and thank all of you for coming out and making your way finding your way through the fog to this place tonight i am very honored to be here it wasn't hard to say yes at all in fact it was an honor to be asked to come here and i i really am grateful that this sort of place exists and that we we get to to have conversation in a place like this i want to wish you all a happy take back your time day if the it is indeed take back your time day and if you don't know what date bigger time day is out explain a little bit about that later because it has to do with a lot of the work that i do i guess i've been interested in the whole subject of work time since i was a student in college way back in the sixty's and i was a sociology student at the university of wisconsin in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight and i was taking a social problems class and we were told that we sociologists were going to have to help solve this major social problem which was going to face the united states by the end of the twenty first twenty excuse me century and i wonder if anyone would like to venture a guess with this big social problem was going to be pardon speak up so many ok this is crowd is too smart i can go home now this is good i was just testing you to see whether i could walk out of the room and you'd already know all the answers yes we were told at that time that because of automation and this coming computer revolution that they called cyber nation at the time that by the year two thousand we would be so productive we'd be able to make stuff twice as fast three times as fast we'd be so productive that we don't have to work fifteen to twenty hours a week paid we would have seven to ten weeks of vacation a year and we would have so much leisure time on our hands we wouldn't know what to do with it and i remember thinking wow like that's a problem i can deal with but it wasn't the problem that we got and strangely as a public television producer here in seattle by one nine hundred ninety i was realizing that the opposite was true that when before i used to meet people in the street and say hi how are you and they'd say fine now they just say busy that was the standard expression by that time you would try to have an appointment to say i'm really sort of a social mom and i like to get out and have conversations and lunches with everybody all the time and and i found that you had to like look in people's calendar month ahead to have lunch i was like what is going on here everybody was just so busy in fact that year time magazine ran it ran a cover story called the rat race and it was like what is america becoming  rushing like crazy right after that juliet schor when a very popular book called called the overworked american and she made the case clearly that in fact instead of working less americans were actually working longer hours and the case of two parent families significantly longer hours than they had been working in the one nine hundred sixty so something weird happened and i wanted to ask like how did this occur how do we get into this you know what  what led to this and was it a universal phenomenon and i made a film for p b s that came out in one thousand nine hundred four called running out of time and looked at this whole issue and really discovered that there were a number of reasons for this but certainly i think one of the big reasons why we are working longer or at least have been until the recession cut it back a bit is that we have seen this immense increase in inequality in this country and so the average person actually hasn't gained in income even though they've become twice as productive and yet we still want the stuff and we still have been consuming the stuff and so in order to do that we have had to do two things we have had to work longer have more people in the family working and we have had to get ourselves in lots of debt that's the way that we have been able to accomplish that when i finished running out of time and it had a premier at u w a friend get her anyway she's got a new book coming out in january about local food so i think you'll like it when vicki is the author of a very popular book called your your money or your life with some of you may have seen and vicki came bouncing down the stairs to me at u w and she put her hands on my shoulder and looked me in the eye and said john you need to make a film about overconsumption and i can help you find the money and i said vicky just said the magic words why don't you come down to k c p s and let's talk about it and indeed she did help me find a major grant from the pew charitable trust that led to my one mini hit of a film which was called affluenza and some of you may have heard of that it later became a book thank you for you have seen it and to put a little plug here the third edition of the book will be coming out in january of next year new and improved as seen on t know all that stuff so anyway something to think about but after i made affluenza i got invited to do a bunch of speaking and other things and i wanted to actually get active again in the issues that my films were about i didn't want to remain just a journalist even though i was already a pretty partisan journalist i call myself half fox i'm fair but not balanced it's really hard to reach the fox standards but i'm halfway there you know so anyway but my films did have a have a point of view and as we got together vicki and i and a number of other people we were talking about what can we do to fight this rush of consumerism in our country and all of its impacts and we thought we can't take this on by just telling everybody to wear hair shirt and live in a cave we can't tell people you've got to sacrifice for the planet and cetera et cetera because even if that might be true it doesn't work people just don't respond to that sort of thing and so our view was that we had to tell talk to people about the sacrifices they were already making in order to perpetuate this economy of mass consumption and in our view the biggest sacrifice was time was the amount we had to work to pay for it all and the impact of that on our health on our families on our communities and our environment and many other things and so in two thousand and two we started this organization take back your time and we came up with the idea of take back your time day october twenty fourth you chose that because it was one week before halloween no seriously chose it because it was nine weeks before the end of the year and it represented the fact that in two thousand and two the average american worker was putting in nine full more weeks of paid time on the job each year than the average european worker so think about that if you'd been a european you had worked as many hours as  americans at work by that time you could take the rest of the year so we picked a cobra twenty fourth and for many years in communities around the country there have been take back your time day celebrations some of them bigger than others and certainly there's been a decline in those but some communities and some colleges are still celebrating the day and i would like to revive it again we worked on several things we worked on things like paid family leave in washington we passed a bill but we didn't pass funding for it so sore didn't matter too much so officially you have paid family leave in washington but no budget and we worked on the issue of paid sick days and as you all know seattle is one of the first cities in the country to actually pass a paid sick days law giving people paid time off when they're sick by the way there are only four countries in the entire world that do not provide at least paid maternity leave for moms when they have a baby by law those countries are the united states was the land liberia and papua new guinea now when it comes to sick days it's about the same there's a handful of countries and the third issue we started working on was the issue of vacation time paid vacation time  americans don't have any by law in this we are joined by four other nations in the entire world every other country has a paid vacation law those four are soaring naam gonna nepal and that paragon of human rights it every other country has at least a basic law and if you live in europe you get at least four weeks off by law after your first week month year on the job get ahead of myself here and in some countries you get more than that so we want to get a vacation law passed and in two thousand and nine we worked with congressman alan grayson of florida and i had the opportunity actually to write the first draft of a bill that was called the paid vacation act of two thousand and nine it was a very very modest proposal it would have required that american workers get at least one or two weeks off paid depending on the size of the company that they work for now remember twenty five percent of american workers get non zero paid leave and many many others get only about a week so this actually would have affected you know maybe thirty percent of workers in the country would have gotten something out of this bill but it was extremely modest it would have been laughable in any other country people would have thought it was a joke are you kidding me one or two weeks you got to be you know you're crazy well guess what the reaction was when this bill came into the congress the response was oh my god how can we possibly compete in the global economy if we give workers wanted two weeks i think about that the fact is everybody we compete with in the global economy gives workers more than that but that didn't seem to dawn on this because i was on fox news nationally and before i bashed fox news again and i fully intend to bash fox news again before i do that i want to say that to its credit fox news was the only station that even covered the issue so they had me on one of their national shows it was the neil cavuto show but some guy was subbing for neil and in the course of this i was over it in the studio at fisher broadcasting and they were somewhere in the ozone in new york and the host pointed at me and he said you know you said you want to turn america into a twenty first century and he almost foamed at the mouth france oh my god no not that not that we were going to i guess apparently pretty good food and wine but this was the character of the debate and of course this bill got nowhere and we i have some good news and i hope you will support this my state representative gail tarleton who i'm think many of you know who represents queen anne and magnolia is going to introduce into the legislature this next year a bill for paid vacation time that would make washington state the first state in the united states to actually have legal paid vacation for workers and i hope that you will support her in that in that we can get a campaign going i know there is a lot of doctors and other people who understand the importance of this they know that for instance men who don't take regular vacations are a third more likely to have heart attacks than men and do women are fifty percent more likely women are two to eight times more likely to be depressed if they don't take vacations regularly than if they do so gail will be entering introducing a bill we are working on the language now and i don't know exactly how long she's going to go for it but i think we'll go for a little bit longer knowing that they'll probably have to make compromises if the bill goes anywhere at all but this is a work i have been involved in on the issue of time and all of this led me to get a and unders deserved reputation as an expert in the area of work life balance now you can ask my wife about how expert i am in a work life balance and she would probably laugh at the whole thing but the fact is i got this reputation and so in two thousand and nine the same year we had been vacationing act i was invited to speak in brazil at this beautiful amazing bucket list place called who falls which some of you made the biggest waterfall in the world was just absolutely gorgeous i was invited to speak it falls to the fifth international gross national happiness con conference i am not making this up i went to brazil to speak at the fifth international gross national happiness con prince and there i met folks from this little himalayan country called blue town which some of you may have heard of which lies between big china and big india it only has about seven hundred fifty thousand people what makes patani interesting is that forty years ago a kid a sixteen year old kid named me scene you want chuck became king of a baton on the death of his father and the story goes that either at his coronation or sometime shortly thereafter he was asked by an australian reporter well king what are you going to do to increase your country's gross national product we called a gross national product then now we call it g d p or gross domestic product then i can explain the difference but you don't necessarily want to know so anyway came along chuck thought about this for a second and since kids always say the darndest things he said well sir with all due respect i believe the gross national happiness is more important than gross national product now if any of our political leaders save robert kennedy who spoke about this quite eloquently in his presidential campaign but if any other american politician ever brought this up in inter terms like this we would have smiled or laughed and or yawned and politely and gone back to the business of making money we might even sent them folks with the white coats to come in and so forth but in bhutan the people take the king seriously so they wanted to figure out how do you operationalize this idea called gross national happiness anyway and they brought lots of experts from different countries in various fields to their country to tell them how to figure that out how how do you have policies that can make people happy how do you measure that and how do you figure out if your government is doing a good job and they can try and in their constitution article nine point two which says the gross national happiness must be the purpose of the government of the top one thing what tom found was that this whole idea of happiness rests on conditions of life in a whole series of what and i'm going to just run these down quickly because this is what butan measures to tell themselves how well they are doing so the first one is living standards and this is stuff and you have to have a certain basic minimum of it people need economic security no question about it it is not a happy thing to live in dire poverty but it's only one of nine things not the be all and end all as it has been in trying in our gross domestic product something we physical health bhutan found out that a democratic government was essential to people's happiness he added abdicated in turn the country into a parliamentary democracy now environment and access to nature and we know that having green space having these things available that even make she get healthy faster he can be in a hospital bed in a room and if you look at him green space obs are you get well quicker than if you look at a building across the street level i was studies that show this sort of thing the environment education and this is not just formal education but lifelong learning and a sense of of being curious and understanding things around about the world allows you to have considerably more happiness without always being entertained by more and more stuff so that's important to culture and this isn't access to culture and to time it meant the preservation of their own culture from an onslaught of western consumerism and materialism but for us it means things like access to art and music and these elements literature all of these aspects of our life without which we are poor and most important  community social connection social support from friends and family social connection with the community things like volunteering all of those things we know are absolutely essential to happiness and they're really number one and they're also the most important thing that you can do for your health in fact the worst thing you can do for your health is to be lonesome and in fact if someone were to suddenly we know this from the studies in pittsburgh that if someone were to suddenly release some flu and cold viruses into this room the odds that you would get a cold or flu are most significantly stand on one thing and that is the number of close friends and social connections you have friendship is an immune builder and lonesome loneliness is just the opposite and we are increasingly lonely in the united states a r p in cooperation with time magazine published a u c l a study in two thousand  that showed that in the previous decade alone the percentage of americans over forty five who could be characterized as chronically lonely had increased from twenty percent of the population to thirty five percent of the population almost doubling that is an absolute disaster it's a tragedy for the people who are lonely and it we will also pay a huge leap big time for it in our health care system because of the chronic illness that will result from now is the one where i come in time balance and that's why the buta knees were actually interested in what i do because they believe that about a balance of leisure and work is essential and that living a rushed and hurried and stressful life is very anti happiness if you will and then finding this one is not from god but we out of this i'm working with a group on this and this is work satisfaction how do you feel about your job are you doing something meaningful with your work do you have you're a boss who's a jerk or a nice person do you have a sense of control do you have adequate remuneration an adequate flexibility and ours all of these things in our society are hugely important for happiness though some of the less so in due time where people do not normally work in large offices and factories so i came back from brazil having met a number of people from victoria b c who are actually using these domains to survey victoria's population to see how well they were doing and i was amazed by this because i never saw it in our papers and victoria's only eighty miles away but it was a great thing so i had i invited the head of that project  michael penick to come down and talk to theone of fifty council and we then developed a thing called the happiness initiative here in seattle you can find that at the website happy count stott o r g and we put on that site a survey now that takes about fifteen minutes and when you take that survey you will get a score of each of these dimensions of life and a comparison with the national u s average so you have a sense of how you are doing and we did that in seattle we provided a report card for the city of seattle and we have now in the happiness initiative which is led by laura music can ski who was the former director sustainable seattle we have been working with many cities and colleges around the country to do these initiatives so i just got back from a two week speaking trip where i signed up to lose minnesota and burnsville minnesota minneapolis suburb and then some colleges in other places around the upper midwest to do these and issue divs our most significant one i think was with the city of auclair wisconsin which just did a bang up job with this and you can see what they've done so as a result of this work i was invited again to brazil last fall to speak at another international happiness conference that turned out to be totally in portuguese without translation  which was a little tough on me but my my talk was translated from english to portuguese and so was the other english speaker who happen to be a fellow named karma aura who runs blue tongs zero happiness program in  i were kind of in a rough way because we didn't speak portuguese and so we spent a lot of time together and we got to know each other well and he invited me to come to baton this past january and february as an advisor to their government for a big report that they were doing for the united nations and so i had the opportunity to be there with about forty other so called experts from many can about twenty different countries including  parliament members the head of the european environment agency all kinds of people it made me look like a very small small fish in a big pond and we we talked together we met for four days with the prime minister and the cabinet we  king and queen we had extensive discussions with each other and we and found out that we have some differences and i'll go through this quickly but the main two differences were between people who believe that the route to happiness is through public policy change and other people who believe that the right to happiness is through personal change in personal attitudes and behaviors the other object of debate was between the word that was the people who like the word happiness and the others who don't and there are literally lots of academics and policy people who actually cringe when they hear the word happiness they get all creepy and they really can't handle it they they think it's this sort of amorphous silly thing and they can't imagine that happiness could have anything to do with public policy which is sort of strange in a country like the united states which was founded on the principle of the presumed of happiness and where they are for most famous so called founding fathers  mr washington mr adams mr jefferson and mr franklin all sat on a number of occasions that the sole artha docs purpose of government is increasing the happiness of the people it's not economic growth it's certainly not making the rich richer it's increasing the happiness of the people so anyway in the midst of this debate we were having this debate because some people like happiness and some people don't and in the midst of this debate  me who is now the minister of labor in the government of italy amazing guy a friend of mine in italy said and rico is a wonderful human being he's the highlight of a very bad government and i cannot see how he can last but in any case it does this we do tend to ways one is by what he said we think of as well being and well being we can define as those aspects of the conditions or quality of life that can be measured objectively so if we look at health well being is things like life expectancy infant mortality obesity all of these kind of things you can do it for all of domains and that's what we did for all of the  there's another side to this and this is what we call happiness and happiness is those aspects of the quality of life that we measure subjectively through service and so when it comes to l health we ask people how do you feel about your health my health is good i'm in pain most of the time or i'm not and i feel good about my life you can do that again for all of you now this doesn't necessarily mean this this is important and wellbeing is the purpose of public policy all and these happiness the purpose of education they are the things that have been taught to us by our great faith and wisdom traditions by now positive psychology by neuro science we're finding all the same things and of course one of those important things as we know is that it is better to give than to receive this is christian tradition of tradition  other face but it is also solid science we know that being generous being having gratitude having compassion being sharing giving of oneself and then things like being patient and having  being able to delay gratification all kinds of things these skills which translate well into so societal happiness and so we we have been working on how to present this to the united nations and to look at some kind of ways in which internationally we can begin to measure these things and work on these things both clearly are important this one is the stuff of personal change happiness are in this area of time balance the second lowest in the united states corps are in the area of government confidence in government you might not be surprised by that amount we haven't looked at the data for the last month  we have a feeling that confidence in government may have trumped time balance as the lowest score in the united states during that period but i don't know yet but nonetheless americans feel very very stressed for time and it has huge impacts on our health on our family life on our social connections and also on the environment this weeds are doing a lot of studies along this line that show for example that simply reducing working hours has a huge i'm greenhouse gas emissions very important that this is key work not right now the swedish environmental protection agency and if anybody's interested i can show you give you links to some of the connections of this kind of work very very important work but dab the other thing is time balance has a big effect on many many things and i just want to get into one before i come to very end of this talk i'm almost done where i'm how how how long have i been going ok well i don't have too much more to go but i know that in this country we have an attitude that those states which by the way according to gallup by the happiest countries in the world gallup surveys of thousand americans every day as to how happy they are and it finds and it's a good thing you're all sitting down because this is going to come as a shock but gallup finds that americans dare i say it are twenty percent happier on weekends than on work days could have fooled me right and  thirty percent happier on holidays than on work days and gallup then surveys one hundred fifty countries around the world with about one thousand to three thousand people being surveyed in each country each year and gallup has a whole ranking of the entire world based on happiness levels and it's more complex but you can find that online you can go to the world happiness report two thousand and thirteen of the united nations and if you go to the second chapter of that report is just google it you will find the entire world laid out in terms of life satisfaction and happiness so anybody know what the number one country in the world is and happiness who said what did you say denmark denmark is the correct denmark is the correct answer i knew someone would get it in this room denmark's the correct answer followed by several other nordic and northern european countries including norway finland the netherlands and switzerland and sweden for example so the united states doesn't do too badly ranks seventeenth in the world although we have dropped from eleven in the last five years so we've had some some some hits from the from the current recession but in any case we don't do too bad when it comes to adult happiness now another issue and  most a lot of americans it's very much the conservative philosophy that you don't want to do things like these nanny states do these nanny states are the happiest places in the world they have several things in common number one they are have the smallest gap between rich and poor of any kind of any rich countries and we in the united states have by far the widest gap between rich and poor they have the shortest working hours in the world particularly the slacker norwegians and dattch right at the bottom of the pile and compared to us who have some of the longest or not the longest that the greeks you know who are always thinking of as you know greek greece and its mass actually work the longest hours in europe and the japanese are about the same as the south koreans are real nose to the grindstone and so forth but they have the shortest working hours they have the strongest social safety net it provides for people when times are tough and i hesitate to say this you know but in this room maybe it's ok i know that i would kind of be taken out and tarred and feathered in some places in the united states but guess what they pay the highest taxes of any countries on earth absolutely every single one of them and there is no question about this data it's as clear as a bell it is not rocket science now americans so will say well you know we don't adults can take care of themselves you know they don't need help from the government they don't need all this kind of stuff and we don't want to take the money from the producers and give it to the takers and you've heard this kind of tea party stuff  but you know what i want to point out is why don't we look at kids because you know not too many people even in the tea party who are going to say that a five year old ought to pull themselves up by his bootstraps is not really all that likely to happen in the understand it so how many of you have seen and you can google this as well how many of you seen the two thousand and thirteen unicef report on child wellbeing  rich countries that's what it's called anybody seen that anybody heard of it you heard of it it was not reported on in any american newspaper although it was the front page headline story in every major canadian newspaper and in newspapers almost all over the world and what this survey this unicef study does is it looks at twenty nine countries the world's wealthiest twenty nine countries are up and that we have data for and then it looks at a couple of other wealthy countries where less data is available and guess where we place at a twenty nine in the well being of children not twenty nine it's not that bad romania's twenty nine laffey is twenty eight lithuanian is twenty seven twenty six is the right answer twenty six is the answer now what this does is it looks at five key areas of children's lives so it looks at material well being what is the poverty rate was the security that these children have in their lives the material security it looks at physical health it looks at risky behaviors and safety it looks at the environment and our mental pollution and quality of housing conditions and i'm forgetting one zero it looks at education so these five areas and interestingly enough the united states the best we do in any of these five areas is twenty third and that's in education and the worst we do is twenty eight but not so good not so good at all and then they also ask children above the age of twelve in all of those countries how satisfied are you with your life think of a ladder with steps between zero and ten where would you put yourself how how satisfied would you say you are about your life and when it comes to subjective satisfaction the u s u s children ranked twenty third we do a little bit better than we do in the objective data it's nothing to write home about now the canadians rank seventeenth and they were absolutely again asked this is this cannot be the brits ranked sixteenth and they were absolutely a gas and so this shall not stand we have to do something about this we can well we're a wealthy country we're proud of what we do we can't have our kids and sixteen play seventy we're twenty six no one yawn i mean that's about all they did do was yawn no one no one did more than yawn or even look at this it's amazing now it's interesting to look at who the top country is and the top five countries and the top five countries they're exactly the same countries and sensually couple of minor variations as for adults but the number one country by a long shot actually is the netherlands it ranks first in three of the five objective category and number one in the subjective how to kids feel about their lives category and the question is why and so you can google this you can you can you can google wired that's kids so happy and you will get all kinds of little citation that will wired kids a happy kid happiest in the world how is it and cetera well basically it boils down to one particular thing their parents have lots of time and they have time for them because there are laws in the netherlands that really encourage parents with children to work part time and both parents so it is typical in dutch families that both parents work part time they receive additional support for their kids they have the right to go to part time work without losing their job there's benefits are pro rated they keep the same hourly salary there are many and they go into lower tax brackets and they love this and it is in hugely popular and this same policy now is being adopted in germany and belgium and will probably be adopted throughout the european union now how did this policy which is called the working hours adjustment act which was passed in two thousand in the netherlands who passed this and why it's a good  question sounds pretty liberal to me right i mean socialistic you know this this kind of thing government stepping in and helping all is well you know it turns out this law was passed by the conservative party in the netherlands the christian democratic party which took its christianity seriously and which had a whole campaign like we've heard in this country about family values we need to value families and how do you value families you make it possible for families to be together to spend time together you don't say parents can't have and you leave and they have a kid you don't make parents work over time and put kids in daycare one month and do all the kinds of things that we take for granted in this country punish parents for taking time off you know when their children are sick and we fire thousands of people each year because they took time off for being sick we do that you know i mean it's it's  however we don't work long our hours of work are rather short in fact they're in need this along with the norwegians the shortest in the world he said we like it that way because that makes it possible for us to take care of all other important non material aspects of life taking care of each other volunteering being out in nature all of these kind of things for which we are not paid and for which there is never enough time and of course this is family values this in fact is you know and i say this without trying i don't want to get preachy but i am in a church so i say that this is this is religious values this is practicing these kinds of things somehow we have not got this through our had as a nation that it is not rocket science it makes sense to take care of our kids it makes sense to have parents and the community have time to spend with their kids and the result is positive and the children are better off for it and they become more productive and more and better citizens for doing so so let me finish up by saying that  i've talked about this a lot you know about the occupy movement it started in zuccotti park in september of one thousand of two thousand and eleven in new york city when you may not know is that there was an original occupy movement and there was a novel written about it which was published in lower new york in september of one thousand nine hundred eleven exactly one hundred years to the month before the occupy movement and the title of that novel is and you can read it free on line the title of that novel is the nine tenth's and it is about the ninety nine percent except it's a little more realistic because it really is more like nine tenths who are who are suffering and and it is written this novel by a man named james oppenheimer who was much more famous for writing a poem later turned into a song which you can also listen to it's a beautiful song you can listen to judy collins version or john baez or john denver whoever you like there's all kinds of versions it's called bread and roses you've probably heard that song or heard of the poem the story is that the poem was written for to commemorate the lawrence tex the strike in massachusetts in one nine hundred twelve but that's sort of impossible because the poem was written in one thousand and eleven so unless the writer were clairvoyant that could not have but ben ben the case was actually written about about a great uprising in new york city called the uprising of the thirty thousand in which thousands of textile workers walked out of their mills to protest to fight for safety rules for higher wages and for shorter hours but in the poem and in also in lawrence where striking women were said to have carried banners that said we want bread and roses to bread is the symbol of money of higher wages of stuff the same way we use the word c y ourselves and up to a point we really needed no question about it it's not good to be dire but we're but roses are the symbol of shorter hours shorter work time time to smell the roses time in the words of the poem for art for love for beauty for all the things they're dredging spirits never new time for all of the material things in life the things that are not things but are the best thing in life and i think we have made a mistake in this country particularly since world war two in which we've really put all the emphasis on the bread and on the money and on the consuming but we've left the roses to will in my view it's time to water them again thank you thank you richard i really appreciate your inviting me here as i mentioned before so if anybody has any questions comments or tomatoes let them fly yes you know i it may be too early to tell how totally  think for some people actually bringing them together and connecting people and who also use it for real i i have to be honest with you i like facebook and i have made lots of real friends who i have originally connected to on facebook and then met them in reality and have have have great friendships with them on the other hand i do believe that it can also become just a sink of time and people can be disconnected and they can use it for you know i joke you know to that common a facebook fan page anything i ever posted i mean and so then i'm sort of telling me wow i don't know you know some second thoughts but i guess it depends on how we we use it like everything else it's a tool i do believe that it it has some positive potential but it also has a lot of potential for a negative impact and just kind of have to figure out how it how it plays out yes you know i don't want to say that i think if you look at happiness trends in the united states since the fifty's there they haven't really gone down their flat they go down a little they go up a little but essentially they're flat to be interesting thing of course is that g d p has risen enormously and happiness and what we might we refer to in a measurement used in some states called genuine progress indicator is actually flat or maybe slightly falling but there are so many factors that play a role now and i would pardon children's happiness we don't have enough major men of that going back in time really new to even start doing that so i don't think i think we can go the first evidence of that is around two thousand and seven or restarted to do that pretty much no change i guess there was a slight very slight uptick in kids happiness in the u s since two thousand and seven but not much it's generally pretty flat so i don't know but i think there are so many factors that go into this and i think obviously i believe both parents should have the full right to be in the workplace i think they ought to be in the workplace thirty her so we can set a fifty maybe or twenty four hours and i don't understand how it is possible that a wage earner working forty hours a week could support a family a larger family when i was a kid and two wage or earners today working full time are having more trouble i mean that that in wow our productivity has has more than doubled it's tripled since i was a kid i mean that's just there's no way to explain that except the ramp an increase in inequality in this country the fact that all the gains have really gone to the one percent to two percent or whatever yes well that there are lots of small countries where people are not happy i mean in the matter of just people be and if you look at economically you can say that these countries have some advantages by being smaller by being more homogeneous although they're not nearly as time a genius as we think for example the city now in the world that has the highest percentage of foreign born residences amsterdam now wait a second actually but but so diversity is happening in these these places as well but i think policy is far more important than and remember that the united states led in almost all of these categories after world war two we were just about the healthiest folks were of course these other countries who kind of bombed out of prison but for a period we were we have up until the one nine hundred seventy s americans worked fewer hours each year than europeans this has all changed really since the so called reagan revolution we were you know maybe a little better than the middle among these industrial countries at that time now we're dead last in virtually everything you look at so i don't think you can simply blame that on the size of population and remember that when we argue about the economy we have some disadvantages in being so big and maybe unwieldy but if the major advantages we have an enormous domestic market we sell eighty six percent of what we produce to people in this country now think of a finland a denmark sweden they are having to sell half of what they produce on the world market so they have to be competitive so somehow they have to be able to produce goods cheap enough to sell them on the world market but they managed to do that paying wages minimum wages of twenty dollars an hour providing five weeks of vacation a year providing free health care providing all kinds of services to people and you know so i think you can you can say that it's harder in this country to get people to agree on policy that's the major difference and we are more polarized in this country but i don't think it's just the size company no i don't i don't think that they're wrong i think they're it's incomplete and i know stephen very well he's a good and the work that he's doing is hugely important and i i supported in robert rice and others who are who are pointing these things out where i think we go wrong is in thinking that it's only that and that people only have to have incomes raise that they don't need these other things like time in their lives and stuff and i think th say that time was even more important and more valuable to the worker than money and that the worker needed time not just to lay around in a hammock but time to take care of the community to be engaged as a citizen to learn to do all of these kind of things that it has been eliminated from our movement the other thing that i find is a huge problem with many of my progressive friends is there absolute obsession with the concept of economic growth i do believe that the idea that growth is the answer to all of our problems and in this the republicans and democrats are not very far apart they have different ideas about how to get growth one scissors charity and one says stimulus but they both believe that economic growth is the path to two people being better off i think this is absolute madness let me let me just lay this out really quickly again because when a church i'm going to give a quick sermon this is a sermon that i was taught by my personal hero a man named david brower who built the sierra club founded friends of the earth and so forth and he used to give the sermon in the last years of his life and in that sermon he took the age of the earth estimated by scientists at some four point six billion years and compressed it into one week the biblical week of creation if you if you want to look at it that way and in that case a day is six hundred fifty million years an hour twenty seven million a minute is four hundred fifty thousand years and a second is seventy five hundred years and you do this you find that earth starts sunday morning life appears sometime on tuesday afternoon in the next few days it becomes ever more complex and wondrous and beautiful and then on the last day saturday at about noon those big animals appear the great reptiles the dinosaurs appear on the planet they have a long run the last four or five in the afternoon when they're there time is cut short by an asteroid crashing into the gulf of mexico which makes the world too too cold for them now the mammals appear and at three minutes before midnight on  final night of the week human beings appear on the planet at one third of a second before midnight on the last night buddha is born at one quarter of a second before midnight christ is born and one twenty fifth of a second before midnight the industrial revolution began and it won one hundredth of a second before midnight on the final night the consumer society began in that one one hundredth of a second we have managed to use more resources than all human beings who all ever lived in all of history all put together did before that time we have cut our soils and our fisheries and our fossil fuels and whose knows what other resources by half we have caused the extinction of countless species and we are significantly changing the climate and brower said there are people who believe that what we've been doing for that last hundredth of a second can go on indefinitely they are considered reasonable normal intelligent people in fact they run our corporations they run our government some of them are even liberals but they are stark raving mad just think about what we have done in this tiny glimpse of a geological eye and you understand that this cannot simply go on we have to find a way to live better without consuming more and more and more technology can help  cannot solve this problem completely if everyone on earth were to suddenly consume at the american level we would need five planets to provide the resources and absorb the waste and valen durning says we're for planet short you know s are these are the places where i differ with other progressives i don't differ at all on the importance of dealing with any quality but i think we also need to talk about time about non materialistic values that matter and we need to talk about growth and we need to talk about growth is something that simply is not unlimited well i don't know you know paul krugman i love paul krugman but he he thinks growth is still there you know beyon who said that david brower who and david brower taught me the meaning of the word happiness so i would i will give you my definition i knew him very well i made a p b s documentary about his life and i went to see him five days before he died when he was at a place called out to bates hospital in two thousand and berkeley california and he was sick with cancer and it was clear that the end was near but when we left i wanted to cheer him up so i said dave i hope that next time i see you you'll be up there healthy again and fighting the good fight and he looked me in the eye and he said john i don't think that's in the cards but it's been a great eighty eight years and i think that's what we all want to be able to say however that much time we have on this planet and we have made a difference in our time here and that's what i ask you to keep doing thank you