's what the advertising powers that be tell us. If we have stuff, if we get entertained, we'll be happy. And then belonging or playing a harmonious role in a mutually supportive community. One of the newer emerging ideas from happiness science is that happiness is inherently shared.

Most research to date measures happiness at the individual level, but increasingly studies are considering how it works in social contexts. For example, there was a study, well, for example, does my happiness depend on the happiness of people around me? A recent study of University students took advantage of the fact that University students get randomly assigned to different dormitory communities. And this study showed that the social microclimate that was more empathetic and happier predicted individual happiness above and beyond characteristics like achievement or socioeconomic privilege or personality.

There's another older study which showed that happiness spreads in communities. And there's this wonderful chart where all the yellow symbols are kind of lumped together in neighborhood clusters, and those are people who are happier. And the illusion is that the happiness is there and it spreads and it grows over time in this sort of generative way. As Roko alluded to, there's a number of well documented advantages to happiness, to greater happiness, both at the individual level and at the group level.

Better health, longevity, better academic and professional success closer, longer lasting social bonds, creativity, innovation, institutional trust, and progress towards goals that serve the common interest. Several factors have been shown to impact happiness, from genetic predisposition to life stress to how you spend your time and resources. And based on this, people often ask, well, is it even possible to change happiness? Right?

And that was kind of Roko's point. And the answer is yes. In part, while genes and irreversible life history shed some light on why one person's default happiness is different from another's, and external circumstances, barring extreme disadvantage, also explain a bit of this variance. Our everyday experiences and behaviors can influence happiness much more than most people tend to assume. For example, while desirable, in addition to deeply unpleasant life events tend not to impact happiness in lasting ways.

Because we're biologically equipped to acclimate to pleasure and recover from pain, there are things we can do intentionally, exercises and activities that we practice regularly that can sustainably increase happiness in life. The experiences and behaviors that foster happiness generally fall into three categories, connection enhancing mutually supportive relationships with others through generosity, compassion, and reconciliation. Number two, positivity, which is a healthy aptitude for experiencing uplifting states like amusement and awe and gratitude. Prioritizing time and space for these and having an optimistic, hopeful outlook.

And then third is resilience, and this is authenticity and grace in the face of hardship, recovering from distress with courage and ease, and finding ways to learn and grow from difficult times. The key opportunities that I see for advancing happiness are conducting more rigorous experimental research on happiness promoting interventions, ones that sample more diverse and representative populations, and that control for preexisting attitudes and expectations. We'd also benefit from a deeper examination of the biological processes and structures that support and uphold happiness.

This would give us a mechanistic insight into why greater happiness makes us healthier and inform new approaches to fostering happiness. And then finally, more work on the basis and advantages of group level happiness. That is, systemically or systematically measuring it over time, discovering and characterizing the emergent benefits. And this is beyond the mean or sum of happiness levels of the individuals in said groups. Maybe it's the ripple effects that Roko is alluding to, and then documenting or discovering effective methods for improving group level happiness. Thank you so much for your attention.

Thank you. Very helpful. Obviously, encourage my colleagues to ask any questions they have. Earlier I talked about the need to be data driven. Just from your comments, it sounds as though the center borrows both from the natural and social sciences. Can you kind of speak to that? I mean, you talk a little bit about predisposition, which obviously, I think, says something about studies you have in the natural sciences, and then you talk a lot about connection, which is obviously sociology and other type group psychology. But I'm interested in that.

I mentioned Daniel Siegel earlier, who talks a lot about the human brain. So I'm interested in that dichotomy, which is a scientific dichotomy, but included in every individual's makeup in a unified way.

Yeah, I mean, when I was in college, I took a class that was called Nature Versus Nurture. And the assumption was that you had certain things that were your genes and there was nothing you could do about it, and the other things were all your parent's fault. And now we know that the body doesn't work that way, and epigenetic processes are part of our mental life and part of how we develop as humans.

And so there are certain kind of genetic predispositions or gene systems that are implicated in biological processes that might make someone more readily able to experience positive emotion or might make them more predisposed towards anxiety. And we know that early life experiences, what happens in your childhood, actually has an effect on how your genes express in such a way that maybe you would end up less happy because of some adversity or trauma.

Despite the genetic profile that you might have had from the time that you were born, there are pathways in the brain that have genetic underpinnings that are implicated in a person's happiness level. Whether your reward systems that speak in the language of dopamine, or your affiliative system that speak in the language of oxytocin, or your kind of ease and contentment mood state, which is usually talked about in the context of serotonin.

All of these are like things the body has that are affected by your day to day experience. Your brain is just making associations all day long with what you see, how you act, and the consequence of that. And it turns out our intentional choices to put ourselves in circumstances where we might experience one particular thing over another. For example, an awe moment immersed in nature. Can be a really powerful way to reduce our blood pressure.

Feel more a greater sense of common humanity with another person, and increase our vagal tone. So these systems are all very intertwined, and it's really important to gather the data that helps us really carefully document those dynamics and relationships.

Thank you. That's great. And it reminds me that there's different types of connections, there's social connections, but there's also, in Buddhism, they talk a lot about a sense of immediacy. Right. And a sense of connection to the moment, which I think is really important. And we can be very distracted at times. And I think that makes it difficult. I believe Mr. Bryan has a question.

Yeah, no, I think the Chairs raised an interesting point. And so I view with kind of the nature nurture conversation as it relates to having this. Obviously, we look for things like the crime gene. Back in the day I was adopted as a child, I know my adoptive parents were wondering, were they the major driving influence on how I would turn out? Or was I born a certain way that they were going to have to parent? And whether it's a mixture of both of those.

I'm interested in the happiness conversation, especially when you're talking about rigorous study. We know hierarchical stress and, like, generational trauma, has played a role in health outcomes and life expectancies and things that we don't fully understand. We just know black people die sooner, and we suspect it has a correlation with enslavement and captivity and generational subjugation. I'm wondering if does that, in the happiness literature, suggest that there are some groups that have a predisposition to being less happy because of those same historical contexts?

Or that the mechanisms by which you can achieve greater happiness also play with that kind of historical weight? Or is it each person's own experiences in their lifetime are what drive positive or negative happiness outcomes?

That's such a good question, and I like to think about it from a medical lens. So while there are certain vulnerabilities that people can have that are associated with their cultural legacy, that are associated with the geographic origins of their identity, they're often less prominent than differences between one individual and the person sitting next to them. The same question often gets asked about sex, gender. Are they more likely to be happy than men?

Usually, any big groupwise differences are underwhelming compared to the things that are apparent in an individual's specific experience and their biological melio.

So. I would be highly skeptical of any argument that any kind of person, based on their ethnic or identity, would have any less eligibility for happiness than anyone else, despite the presence or absence of decades or centuries of oppression and adversity. And that's not to diminish the ways that those circumstances might make someone more vulnerable to a certain kind of stress response or a certain kind of vigilance to threat. I just think that those two things coexist.

You can have a kind of stressful life or a physiological melee that is reactive, but also be a very happy person. Right. I don't want to limit happiness in the traditional kind of maslow, hierarchy way, where you only get to it if all the other needs are met. There are people who are very underprivileged, who live very simple lives, who put us to shame in terms of their capacity to find joy and happiness in their overall life.

I mean, I think in many ways, the Brazilian city is an example. Here's a place where life was hard, but they figured out, in some ways, to come together to make progress, to change things in a way that was serving common interests, and that really led to them scoring really high on some measure of happiness.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Bryan. The conversation reminds me, going back to your point about resilience, too, which could be part of that overall equation, I think. Great. Any more questions? Thank you very much. We're going to go to the next panelist. Before I do, I want to see if we've been joined by Ms. Ortega. I want to see if she had anything she wanted to say. Ms. Ortega is good. All right. Going to go to. My notes are a mess here. We're going here. Okay.

Thank you, Emiliana. Our next panelist is John Helliwell, economist and founding editor of the World Happiness Report, now in its 11th year of publication. He is joining us remotely from Vancouver. Dr. Helliwell, thank you for joining us today.

Yeah, you can go ahead and get started. Thank you very much.

The World Happiness Report, for those of you who don't know about it, had its origins in a United Nations high level meeting in 2012 called pursuant to the 2011 resolution by the prime minister of Bhutan before the General Assembly to make happiness and well being a focus for governments to take seriously in designing their policies in the process.

In meetings in Bhutan prior to that April 2012 meeting, it was decided that it would be important to build for that meeting a summary of the available science and data about well being around the world. And that was gathered together in the first World Happiness report. It apparently fed quite a need and interest in these data because there is a standard line that if you treasure it, you measure it, and if you measure it, you treasure it.

It works both ways, and in the absence of the data, it's hard to move beyond the instincts into the action. And so I think that's part of the reason why both individuals and organizations and governments around the world have paid a lot of attention and why we've acquired more and more spread in terms of the governments and people who are interested. And the science, as your previous speakers have said, is growing fantastically.

So our purpose is every year to try and update our review of the science, often through special chapters. We've had special chapters on immigration and the happiness of immigrants, cities versus countries, the genetic basis of happiness. This year, the focus of the report, coming out on March 20, is on happiness at different ages and in different generations all over the world, we're used to ranking happiness. And for us, picking up on what others have told you is really asking people to answer Aristotle's question.

He said, the way you judge a good life is to ask person in a reflective moment to think about their life. And so that's done through the advantage of having the Gallup world poll, which is now almost 20 years old, and asks a question around the world, asking people to think of their life as possible, life as a 10 and the worst as a zero, how would they rate their lives today? And then we and others try and figure out what underlies good lives.

Of course, the basic science of well being is looking at all kinds of experimental context and subpopulation context. When I'm speaking to governments, as I am now, first of all, I congratulate them for thinking about these things, because it's very common when you speak to governmental or intergovernmental or global institutions, for people to say, that's great. And then tomorrow they go back to doing what they were doing yesterday. Moving beyond the interest into the action is what's really important.

I'd like to spend a couple of minutes giving some specific advice, if you like. I'm happy to talk about any of these issues we're coming up with, with different ages. A couple of thoughts were spurred by what I've heard from your other panelists. One was the question of toddlers and seniors, or that may have been one of your Committee Members rather than the other panelists.

But it's certainly true, and there's a key role for governments in that, because this illustrates a more General problem with getting a move towards enabling people to build happier lives for others and for themselves, is there's a climate of risk reduction. So almost every organization I'm in, and I'm sure it's true, in your departments, compared to 20 years ago, they all have risk committees. They're all designed to develop procedures and methods and checklists for everything in order to minimize risks.

Well, that typically involves closing doors, when what you want is open doors. Let me give you a specific example. There's a project in Saskatoon that brings together a grade six class for a whole year, puts it into an elder care facility. We've been now studying that experiment for more than four years. It's been going for longer than that.

And it's quite apparent from the detailed investigations of the lives of the students, their teachers, the elders, the families of the students, the people who simply work in that environment, that everybody's life is improved. Is it terribly expensive? No, it's just a class. Class and the teacher move into a space that's no bigger than or smaller than the space they would have had in the school, it's just a different way of thinking of things. It's using the elders to teach the youngers.

It's using the youngers to teach the elders. And I'm sure your own experiences in families and out would allow you to see. Well, of course, it's a no brainer. Why aren't we doing it everywhere? Well, the reason why is very hard to convince a school board who's trying to keep their kids safe and not let them interact with people. Elder care facilities, they don't want the people inside to go out.

They don't want people outside to come in, so they lock them up and they die in boredom in front of a television set. And so if you allow doors to stay closed rather than force them open so that good things can happen, but it's very difficult to do because we've tried it in a number of venues, and it doesn't take many people to shut down innovation. It takes a whole community or a whole confluence of things to start one.

So in a state government or other governments, these cross silo cooperations are terribly important. Imagine starting from a ministerial base. You have to get the education departments and the elder care people responsible for that all on the same page and say, hey, wait a minute. We think we're keeping people safe by having our own silos and looking after our own people with our own specialists. Why don't we treat the students as staff in the elder care facility and the elders as teachers of the young?

This is where you get the kind of social connections we're talking about in a really powerful way. I'll take one more example that I heard of the air traffic controllers. You say some occupations they don't want to be. You don't want them too happy. In fact, I think the evidence, and I've got an example or two, is quite strong, that, in fact, you do want them happy, especially in high stress occupations, because where that administrative structures are flat and friendly means flat and flat means friendly.

Typically with these structures, people are more open at offering advice to their colleagues. They're having more fun with their colleagues during the working day. They're less stressed, they're more relaxed, and in fact, they're more observant rather than less. I can give you two examples of that. One is in experiments that were done on stopping bad things happening around the operating table. And the key thing, it turned out in the procedures they adopted, which are more like pilots checklists.

Before the operations, the most important thing was the part where people pulled down their masks, introduced themselves to the colleagues, and the whole car structure flattened. The lowliest person rank in the room was capable of speaking to the others on a no threat basis, and that rate of accidents dropped very considerably. Okay, those are examples, quite specific ones, about what governments can do. So you talked about high level governments and Low level governments.

I agree with the previous speakers that the kinds of things that need doing are most easily and productively started at a very low level. Higher level governments can come in and help ensure the lower level communities that somebody's watching their back.

If you ask people in specific terms why their library isn't open in the evening for everybody to use, why all these public buildings are not made available for wider public use, why there aren't more gathering places, more green spaces that are shared, they say someone will have an accident, we will get sued. And that is often a stopper right there. And so it's possible then for somebody at a higher level of government to say, you go ahead and experiment.

If somebody tries to sue you, send them to us. We've got the backstop. There was a program on art shows. Nobody was taking these very valuable paintings around the world because of the insurance costs, were exorbitant. So the Canadian government brought in a system where they said, we'll insure those paintings for you. Self insurer. They didn't even go about getting premiums.

And in fact, they made possible art shows of wonderful art coming from all around the world in a way that helped everybody, and it ended up costing essentially nothing because these risks were not as great as people thought they were. And it's just a question of somebody saying, I'll stand behind you and help you. And of course, that makes the governments feel better about what they're doing. On one final question that I can add to what you've heard before about trauma and its consequences.

Others in this year's report, we're focusing on, as I mentioned, happiness at different ages. And one of the things we've discovered, and it's got a good side and a bad side, is that in countries that have had severe trauma and death within living memory, and there's both eastern and western Europe there. But I'm going to focus specifically on the countries of the former Yugoslavia. When you can remember what was going on in the 1990s, most countries have difference of happiness in ages.

One of the sets of countries where there's the most extreme difference between the happiness of the young being much higher than the happiness of the older in those countries where those people who actually live through it are still bearing important scars. The positive thing about it is that their children are not.

And so that the intergenerational effect, even of circumstances which are as terrible as those were, in fact, within a generation, and it's even Shorter in some of these places, it's turned around another example, eastern western Europe, that people under 30 were not even born when the wall fell. And there was a big gap in happiness between the countries of western Europe and those of the former Soviet Union that became central and eastern Europe. And the happiness gap has been steadily narrowing for the last 20 years.

But once again, it's the young who are at the highest happy levels and people who still have the shadow of the old world and its pains living with them, so that now the under 30s are equally as happy in western and eastern Europe, even though there's a full point on the 10.0 scale lower for the older population. So I think that's telling us that, yes, happiness can be terribly damaged by bad events and bad things happening, but societies can grow and learn the lessons.

One more thing, and I think then I'll stop for questions, because I have a tendency to keep telling stories forever, that there's a puzzle about happiness in old age. There's kind of a U shape often. And people then ask, and we are asking a lot in this year's report. We've done it before as well. Why is it that people, as they get older, are getting happier? Because we know that subjective health is a strong determinant of happiness. It's getting worse on a steady decline throughout life.

The importance people attached to it is actually growing. With age, we find and social connections which we know are absolutely fundamental. The actual amount of leading that goes on with others by people in the older age groups is less than among the youngers, but yet they're happier. And you say, how could that be?

And the answer is that one of the things that makes everybody talk about the negatives and focus on them is something that Ray Bowmeister, a very eminent psychologist, spent a lot of time looking at called the negativity bias, that people are hardwired to pay attention to bad things, to pay attention to possible dangers, and to actually think about them more and react to them more.

And that had a much greater relevance for life when being attacked by a snake was more important than living in a larger community. Nowadays, there's much more benefit to be gained by thinking better of others. And it turns out that somewhere along midlife or earlier, if you're lucky, there's something called a positivity effect.

So first, it's just simply reacting to the negativity effect, but it allows you to recognize the negatives, to learn from them, but put them in a drawer, don't let them hang over your head. And the positive things, to bring them out, to polish them, and to look for more ways of doing it. It also leads people to be more trusting and open. Well, you could imagine how that hit departments of gerontology and elder care.

They're saying, oh, my goodness, there are all these scams going on on the Internet, and the old people don't all have all the marbles they used to have, and they're not as tech savvy. They're just going to be minced meat for the scammers.

And that's become a big policy issue of protecting them and somebody wisely enough, who was a researcher in the mold of the greater positivity effect that you get as you learn about life and learn what it is to be more positive and learn the benefits of being more positive, that they said, maybe this leads people to be too optimistic about others and to be subject to scams, and that's something we have to protect them against.

Well, these very wise researchers, and this is very recent, because the need for this only has arisen in the last half dozen years. They said, well, we're going to set up a scamming experiment, and we're going to run it samples of old people and young people and put them through exactly the same risk, the same telephone calls, the same email exchanges, and see what happens. Now within age groups, they indeed find that the people with less mental acuity were more likely to be scammed.

The people who had less tech savviness were more likely to be scammed. But even though that's true, and that both of those are weaker in the older age groups than the younger ones, the older age groups were less likely to be scammed than the younger ones. And so what's going on here? And it gets back to the question about can you be too optimistic? And it's just too accepting of others? What's going on in this positivity effect? It's wise positivity that people are learning.

It isn't that they simply ignore risk. Getting back to the air traffic controllers, you pay attention to the risk, but you don't magnify it out of proportion and you look for ways to deal with it. So these elder people in these scamming experiments, they were a little more skeptical about what they heard. They wanted to look at the underpinnings of it before they went any further. And so they were more open in General.

But it didn't mean they were just saying, I'll accept anything, what me worry? They were wiser about allocation of their trust and well being. So if you have that wiser openness, then you won't get in trouble and you will discover a happy life. Well, of course, there are lessons in that for all of us. Might be nicer, I think, if I open for you to ask questions, so I don't talk too long.

Thank you, Mr. Helliwell. I appreciate that. If our Committee Members have any questions, I have one question. I appreciate that you talked about sort of cross government and how important that is. And in your comments, I was thinking about the extent to which, like urban planning, for example, can very much have an impact on isolation and what we do with our parks and what we do with schools. And then I immediately thought, well, we don't do any of that as a state government.

So obviously it does require different levels of government being involved with one another. You use the example of Canada with respect to art and art insurance. There are other governments that you're aware of that seem to do cross governmental cooperation well in a way that helps with these outcomes.

It's a very good point. As you well know, the class leaders in the world, assessments of happiness in terms of people's valuations, their lives as a whole, are the nordic countries. And in my discussions on specific questions like this with nordic governments and policymakers, there is a tendency to be much more open to what we call cross silo cooperation. In other words, not going at it as a specialist, but drawing in people from other disciplines.

The Finnish government, which, as you know, had the best education system by the PISA tests for a long time. They were among the first education departments that said, this isn't all about grades in math and science and language. This is about preparing people for a world in which they're to be productive, happy citizens. And we should look at those aspects of education very seriously. Well, that involves you going outside the regular notion of curriculum success.

So even though they were leaders at the game that was being played, they said, we're not sure this is the most important game we have to broaden. So I was impressed by their willingness to do this. I've seen evidence at the community level for this kind of thing to happen. There were a number of experiments in Tijuana, for example, which was the murder capital of the world.

And then they brought in people from the different disciplines into that community and said, everyone sat down and said, what can we do to make our communities happier, safer places? And you could once just getting together and talking where the people are coming from, different disciplines with different powers, that they're then cooperating, not the other way around.

There's something that came out of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, just by coincidence, in the same province as the other thing I mentioned, where they called it a hub model, where they were having communities where 90% of the police calls and accident calls and family disturbance calls were coming from some communities. So they essentially brought together all the people who end up being called, as well as the people in the communities who are calling and saying, what can we do to make a more unified set of services?

So we've got things there for people when they want them, when they need them, to stop things getting into a crisis situation. So that gives the kind of engagement. You heard from the Curitiba example before from Roko that it's getting the people in the community working together with the people whose job it is to help them provide those services.

So it was the first responders, it was police, it was people looking after unemployment, social support, social programs, education, and a number of the health services, as well as local community people. And it was a small enough level that they actually, high enough level that they had the buy in from their home department. So they were free to actually deliver on promises, but yet it was a low enough level they could actually meet together personally and do it. And then, of course, once you do that and it works, then you are lighting a streetlight for others to look through or to learn from.

Thank you, Dr. Helliwell. Any other questions from our Members? Thank you very much, Dr. Helliwell. Appreciate it. We're going to go to our next panelist, old friend, Mark Baldassare, a Statewide Survey Director and Miller chair in Public Policy at PPIC. Mr. Baldassare has research to share with us on trends on happiness and satisfaction in California. Good to see you again, Mark. Been a while.

So when Katie sent me the invitation, I was asked to make a presentation that was roughly five minutes. So I'm going to try to be roughly five minutes or less in the interest of time. And on our PPIC website today is the testimony if you want to read.

It, which will be my comments. And the headline was, most Californians are pretty happy, but a growing share are not too happy. So I'm kind of giving it away right there in terms of this. But first of all, I'm pleased to be speaking with this Committee today and that you're taking on this issue. I've been analyzing local, state and national polling on happiness and quality of life throughout my academic and professional career.

And when I launched the PPIC statewide survey in 1998, we included a frequently asked question on happiness from the national survey, the General Social Survey. And we recently repeated that question and a number of quality of life items for an update on my book, which was on the issue of California's changing social and economic and political landscape. I just want to summarize some of the findings for you so you get a sense as policymakers where Californians are on happiness today.

So keeping in mind that we talked to adult Californians 18 and older in our polling in a September PPIC statewide survey, when people were asked, taken altogether, how would you say things are these days? That's the national question often asked, 58% said they're pretty happy, 16% said they're Very happy, and 26% said they're not too happy.

Majorities across age, gender, partisan, racial ethnic groups. State regions report being pretty happy, but fewer than one in five in these subgroups say they are very happy. How did these California results compare with the national findings? The most recent General social survey in 2022 found similar number of Americans saying.

That they're pretty happy, 55% somewhat more. Saying that they're very happy, 25% somewhat fewer saying that they're not happy, 20% in the national findings. I should point out there was a pretty significant decline in happiness, if you look at the polling in 2018, 2000 and 2222, and many people attribute that.

To the pandemic, and we'll find out whether or not we see a recurrence of that. But I think this may be the first time we've mentioned the pandemic here, but I want to just point that out. Okay, so the decline in happiness in the US coincides with what we've seen in California, decline in happiness despite a fairly stable core of people who say that they're pretty happy as adults. In fact, most adults in the three times we've asked this question say they're pretty happy.

Fewer Californians today are saying that they're very happy. The number went from 28% down to 16%, saying they're very happy today. And more people are saying that they're not too happy. The number of not too happy went from 13% the first time we asked the question to 26% today. So that's roughly a doubling. But really important in my view, as looking at the polling, is that there are specific demographic groups in California who are more likely to say that they're.

Not too happy today, 18 to 34 year olds, 30% of them, said they're not too happy. Renters, 32% those with a high school education or less, 33% those with annual household incomes of 40,000 or less, 39%. So those were the groups that expressed today, that they were the most likely to be not too happy.

And since the original time we asked it in 1998, the share who say they're not too happy increased by large margins, particularly among 18 to 34 year olds, where it went from 10% to 30% in our latest polling, and those with incomes under 40,000 went from 18% to 39%. So roughly doubling in that case. Why these downward trends? Our survey offers a glimpse at some key factors. We find that happiness is aligned with specific quality of life ratings, in particular jobs, leisure, and housing.

In our polling, we also looked at personal finance. But the biggest changes that we've seen over time have been in satisfaction with jobs, which went from 52% saying that they were very satisfied in our first polling to 31% today. Leisure, though, too, what people are doing when they're not working, 47% to 31%. And housing, their satisfaction with housing also went down. Interesting. Those things were more relevant than satisfaction with household finances.

And once again, in these specific ratings, it was younger adults and lower income residents who've lost the most ground. 18 to 34 year olds saw the greatest decline in satisfaction with jobs, going from 37 to 18, with leisure going from 49 to 29, but also with housing, going from 43 to 32. And similarly, among those with lower incomes, we saw declines, double digit declines, in each category for jobs, for leisure, and for housing. So I only have five minutes.

So there are many other factors that could contribute to happiness. You heard a lot about it today in the discussion so far, and I'm certain we'll hear some more from our remaining speaker. Satisfaction with marriage, family, friends, neighbors, local civic life, among other things, can lead to personal happiness. Ratings of parks, schools, police, streets and roads, local air and water quality may also matter.

These are all things that obviously in your purview, and residents perceptions of their physical and mental health and specific indicators of their economic well being can also have profound consequences on happiness.

At this point, I'm not going to provide solutions on happiness and public policy outcomes, but I'm going to recommend that you pay special attention to younger adults and lower income residents in California based upon our results, and look in more detail at what kinds of policies related to jobs, leisure, and housing can have impacts on quality of life for these residents.

In closing, we still don't know how much the decline in happiness in the US and in California is related to the pandemic, or whether it has roots in deeper political, social, or economic issues. And for this reason, we plan to ask about happiness again in our polling right after the November 2024 election. So stay tuned for more results from PPIC. Thank you.

Thanks, Mark. Good to see you again. Mr. Bryan's question.

You knew I would. I'm curious. 18 to 34 poor folks, renters, are these proxies for each other? Are there compounding effects between those? Do we see any kind of mutual exclusivity there? And then I guess you also said there were majorities of people who feel happy across other subgroups, like race. So, like black and Latino populations don't appear to be proxies for younger or poorer, or more likely to be renters or I'm not quite understanding how all those things speak to each other.

Well, so far as we can tell, there is some combination of factors between age and income and education. I looked real hard for differences across race and ethnicity and gender and didn't see them as much as we did in those categories. But there is some compounding, and especially.

When you think about the compounding of race, of income and renting and age, especially in California today, and you think about some of the other findings that. We're seeing in terms of mental health stress, particularly in younger adults today. And I just want to again say that we just don't know about children. We didn't do polling on children, but this gives you a sense of where adults are and where some of the challenges lie today. But more research is needed for sure.

Thank you. Any other questions? Thank you, Mark. Great seeing you again. Our final presenter for our first panel is Reverend Rajeev Rambob. Reverend Rambob is a minister of the United Church of Christ, and he's here today to talk to us about the intersection of happiness and spirituality. Reverend Rambod, thank you for being here.

Welcome. It's an honor to be with you. Thank you for the invitation. I am Reverend Rajeev Rambob. The first 14 years of my career were in K-12 education as a classroom teacher and site administrator. Next, I ventured into nonprofit work, primarily homeless services, and at a community action agency, an antipoverty entity that was born out of President Johnson's war on poverty. I was recently pastor at Parkside Community Church, located 4.7 miles south of where we're gathered now.

Parkside is a vibrant, progressive, social justice Christian community, and as of a few months ago, I have returned to the classroom. I now teach fourth grade at Pony Express Elementary School, just a little further south. This moment is surreal, not because a Select Committee on happiness and public policy outcomes isn't necessary, but surreal, as you eloquently described Mr. Rendon in your opening remarks. In settings like this, we've done it backwards for all too long.

And as someone who's been on the front lines of public service to the most strained individuals in our society, I can attest that we have gotten it backwards more often than not. And we as a society are not very good at considering our well being or our health or healing in the most foundational and comprehensive sense, because we have managed to force ourselves at every turn to monetize and commodify our humanity, to consider our comforts, the fullest measure of success when a disaster strikes.

And the news report shares the injury and death toll and flashes images of destruction. Many wonder, when is the reporter going to talk about the financial cost, the dollar damage estimate? How and why have we allowed it to become commonplace, to put a price tag on tragedy, when the preceding sentence fragments included injury and death of human beings? The more I've wondered about this, the more it seems the answer is money is the measure we value most.

Adequate nourishment, clean water, navigable roads, safe housing are all important, not in and of themselves, but important for what they can facilitate. As you talked about, as a clergy person, I've had the chance to be alongside individuals and their loved ones in times of pregnant expectation, birth and baptism, weddings, sickness, and in tragedy, the final days of life.

When sitting with a person who is no longer responsive and the moment of death is already in the room, the conversations with friends and family are often void of pretense and full of purity. People always express gratitude for the things that brought them happiness. And here's what those sentiments boil down to. Community, family, a friend circle, service club, a house of faith, one or two real friends, friends who know all your stuff and are still your friends, sharing laughter, time spent together doing nothing.

Your Mother Teresa says or said, the hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread. And I add that happiness, true happiness, is the evidence that the hunger for love has been satisfied. The essential mission of this Select Committee is to satisfy the hunger for love, and happiness is the evidence of a job well done. And I thank you. And to borrow the words or quote the words of former Vice President Joe Biden, this is a big fricking deal.

Thank you. I appreciate that. And I hope it is. Your comments were eloquent. I thought of a quote. The opera producer Peter Sellers always says, human productivity is a cultural question before it is an economic question. And I think when we talk about connections themselves, I think ultimately, I think it speaks to that. I'm also remembering a New York Times study about 10 years ago. You talked about just before people die.

The number one word that people say before they die, according to the survey, was mom for most people. And that, I think, again, speaks to a lot of what you talk about with respect to nurturing, with respect to connections, with respect to memory, and those types of things specific to your day job.

We hear a lot about the bowling alone concept, and we hear a lot know a lot of governments in Western Europe talk a lot about the demise of, quote unquote, organized religion, which, again, the distinction between religion and spirituality is different. What do you see the role of organized religion in terms of creating opportunities and spaces for connection and those types of things? And I'm sure connection means a lot of things to you as it does to me.

Sure, that's a great question. And I think houses of faith and religious traditions, especially the longer established ones, are champions of silo living. Nobody invented it. Outside of religions institutions, we tend to be very insular, protective, and isolationist. I have wondered if more effort from state local governments were offered to houses of faith through some sort of incentive to do interreligious collaboration and innovation to improve community. Just a simple example of a church that I heard of, and we never quite got it off the ground.

At mine was an after school milk and cookies program where retired Members of the faith community and the church happened to be near an elementary school had free milk and cookies one day a week after school. So as kids were walking home, they could stop in.

Everyone was fingerprinted and cleared, safe, and just talk with an elder in the community over milk and cookies, because that was something a lot of us had growing up that really we can't have anymore because of the financial demands of a household. So I think some of those types of out of the box thinking to do what my colleagues have studied at length, will have an impact.

I also think houses of faith need to do more towards mutual understanding and to recognize rootedness should not be a shield or an instrument of war in any way, but rootedness should be an opportunity to be a stable person or community who can then be open and an honest relationship and dialogue with others who are also rooted in their tradition. And I think that takes some cultivation. That happens amongst clergy, but it typically doesn't roll out to the community at large.

Another thing, quite frankly, with the decline in organized religion, not just in the United States, Europe has certainly been on the front edge of that. There are a lot of premium spaces for meeting and gathering that could be leveraged to equip communities to do this more freely and possibly at low to no cost, so long as the facility needs are met.

I think most congregations of all stripes would be very willing to consider becoming more of a community center hub than just a one service a week shop. But they also want to keep the place up. And just a real quick thing about the data. As a spiritual person and a lover of science and data, I love spreadsheets. Data often reveals what already is, and the chance of it offering you clear answers to what could be is slim to none.

So there comes a point where you and others in these important positions, maybe even literally have to stand around in a circle and hold hands, discuss and take a leap of faith and give something an earnest shot. Communicate with us along the way. You'll have a lot of cheerleaders and failures are learning opportunities. Nothing's going to be perfect the first time out. But if we don't do this, we already see where we're headed and it needs to be done.

And there's a lot of people who I know and have talked to already that are ready to pitch in in any way they can. A little bit more in relation to what was talked about. I think from a practice perspective, I think being talked about, rooted devotion is another part. I think we've become devoted to our screens.

We need to be devoted to time, to be bored, to just wonder and imagine and sit together with people that you love in silence, not have an agenda at all. I think those are important parts of a healthy spiritual life as well.

You reminded me of a book. I think it's called the Art of doing nothing. I think a Professor at Stanford wrote it. And then also remember an old poem. Go silently amidst the haste and noise and remember what peace there may be in silence. And I encourage my four year old daughter, it's okay to be bored sometimes. Just sit there and do nothing and that's okay. It is cool. Thank you very much. I appreciate am. What am I doing? Thank you, Ajeev.

And thank you to our first panel for your excellent presentations. We're going to move on to our second panel focusing on happiness and government. How can I do that? And also go to the restroom. Katie? Yeah. We're going to take a three minute break.

Thank you so much. Going to get on to our next panelist. Our next panelist is Mayor Lily Mei of Fremont. For the last five years, Fremont has been named the happiest city in the nation, according to an annual study conducted by Wallet Hub. Mayor Mei, thank you for joining us today. And I'm going to, in the interest of time, remind all of our panelists to keep their presentations to five minutes. Thank you.

To go live. There it is perfect. Good afternoon, and thank you for allowing me to come and share. I'm delighted to be here today as representing one of the happiest cities in the United States. We're very blessed that the City of Fremont is here in the State of California. It's the fourth largest city in the Bay Area by population, the second largest by landmass, and deals with many of the issues that everyone else does. Traffic, challenges with homelessness and housing.

But what makes our community so special? It's a vibrant community with an exceptional quality of life and abundant opportunities. And Fremont has really earned its reputation as a beacon of happiness and well being. While I was listening to some of the other speakers talk about how there is the importance of having that sense of community, our residents embody the spirit of unity, cooperation, inclusivity.

And whether it's through numerous community events, volunteer initiatives, or neighborhood associations, our residents deeply are connected and are committed to supporting one another. Part of it comes from the fact that we have such a diverse heritage and when you come from so many different cultures and languages. And the gentleman earlier talked about interfaith. One of the things that we're very blessed to have is interfaith Thanksgiving and other gatherings that bring our residents together.

The strong social fabric of the city creates a sense of well being and contributes to the overall happiness. I know some of this firsthand. When I moved there 30 years ago, I was a young person with student loans and trying to get through that, and then have had the pleasure and opportunity to have two MIFs, Made in Fremont, and raise my family there and then. Now, as I'm nearing the end of my second term as mayor, I also have the chance to be classified.

As my son says, I plan very well because I can move into my own senior housing. So I've seen the whole gamut. But I think that that tenure brings to us the key factors contributing to our city's happiness and exceptional quality of life that our city offers. For example, we talked about wellness and how important right now. I think after the pandemic, we realized how people really need to have that connection.

It's not about just seeing someone on Zoom, it's about how we are able to connect with our community and some little things like making a 10 minute walk pledge so that our city can utilize and better boast our array of amenities and services that cater to the needs and interests of our residents. From our beautiful parks, hiking trails, we updated our master park plan, our bike and trail plans and recreational facilities to world class institutions as well as healthcare facilities.

Fremont really thrives to promote nurturing environment for individuals. We have over 63 parks. And over these last couple of years, even during the pandemic, we've opened up the first campground in the Bay Area. Hiking trails we've shut down the canyon for allow people to see the natural beauty and to connect and see what it's able to imagine.

Even things like right now we are updating our master transportation plan because we realized during the pandemic, we do also a health study and we noticed the challenges with obesity and other health issues that have arisen. Whether it's the mental health and working with our youth to do things like box art in our community, or we have a mental health awareness contest. So I think the best messaging sometimes comes from themselves and to utilize that. So I'm very excited about that.

But when I was talking about the active transportation plan, I think it's important that we get out and that's something that we as local leaders can do. And so we went out and did the first year walking within our district. I was joking.

I said, you can move with May and we can walk through all the districts with all our council, or we can also do things like right now when we updated our transportation plan, it means looking at each district and having some safe routes to school. I'm very blessed that we've partnered with our active transportation. When we look at public transit, if you adopt it younger, you're more likely to use it.

And also because the equity piece of it, when you're able to provide that and provide that option for free and reduced bus passes to look at. How can we get people on this ridership? We are between 680, 80 so we have highway, we have bus, we also have BART. And so if we're able to utilize the adoption, it creates this lifelong awareness of this option. We also are one of the few cities I've just sat in our Senior Commission plan and I was teasing with them.

When I'm done, I could join their Commission too, and that we were looking at different options and we're updating it right now and having lessons like for elderly. We have, as I mentioned, so many people in different languages and cultures. So providing that access in different languages and providing that assistance. If you've never ridden the bus, here's how you'd go and ride the bus. And we train people. It means that also we're looking at technology. I'm a strong belief in pioneering our technologies.

So whether it's using an app, we have go, go, grandpa. I think I remember granddaddy, which I think is important. And also things like even having gatherings where they can go on trips, day trips. I mean, that peer counseling and that ability to check on your community residents, let them know that they're not alone. And that's one of the things that is so important when delivering food for meals on wheels over the years.

One of the things that's the saddest part for me is when people don't want us to leave because they feel so lonely and have no one to talk to. So that's how we know the connection is so important. But whether it's a place to live, as I mentioned, or the place to work, we're proud of the fact that we have the most manufacturing jobs in the State of California, and the most clean tech manufacturing and hardware manufacturing in the United States.

We were recognized by NLC recently as one of their soul smart platinum, the first city in the United States to be platinum. And in fact, I just got back from there, and they asked just by chance, I didn't plan this. They said, pick a pin. And it says, ask me what makes me happy.

And so, just by know, being here today is one of the things, but having that connection and having a robust economy where people can work and have skills, so it means the quality of education. When I picked Fremont for home, I was a young person and didn't have children, but I knew that having quality education, having those support wraparound services, is important for the quality of life for our community.

As the mayor, I look at people during the pandemic, and it's things like rental assistance, providing food assistance, delivering that vaccination, or health care, getting out to the community. We also are one of the few schools for the deaf, one of two in the United States. I mean, in the California area, the only school for the blind. So when we talked about active transportation, it means, like, white cane day, it means there's other ways that we engage them so people don't get left out.

The other thing I mentioned earlier was the accessibility. And when it comes to things like even our State of the city or our census, and our outreach, I was honored to be able to give some basic welcomes in eight languages so people feel part of it. It means that when we're at our concerts in the park, we have someone signing, and also even our Santa Claus was able to sign. And we had the school for the deaf with their bell and other chimes.

It means our playgrounds. And I have to thank that we've had alumni like Christy Yamaguchi come back and help us create an always dream park, because it means that everyone has a chance to be on the playground. It's handy capable. So when it comes to jobs, we also have a strong presence of leading companies and startups that offer a wealth of employment opportunities and foster a culture of creativity, innovation, the availability of good jobs coupled with the high standard of living is a challenge.

Over these last couple of years, many of us are struggling with allowing our residents to lead fulfilling and prosperous lives. So that means us partnering with our educational institutions from the elementary school level, providing things like for our area. As a Mayor, we can work with our libraries. We've created maker space at the library so everyone in the community can have access.

Things like at our junior high level, having things like robotics, or having a place that they can borrow tools or even computers is some of that. And when we talked about cross sectionality between intergeneration, it means things like having reading time. It's one of the things I've really enjoyed. It gives me great hope. When I spend time with our youth, it makes me happier than anything because they're truly the most honest and the most genuine in their care.

And then bringing them with our elderly, because one of the things I realized as a parent is that sometimes you're so busy as a parent running from day to day, that you don't have time to take a pause. But sometimes our grandparents, who feel also that loneliness, have that patience and that love and care. So when you bring people who want to listen and children who need that attention, it really creates some foster or sense of community.

And even on the reverse, so, so many of our families right now, with the technology day and age, don't have that access and training, and getting our students to be able to teach those skill sets in terms of how to access the Internet to our seniors, that also creates a symbiotic relationship.

So promoting health and wellness, access to top notch health care facilities, things like, we have a friends of children with special needs and other centers which provide not just classes for the individuals, but for their families, and also for work opportunities for those who can provide that, as well as housing spaces. So Fremont's commitment to safety and security contributes to the overall happiness, like I mentioned, where we can live, work and play.

Lastly, I think that having the cultural diversity, vibrant arts scene, I tell people that I can go from a Jewish temple to a Buddhist temple, to a godwara, to a Christian Catholic. And so having that ability to see that is something very important. And it embraces this, fostering a sense of understanding, tolerance and more importantly, appreciation. The city hosts a wide range of cultural festivals, from the Festival of India, to our Niles Festival Parade, where we have the original Bronco Billy and Charlie Chaplin.

So the original Hollywood, to art exhibitions and performances. Like this past year, we also had things like Lunar New Year, Black History Month, and to be able to celebrate and enjoy the diversity of performances. This brings joy and happiness and highlights the inclusivity of cultural exchange. So, in conclusion, I just wanted to be able to say that I hope our City of Fremont stands as a shining example. And there must be a reason.

I hope that we have been happiest for six out of eight years that I've been mayor. And so I jokingly say one of my fellow neighboring cities has been happiest two or three of the other years. But it's okay, because we are trying to work on this regionally. It's not just for us. And that's one of the things. It's not just about me.

My hopes is that for our city, as we move forward, we continue to bribe this exceptional quality of life, abundant opportunities and commitment to well being, and the celebration of diversity. While this is my first conversation with you today, I hope this is not my last. I think that it's very hard to encapsulate everything that's happening in our city in five minutes. And I hope that we can cherish and preserve these qualities that make our city special.

And I want to work to commute together on happiness and being the well being for our residents remaining at the collective efforts of our forefront. And so right now, I also want to clarify that I think that every city has their own processes and working with school board and other organizations. I'm not the CEO of our City because that is our City Manager, but I often tell people that I hope. I'm the CHO, which is the Chief Hope Officer.

And I think because of my background in networking, it's about bridging and bringing people's connections from the needs and the programs, and to amplify their voices, advocate for their resources, and to ensure that the people are able to continue the quality of life when you look at things, and I'm not going to criticize them, but I know it's easy to look at anything, report having been in management as a budget line item, as a statistics, but not hear directly what happens to the people that are affected by that.

And so I think it's a privilege and an opportunity for me to say to you how important it is for us to have this. And I wanted to thank you on behalf of our entire community. It's something that means so much to me that when you measure happiness, it doesn't mean everyone's happy every day, but it means that we're striving to provide that and to continue that effort and championing that. So I'm delighted to be here if there's any questions I can answer, and I'm happy to return.

Thank you, mayor, we appreciate it. I know you have to run. I have a couple of really quick questions before we let you go. Two questions. When I first got here 12 years ago, I think one of the things that surprised me the most was a lot of the debates. A lot of the fights we have are not necessarily partisan or ideology as much as jurisdiction and levels of government.

You talked about very real ways that the City of Fremont and municipal governments and like London, has been spending a lot of money on battling social isolation among seniors. And sounds like the type of vein you're working in as well, from a state perspective. Usually council Members say the best thing you can do is stay out of our way. What can we do to help cities to facilitate a lot of what you've done?

And then let me ask you other questions too, because I know you got to run. You can answer them both at the same time. Obviously, around here, things are not financially what they were over the past decade, and we're facing a significant deficit this year. We're wondering also what sort of Low cost types of things, programs that City of Fremont has been involved in that have been helpful. Thanks.

Sure. I think know one for the state level. I think it comes with policies and be able to Fund those with the resources that are needed. And I don't think it's one or not either or. It can be both. For example, when we think about workforce development and how people are struggling to find housing and becoming homeless, it's creating these educational. We had an earn and learn Fremont program where we got people into jobs.

When companies are looking for the workforce and people need to have these jobs, having paid positions, having supportive services such as paid health care for them, it creates the ability for the companies to find the workforce that they need, and it creates people the opportunity to change not just the trajectory of themselves, but their whole family.

It means that we brought people that were formerly homeless, people that were formerly seniors, single mothers, and connected them to jobs that were able to end education with the Aloni College or other entities. It means, like right now with our school district this year, we're going to do our first joint internship fair and to talk. Know, I think a lot of times, and we're at this pivotal moment right now.

When I came out of school, I demonstrated IBM will writers, and I remember compact telling me about a new concept called the laptop computer. So it dates me a little. You know, we're kind of at that moment right now, and there's such fear about AI and also the jobs that are going to be out there. I have two millennials, so I know that.

But I think that that's where we as a state, when we look at some of the innovation and what we have, we shouldn't walk away from that. In fact, this Friday, I'm going to help host one of our first California battery days. I mean, with that type of innovation, for example, we've all been struggling with the crazy earthquakes, Red Orange Skies, and fires we had piloted using our own technology, not just saving costs on utilities, but getting people trained.

And then also the ability to be resilient in case of a natural disaster. It means the ability for us to micro grid and go off grid for 12 to 15 hours, because we're not just isolated, there's no Republican way or Democrat way to fill a pothole. It just wants to be fixed.

And I think that that pragmatic perspective and approach, and also having the ability to pioneer and demonstrate this, I want to thank the chairs of the Energy Commission for helping us do some of those pilots and for all of you with the transportation, these safe, smart, and connected streets, having things like even, we are one of the first five cities in the United States to do journalists, first responders. So we're talking about public safety.

We're talking about ways to make it so it's less confrontational to reimagine safety, but in a way that utilizes technology that helps our community. So again, if you'd like me to come back, I am delighted to come back and share. I would love to be a Member of, however I can participate in this community. I just think that it's kind of hard to share in five minutes, but I have plenty of things to say, even things like development housing.

I was just at our State Planning Commissioner's discussion, and this type of comment, when you talk about happiness, it also reflects on all of us in leadership. It's hard because right now, we are so divisive. And I'll say that when I see the federal. I just came back from DC and also at the state level. But if we can put aside our differences and focus on what's most important.

The best example I'll close with when I was leaving, when I was on school board, it's one of the hardest positions, because nothing gets more personal. And I think, you know, as a parent, than your children. And when we're going through some of the toughest times, one of the best things we did, which I think is still there today, is that we put pictures of our children up there.

Some of these kids are probably now in their 20s or 30s now, but we put pictures of children of every ethnicity, handy, capable, different backgrounds, so that when we're disputing with each other on the dais and trying to figure out what we're doing, we focus and look out and we see the faces of the children, which is what we committed to serve, not ourselves, not our political ideology, not the budget and fighting with each other, but who we really need to deserve is to get that voice out.

And so that's why I think having that perspective is what grounds us, what makes us more sane in terms of trying to deliver these solutions. And that's why I'm delighted and privileged to be here with you today, chair. And I really want to thank you. And I also want to thank your incredible team. So thank you for the partnership.

Thank you very much, Mayor. Thank you. Appreciate it. Our next panelist is joining us remotely. Mr. Phuntsho Norbu, Council General for the Kingdom of Bhutan to the United States. For decades, Bhutan has developed and utilized a measurement tool known as gross national happiness, a philosophical and practical approach to measuring happiness, which is then used to develop public policy.

Mr. Norbu has joined us remotely from New York City and will be giving a slightly longer presentation in order to provide a thorough background of this groundbreaking government policy. Mr. Norbu, we're happy to have you join us today.

Anthony Rendon, chair of the Select Committee on Happiness and Public Policy Outcomes. Members of the Select Committee, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. My name is Phuntsho Norbu, and I'm the Consul General of the Kingdom of Bhutan to the United States. Allow me to thank chair random and the Select Committee on Happiness and Public Policy outcomes for inviting me here today.

It is an honor for me to introduce Bhutan and our pursuit of cross national happiness, or GNH, before this Committee today, I will provide a brief background on the conceptualization of GNH, its basic tenets, and how we operationalize GNH in Bhutan. Honorable Members, the concept of happiness is not new for America or for us in Bhutan. Our founding fathers have clearly understood the importance of including the happiness of their people in their respective founding documents.

The founding fathers of the United States have included life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In the 1776 declaration of Independence, Shabrung Naom Nangyo, the father of unified Bhutan in 1729 had pronounced in the legal code that if the government cannot create happiness for its people, then there is.

No purpose for the government to exist. This pronouncement is a compelling reason for our governments to take happiness very seriously. Honorable Members Bhutan is a small, landlocked Himalayan kingdom that began planned economic development only in the 1960s. Bhutan is neither a resource rich country nor an economic power. We are landlocked between two of the world's most populous countries, China to the north and India to our south. We have many constraints and are faced with multiple challenges, but we are also blessed with extraordinary leadership.

Our visionary kings have consistently forgotten their comfort and convenience and have placed the priority of the well being of the people. They have made happiness for the Bhutanese their overarching priority. This was clearly demonstrated way back in early 1970s when his Majesty the fourth king pronounced, for Bhutan, Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product. What this meant was that the focus of development in Bhutan will be on the happiness of our people rather than just the economic pursuit.

This was an unconventional concept at a time when countries were focused on maximizing Gross Domestic Product, which was used as the principal yardstick to gauge the developmental stage of a country. So why did Bhutan decide on this new path so early in its development journey? We believe that this can be answered by looking at so many of the problems that the world faces today, including the most recent situation caused by COVID-19 pandemic.

To a large extent, most of these problems can be attributed to following a development model that is entirely focused on maximizing economic growth and unsustainable consumption, which did not take into consideration other factors that are important for the progress of a society. The GDP focused development model pursues limitless wealth in a finite world, thus progressively destabilizing the very environment that enables us to survive on this planet.

A development model pursued by Bhutan provides centrality to human beings, a human centric model that strikes the balance between the material needs and the emotional and spiritual needs of mankind. Bhutan follows a development planning cycle of five years and his Majesty the King had stated, at the end of the five year planning cycle, if these developmental activities did not make the bhutanese happier, then these plans had failed. Simply put, GNH drives all development in Bhutan.

The rest of the world started looking into alternative development models only during the turn of the 21st century, when it came to notice that although countries recorded very high economic growth, it did not necessarily translate into a higher level of happiness or well being of its people. This was further exacerbated by the several financial crises in the last two decades where we saw entire life savings, stocks, jobs, and homes of so many across the globe disappear overnight.

The flaws, limitations and a narrow scope of GDP driven economic development model was starkly driven and the need for a rethink on alternative development models was observed across the globe. A model that is holistic and inclusive. The United nations has since adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, which is a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030. So what is gross national happiness?

In a simple term, GNH steers the government away from chasing unrestrained material growth towards sustainable economic development, cultural protection, environmental preservation and good governance. To make sure that development is truly holistic and inclusive. GNH is built on four interrelated and mutually reinforcing pillars. They are, one, equitable socioeconomic development. Two, protection of culture. Three, preservation of environment and four, good governance. So, pillar number one, equitable socioeconomic development. This pillar ensures that the growth is clean, green and equitable.

And that all citizens are provided free health care and receive free education. Two, protection of culture. This pillar ensures that at the age of globalization, we do not lose our culture and traditions. This is important not just because we are a small country, but we are also the last surviving Mahayana Buddhist country. And as such, we are the world's custodian to a unique spiritual and cultural heritage. Three, preservation of the environment.

Our constitution requires us to ensure that a minimum of 60% of Bhutan's total land area will be maintained under forest cover for all times to come. Today, due to the success of this pillar, we have 72% of our country under forest cover and more than 50% of our total area protected as national parks, nature reserves and wildlife sanctuary. The unspoiled natural environment supports thriving populations of some of the rarest animals and plants on the planet. Bhutan is also a carbon neutral country.

In fact, we are a carbon negative country. And our forest sequester three times more greenhouse gases than what the entire country emits. Pillar four, good governance. Our kings have focused on making the government transparent, accountable and decentralized. His Majesty, the fourth King, introduced parliamentary democracy in 2008. In reality, he imposed democracy against the will of the Bhutanist people. What this means is that we may be the only country in the world that did not fight to become a democracy. Today, we are a democratic, constitutional monarchy.

And it is the elected government's responsibility to stay faithful to the ideals of GNH. The pursuit of GNH is enshrined in our constitution. That the state shall strive to promote those conditions that will enable the pursuit of gross national happiness. At this point, I wish to clarify that the government is not in the business of making every individual Bhuttu is happy. This is not the responsibility of the government, and the happiness of individuals must remain the responsibility of the individual.

What the government does is, through deliberate public policies, create the right conditions that will allow people to pursue happiness. These conditions are captured by the government under the nine domains that influence the happiness of our people. The first five of the nine domains are straightforward and have been the primary consideration for any country in pursuing development. One, health, because physical wellbeing is critical for happiness. Two, educational attainment, because without education, one cannot fulfill their full potential. Three, living standard, which covers food, clothing, shelter and employment.

Four, ecological diversity and resilience, because the natural environment is so critical to the good health of the planet and its inhabitants. Five, good governance. Because only through good governance, individuals are provided the platform to pursue happiness. The remaining of the nine domains. Remaining four of the nine domains are quite innovative and neglected in most development discourse. But we in Bhutan feel that these are equally important, if not more important, than the first five domains. They are one, community vitality.

This touches on the depth and quality of your relationship, whether it is with your family, friends, or the community in which you live. Two, cultural diversity and resilience, which is very important as it is the foundation of our identity. Three, time use. Because time is our very life, we make better choices when we understand this and use it for what we care about most. And the last domain, psychological wellbeing. This is the spiritual half that makes us human.

And in Bhutan, we nurture psychological well being through the promotion of meditation to increase mindfulness, which is shown to enhance happiness. Therefore, we have introduced meditation in all our schools. So how does the royal government of Bhutan implement GNH in its planning process? We do not leave the GNH discourse at a theoretical level, and yes, we do operationalize it in our national development planning.

Until very recently, we had a central government body that was mandated to look after all policy formulation and planning activities of the government, called the Gross National Happiness Commission. Given its importance, it has now been subsumed directly under the prime minister's office. The primary function of this body is to ensure that the government policies and plans are GNH friendly. This is done by using what we call the GNH policy screening tool.

Every draft policy and project that is initiated by the government will have to undergo screening through the GNH lens to check if they contribute to the overall advancement of happiness of our people. Only those policies and projects that pass the screening tool are approved for implementation. Many policies do not pass the screening tool and they are sent back for review, revision and improvement till they are deemed to be GNH friendly.

Some face operate rejections, for example, the government's mineral development policy, which was deemed too polluting and too unsustainable. So the question is, how do we measure GNH? In measuring GNH, we have an autonomous social science research Institute called the Center for Bhutan and GNH studies. They undertake a nationwide GNH survey every five years, seeking key responses related to the wellbeing, happiness, and the level of contentment of the Bhutanese people.

The survey questionnaires take into consideration the 33 indicators which contribute to the four pillars and together make up the GNH index. The 33 indicators include standard indicators like income, housing, schooling, but also mental health, the number of healthy days, emotions, spirituality, family safety, the environment and others like sleep time and the government's performance.

The GNH index provides an abundance of interesting data and the results of this survey is elaborated extensively within the concerned agencies of the government and targeted policy interventions are prescribed in order to address areas that need improvement. The results are also used to influence the five year national development plans. Honorable Members, allow me to recapitulate on the points I have made thus far. Number one, GNH drives all development activities in Bhutan.

Number two, the four pillars of GNH are one, equitable socioeconomic development two, protection of culture three, preservation of environment four, good governance three, to ensure that elected governments stay faithful to GNH, the constitution requires the state to promote those conditions that will enable the pursuit of GNH. Four, the nine domains of GNH define those conditions that enable happiness.

Five, the office of the Cabinet affairs and Strategic Coordination subjects all government policies through a screening tool to ensure that the policies and projects contribute to the overall well being and happiness of our people. 6th, the Center for Bhutan and GNH studies conducts a nationwide GNH survey every five years, the results of which is used to influence the national development plans. So, given all the above, are we the happiest country? The simple answer is no, we are not and we have a long way to go.

We have many immediate challenges such as poverty, inequity, unemployment and climate change amongst others. However, we intend to work through these challenges within the GNH development model. His Majesty the King Jigme Lessa Name Wangchuk had defined GNH to simply mean development with values and promulgated his vision for the GNH for the 21st century.

I quote, in order to continue to achieve GNH in a fast changing world with newer opportunities and challenges of the 21st century, GNH must be used as a bridge between the fundamental values of kindness, equality, and humanity and the necessary pursuit of economic growth, unquote. I hope I have been able to provide some insight on the pursuit of gross national happiness in Bhutan and take this opportunity to commend the initiatives taken by the California State Assembly in this new endeavor.

I wish you, Mr. Chair, and the Members of the Select Committee our very best for a successful deliberation and your efforts towards enhancing the happiness of the people of California. Thank you. And Tashi Deleg.

Thank you, Council General. I appreciate it. I had one quick question. I know you've been measuring GNH for decades now. What changes have you seen during that time?

We have a social science think tank which has been measuring GNH for quite some time. So every five years, survey is undertaken with all the 33 indicators and key questions. So what we have found is that most of the people are, I think, on happiness, on the front of happiness. I think it is the satisfaction. And I think people are found to be relatively happy. Almost 90% have been found to be relatively happy. Small number has been found to be not so happy.

So we are working on how we can make the targeted interventions, policy interventions are made to see how we can cover everybody to be very happy.

Thank you, council General. I appreciate it. And I think that points to just the importance of awareness and making sure that you're crafting your policies according to where you want to go. Thank you. Our next panelist is Zima Creason, Executive Director of California Edge Coalition, who's here to talk to us about the intersection of work and happiness. Ms. Creason, thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me. So happy to be here. So as you mentioned, I am the Executive Director of the California Edge Coalition. I'm also on the San Juan Unified Board of Education. I spent almost two decades working in mental health policy, and I'm also the sibling of two, a brother and sister that died by suicide. So the topic of happiness is near and dear to my heart, because the reality is that the absence of happiness really can lead to death.

I have seen in my own family, and we see in so many families. So talking about the intersection of work, happiness and policy, so what's the first thing, one of the first things we ask each other when we meet someone new, what do you do? Right. And the response to that question could have you feeling different ways depending on what your situation is. So it can absolutely be an ongoing reoccurring contributor to the decline in your happiness every time you have to answer that question.

And you can have a job. It could be a living wage job, but for whatever reason, there's a stigma behind that job. Or maybe you're working through the home. Working a home manager is what I like to call them, and there's a stigma related to that, or you are making below a living wage, or you're living in poverty. So all that comes up every time you're asked that question.

So work plays obviously, a significant role in our lives as a contributor to happiness in several ways, and I'm going to point out a few examples. So, resources responding to that old saying, zero, money doesn't make you happy. Well, it does to a point. A recent purdue study that I pulled up actually had a number in California, $145,000 a year to be happy in California.

And past studies that I have seen show that it's not like you get happier with every dollar that you make after that amount. But that leads to my next point. Economic stability means the means to support yourself, the means to support your family. It's a social determinant of health and mental health. Work provides a sense of purpose, a reason to get up in the morning.

Social connection, an opportunity to connect with individuals, to build your network, to be able to advance, really just an opportunity to interact with people every day. And, of course, self esteem and confidence. The ability to advance in a position can make people very happy, and also the opportunity to master new skills. So let's tie all that to policy. So I do have some specific examples of how some policy focus areas that can contribute to this intersectionality.

So, of course, job quality, nobody's happy working in a job where they're disrespected, or they can't depend on their schedule, or they can't have an actual life, or they're not being paid appropriately. High quality public education and training offerings are huge. And not just the offerings, but the support to access those offerings and to complete those offerings are incredibly important. And also the full supports, and there's a through line happening with the other panelists, the supports that it takes for the whole person. Right?

So the transportation to childcare, access to technology, all the things that it really takes to be successful in supporting employers, that's something I don't know that I heard yet today. So I want to uplift that there really is a role for us to support employers so that they know how to build and sustain a healthy workplace, small and large.

Because if we don't know, why would we assume they know how to do this right and how to do this while ongoing and of course, ensuring that we're not building a one size fits all approach, but instead honoring the diverse needs of Californians. Opportunity, Youth. I like to bring up quite a bit. So young folks really living the struggle, most of know, maybe in foster care or justice, know really hard time.

When we work with OY, they don't fit nice and neat into the adult workforce system. So being really mindful of the needs of the very different community Members represented here in California. So today, I just want to uplift. Warms my heart. We're using the celebratory language of happiness, but to me, and in my view, we're talking about mental wellness in a new way that's long, long overdue.

So when I hear this, I think about my brother and sister that are no longer here and how many other brother and sisters may still be here to have these conversations because of this work. So I, along with the entire edge team, applaud your leadership. Thank you for inviting us to be involved, and we would love to partner with you in any way to move this forward, move the work forward. Thank you.

Thank you. Appreciate it. We spend so much of our time at work. It's no surprise that it has a big impact on our level of happiness. Obviously, since COVID we've seen a change. Even before COVID we saw a lead up to change in terms of the way we work. And you talked about social connections. Going to work and interacting with people that you like is cool. It's a good part of the human experience. Have you looked at remote work? What does that do for happiness? What happens there?

So my response is going to be very lived experience. I can't point to a study on this. So based on what I'm seeing in business and what we've done, even in our own office, because, of course we had an office. We were in the Freeport Fremont, the building, 10th and 9th over there. You know what I'm talking about. By the new Taco Bell, if it's still there. We had an office. We went in every day. I think Fridays was a remote day, something like that.

Then the pandemic happened. It didn't make sense to keep the space. We got rid of the space. We figured out how to go all remote. We did that. We did not come back. But we do value the connection and the connectivity time. So we built that into doing something different. So once a month, we have togetherness day. We get together, we have lunch together, we celebrate birthdays or holidays or whatever it may be, we have interaction via Zoom.

It is via Zoom but every week I meet with each team Member individually. We get together as a group on our agenda. We have a new item called the Wellness Corner. So we're really being very intentional because that gets the. And we're not just talking about work anymore. So even if we're on Zoom, we're building an intentional connectivity conversation to keep that going and of course, still having that togetherness time.

So it's interesting because what we're seeing in the field is there are some leaders that have the mindset that you just need to be there. If you're not here, you're not working. But where's the evidence of that? I'm sure there's some jobs, retail. Sure there are some jobs where that makes a whole lot of sense, but not all the jobs. So really, are we overtaxing community make us feel better? Does that make sense? I'd say no.

Thank you. That's super helpful. I appreciate that. Thank you so much. And if you can stay for questions, that'd be great. I'm not sure if you can. Great. Our final presenter. Thank you for staying with us is Meliksah Demir, the endowed Professor in happiness at Sacramento State University. He's coming to our hearing room straight from Sac State Happiness Day Celebration. That was accidental, or was that. We do that on purpose. That was accidental, which. It was intentional, which is happening right now. Thank you, Professor Demir, for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it's good.

Yeah, I think so.

I'm delighted to be here. And my name is Milk Shattimir, and I'm the Rekhi Singh endowed Professor in Happiness at Sac State. And my position entails promoting happiness on our campus and in our community as much as possible. And as we may know, March 20 is the international day of happiness. And because it's a spring break at Sac State on our campus, we have the Happiness day on our event a week before. And then I have a bunch of buttons that I believe shared with you.

I will be happy to share with the audience after this. And this position was created by Rekhi Singh four years ago. He had a vision. He believed that happiness has the potential to make a difference in the lives and well being of people, and it confers benefits. And as a Professor, I've been teaching courses on psychology of happiness, and we have been promoting happiness on our campus via educational events.

And I also have been offering workshops, seminars, talks to different units, groups, associations in California, ranging from San Diego Judges Association to Girl Scouts in California. So that has been, in a nutshell, the purpose of this particular job, and I was given a few specific questions to address here, and I will go. With those if that's okay.

The first question was, why should the Legislator concern itself with happiness? What are the benefits of being happy? I think the Legislator should concern itself with happiness because we do have convincing empirical evidence showing that happiness confers a variety of benefits in different life domains. It is good for the individual and it's good for the society. And we do have experimental and longitudinal studies collectively highlighting the following findings. First, happy people live longer. They are living four to 10 years longer than unhappy people.

Happy people are healthier. They are less likely to catch a cold, even when injected with a cold virus in an experimental setting. So this means reduced health costs for the happy people. And happy people also have a stronger immune system functioning. Happy people are also more creative at work. They are more innovative compared to less happy peers, and then they are more successful at work. They are more likely to secure a second interview when they apply for a position.

They are more likely, compared to their peers to make at least $10,000 more in income across the lifespan. Happy people are also likely to be more altruistic. They are likely to have better social relationships. And then, most importantly for the society, I believe. And then for California, perhaps they are more likely to volunteer. They are more likely to donate to charities. They are even more likely to donate their kidneys. So this is really impressive.

And also, I believe this is very relevant for our major global concerns. Happy people are not selfish in that they are more active in taking action towards climate change and environmental issues. They are sensitive towards those, and they are more likely to take action compared to less happy people. So overall, happiness is good for the individual and good for the society. So these are the overall benefits.

And I believe the next question that I was given was asking, is there an opportunity for public policy solutions on happiness? If so, what are they? I am not a public policy scholar, but based on my knowledge of the field, I've been doing research on happiness for the past more than two decades. I can make a few suggestions, if I may, and this is relevant to what Professor Baldessare highlighted as well.

First of all, I think it would be wonderful to invest in mental health and mental well being in California. Whether it's the availability of health resources, mental health resources, or offering related interventions on our campus, we are trying to spread the word that happiness is not a luxury. It's a necessity in our lives. It matters. It makes substantial differences in our lives, and we need to spread this word to people and then raising awareness could be a first major step in this particular pursuit.

And then the site related to this thing. I believe starting very early is a good idea. What I mean by that is, perhaps we can include well being and related courses, not only happiness, but also positive psychology related concepts such as flourishing, such as resilience into school curriculum. And then I know some schools are already doing this, but it would be wonderful in California if we set an example for the entire country offering courses on wellbeing and happiness early in life.

Because when you take a course on happiness, you learn not only what it is and what makes people happy, but you also learn the ways to cultivate happiness in your life. You learn that it is within your reach to achieve happiness in your pursuit of happiness. And then related to this, for instance, SAC state thanks to Rekhi Singh, the donor for my position is one of the handful in the entire nation offering a course on psychology of happiness.

So investing in curriculum and education could be the second, perhaps in a public policy. Another one that I'd like to highlight in the light of the findings by Dr. Baldasare is he highlighted that according to the most recent General survey in California, the unhappy group in our state is the emerging young adults, 18 to 35 year olds and also low income people.

Now, with this information given to us, what I like to share with you is that there is enough evidence right now linking nature connectedness to individual happiness. People are happier when they spend more time in nature within green spaces, when they go for a hike, when they go for kayaking. And in California, our state is very lucky in that sense. We have fantastic parks and lots of opportunities. However, cost may be an issue. I discuss this every semester with my students.

As a public policy, what can we do to make sure that leisure activities are easily accessible to everyone? Perhaps we can increase the number of free days. We shouldn't limit it, perhaps to just 4 July, but maybe have it more frequently, if possible, to emerging adults. Young adults. We shouldn't restrict it to them, of course, to any age group, because being in touch with nature and leisure activities are reliable markers and contributors to happiness. And California is a great place.

I personally struggle taking my son to multiple parks. He wants to go to these parks, but paying $20 here, $25 here, I can't even afford. And I cannot even imagine individuals who are trying to go by with less with the low income group I'm referring to. So I think this could be a good policy to keep in mind to make it more affordable and available to large segments of the population in California. Overall, I believe happiness is a necessity in our lives.

It confers tons of benefits and it matters. And I'm grateful that California, we have a hearing on this and I'm again delighted to be here. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thanks for your remarks and presentation. Ms. Creason brought up a good point when she said that, and I've read this a lot in the past, in all the reading I've done, when you said money doesn't buy you happiness, but you need a certain level of, level of subsistence. As somebody who spends a lot of time on a University campus, we know, I was served on the UC Board of Regents, the Cal State board of trustees.

I know couchsurfing and the level of poverty among that our students face is one of the really unspoken things in our state that we just don't talk about. And I also think that those are very short term problems, hopefully short term. And in the long term, there's also the conversation about debt and the conversation about how much am I going to owe after four years to get data here?

Can you speak to both of those, the sort of the short term concerns that a lot of students have and also sort of the long term concerns that college is great, it's fantastic, but you can rack up a lot of debt. And what does that do for someone's psyche? Because obviously we've seen in this country an effort around debt relief for students and those types of things. I'm just curious if we are doing the right thing.

Well, that's a great point, and I am not familiar with any specific data from a scientific perspective. But what I can comment based on my interactions with students in the past 20 years, is that they do struggle with the debt they accumulate as they pursue their education. And then those are the lucky ones. If they finish in four years, usually it takes at least five or even six years to complete their degrees in different colleges and universities.

So they accumulate a significant amount of debt and then they go to MA programs or a PhD program. It means additional debt. This is certainly going to make a big difference in their overall well being. They are likely to struggle and feel distress, unfortunately, because no matter how hard they try, they are still going to be in debt 15 years after they start a job. So debt relief policies could be a useful way to address a major concern among college students. Certainly, yeah.

Thank you. I have an easy question for you. You mentioned a son. How old is your son and when did you start taking your son to parks?

My son is going to turn nine in two months. And then I've been taking him to Folsom Lake and then a bunch of other parks around. He's into kayaking, thank God. So. I like that. And then. So we love hiking and other things, so.

Fantastic. Thank you so much. That concludes our second panel. I want to thank all of our panelists, virtual and otherwise, and in person, for their insightful presentations. This is extremely informative hearing, and one that I know that'll shape our conversations moving forward. We will now move to public comment portion of our hearing. For those in the audience, please step up to the microphone, which is somewhere in the middle there. Please step up to the microphone if you'd like to provide comment. Each person has two minutes.

Please be sure to share your name and your affiliation, if any.

Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, Members of the Committee, distinguished panelists, thank you so much for convening this Committee today and opening up this discussion. My name is Alexis Foley, and I just wanted to represent Member of the California public. And I believe, as humans, it is in our nature to be happy. So to experience joy or sad, to experience sorrow. And that navigating this nature can be a really unique learning curve for each and every one of us.

And that each and every one of us have an impact on each other along the way. We've heard so many great examples from people in this room today. I believe that happiness is a factor that can help raise our quality of life and collective consciousness. I believe that governments are rulings of collective consciousness. And so that's why I'm so excited to have this, see this discussion unfold.

And I also believe that happiness could be maybe one of these underlying root problems to a lot of the other bigger problems and issues that we see. So I think the impacts of happiness on a staff level, leadership level, but even on the unhoused level, are equally important across the board. I probably running short on time, but I did want to maybe give some examples or speak with anyone afterward about data driven examples, data driven benefits to prioritize happiness and policy making.

Some examples of really low cost ways to cultivate happiness in the workplace or just in life. And then three reasons why society should prioritize happiness. Maybe a couple of examples if the line isn't too long behind me, if that's okay, sir. Thank you so much. So, just data driven benefits of prioritizing happiness and policy making could include increased economic productivity, reducing health care costs, and increasing social cohesion.

That would relate to reducing crime rates, maybe some low cost examples for creating space to cultivate happiness, to really create that space. There are some tools out there, maybe three options, but mindfulness or journaling can help reduce stress. So that would be helpful. One of our panelists spoke about it, but modern, innovative, like work life balance tactics and building that into the workplace and workday and all of this can benefit improved strategic planning and also decision making for all of us and improve organizational effectiveness.

So maybe just really quick, why should society prioritize happiness? And I think California would be really good leaders in this area. It promotes good governance, it can foster environmental sustainability, and it can nurture wellness and good public health. So I just wanted to leave with that. And thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Ms. Foley.

Next, I had a question. I'm Lynn from Calmatters. They were saying, know, economy and a lot of money doesn't really have a huge effect. I mean, there's some needed basis for substance and to have people have economic stability. My question for legislators is really, with the budget deficit, whatever policy that comes out, if it requires more money, how would you kind of reconcile this, California facing this huge budget deficit and some of these policies that might come out of this hearing that will require more money? Can you give some insight on that?

Questions for me. questions for me. So how do I reconcile the deficit with some. Should we take this off? With potential solutions to addressing health. Good question. I talked a little bit about this in previous interviews throughout the week leading up to here. I don't want to prejudice the outcomes of these hearings. I'm really interested in hearing from the experts and what they think are the best solutions. Yes, I think we've heard both today and in my other readings, we know that sort of unstructured spare time and those types of things are incredibly helpful.

It's not necessarily a government directive, but something that can be built into the workday by private employers or by employers, public employers as well. When we do talk about the World Happiness Index, for example, I think it's pretty clear that a lot of the countries that rate highly are the nordic countries that have strong social safety net programs. So, I mean, for me, ultimately, and this pretty much jives with my political ideology, I mean, I do think we need a strong safety net.

I think we need good schools. I think we need health care. That stuff costs money. It really does. I understand your question in terms of that balance and how we get there, but I do think making sure that we achieve those directives is ultimately in line with the data in terms of how we achieve happiness. .

Thank you. Other questions. Great. This concludes our hearing on the Select Committee on happiness and public policy outcomes. Thank you all for joining us today. I look forward to more discussions on this topic.

Thank you again for having me.

Thank you, chair.

Appreciate you.

Anytime. Anytime.

Thank you, Katie. Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm picking up what you're putting down. All right. Holler if I could be helpful. I'm around. How are you? It was very important.

But.

Um, very much so. Thank you so much for being. Thank you.

Yes.

Love to. Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And maybe it mostly.