Chapter 10 Communities

We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.

–– Dr Martin Luther King Jr1

At this very moment over one million Britons have not spoken to anyone for over five days.2 This is deeply shocking. Loneliness is a major problem in modern societies. It is most common in old age, but many younger people also feel it, especially because more and more of them live alone.

In a national survey, British people were asked, ‘How lonely do you feel in your daily life?’ (on a scale of 0 to 10). As can be seen in Table 10.1, over 15 per cent of all Britons are lonely (answering 6 or above). For old people, loneliness is the biggest single factor affecting their happiness.3 It also increases their likelihood of suffering from dementia, heart disease, depression, stroke or of death.4 Being lonely is as bad for your health as smoking is.5

Table 10.1
Percentage of people who feel lonely in Britain

Age
16–64 15%
65–79 15%
80+ 29%

The social animal

The reason is that, as Aristotle has said, we are social animals. We need other people for a thousand practical reasons – to eat, procreate, earn a living, and so on. But we also need them for more than that – we need them for themselves. We need them for the pleasure of their company. And we need them for the joy of being of use to them – we need to be needed.

As we have seen in Chapter 7, most of us love socializing with people who want our company.6 It makes us feel understood – that the world is on our side. Moreover, we depend on other people for our own sense of who we are – our identity. Our identity is connected to the kind of people with whom we naturally associate. We can of course choose who we socialize with, but from then on it is a two-way process, as they constantly reinforce our image of ourselves. And that is what gives us the sense of belonging.7

We all have multiple identities. We belong to a family, to a workplace, to a group of friends, to a local community, to a country, and even to the world. We can influence each of these groups, and they in turn influence us. In this chapter we shall focus on how our local community affects us and how we contribute to it.

When we associate with people in our community, we usually do it for a particular purpose, as well as for the intrinsic pleasure of being sociable. When adults meet outside the family or work environment, it is generally for one of these purposes:8

So who organizes these activities? Many of them are provided by the private sector (like cafés, bars, theatres, cinemas, dancing, yoga classes). Others are typically provided by local government (like swimming pools, libraries and some sports fields). But many are provided by non-profit clubs of all kinds – from golf clubs to churches to social service groups. Let’s call them ‘community groups’.

These community groups are the heart and soul of many communities, and a key part of the social capital of a society.9 Some are socially homogeneous (like golf clubs), while others are more socially diverse (like many churches). In the terminology of the great Harvard sociologist Robert D. Putnam, the former provide ‘bonding’ social capital and the latter provide ‘bridging’ social capital. Bridging social capital is particularly important for establishing one’s general trust in humanity – the importance of feeling that other people are generally on your side.10 But both types of social capital create the experience of belonging which is so essential for a happy life. And for most people the main sense of belonging still comes from face-to-face interaction rather than from online communities.

So what can be done to increase the sense of belonging to your local community? On the positive side, we can encourage volunteer activity which is the lifeblood of community groups. Planners can also plan the local neighbourhood so that people naturally associate with each other. On the negative side, we have to offer safe and crime-free streets. And we have to construct communities which, however diverse, involve mutual respect and not the feeling of ‘them and us’.

Thus in this chapter we will discuss four issues:

  1. community groups and voluntary activity
  2. crime and the integration of offenders
  3. ethnic diversity, and
  4. the physical design of cities.

Volunteering

Though many community organizations receive money from the state, they would not exist without voluntary labour.11 Many are run by volunteer officers and committee members, and nearly all use volunteers to do much of the work on the ground. Voluntary activity on such a scale only happens because it feels worthwhile to the volunteer and, as Chapter 1 showed, there is plenty of evidence that it raises their happiness levels.12

Thus voluntary activity, like all giving, is twice blessed – it blesses those that give and those that receive. A good example is the Experience Corps that flourishes in many American cities and enables old people to feel needed by giving meaningful support to children. The volunteers must be at least fifty and they deliver literacy support to primary school children up to the third grade. Most of the volunteers have high school education only, and they get two weeks’ training in how to deliver the literacy support. They then work in schools delivering this support for fifteen hours a week. In Baltimore, the volunteers have been carefully followed up in a controlled trial, lasting on average for six months. Compared with a wait-list control group, the volunteers who participated in the trial found they had increased ‘the number of people they could turn to for help’, as well as their level of physical activity.13 Over two years, when compared with controls, they were found to have increased their brain volume in both the hippocampal and cortical areas.14 This makes good sense: contacts between young and old not only help the young, but rejuvenate the old.

Similar principles apply to programmes specifically aimed at reducing loneliness in old age. Many of these schemes save as much as they cost.15 In one randomized trial in Finland, people were invited into day-care centres where they regularly undertook activities together, including writing, exercise and art. Two years after the initial approach, their subjective health was improved by 25 per cent, and their health care costs were down enough to fully pay for the programme.16

Schemes led by volunteers are particularly cheap.17 In one British experiment, volunteers over fifty-five visited older people who were lonely; they went once a week for ten weeks to help them plan out a more sociable life. In consequence, the old people felt less lonely and developed more social contacts. And the volunteers themselves also felt less lonely.18

Volunteering and charity work cannot of course solve all the ills of society – the state also has a crucial role to play. But volunteering widens the network of contacts in a society. As Pope Francis puts it, it involves direct ‘engagement’ in the lives of others. The opposite is a society where people constantly distinguish between ‘them’ and ‘us’ – a society where people have a strong fear or dislike of ‘the other’. In the West such ‘others’ commonly include both criminals and people of different ethnicities. In fact, when Westerners are asked about the problems facing their society, the most commonly mentioned issues include both crime and immigration.19 Let us take these issues in turn.

Crime and the integration of offenders

Crime affects not only the victims of crime, but also the whole community. For the fear of crime undermines the security of everyone. In Britain, a doubling of the local crime rate reduces the average mental health of the average local resident by 0.1 points (when measured on a scale of 0–10).20 This is partly because people hugely exaggerate the amount of crime. In one survey 30 per cent of Europeans thought they were likely to be burgled in the next year, whereas in fact the number actually burgled in the previous year was only 1.6 per cent. This discrepancy was greatest in countries with low levels of social trust – countries where general antipathy to ‘the other’ was at its greatest.21

So how are we to reduce crime? One obvious way to reduce reoffending is to stop treating convicted criminals as ‘the other’. An impressive example comes from the Singapore Prison experiment. In 1998 the prison service was under enormous pressure. There were high levels of recidivism, and prison officers were leaving in droves due to low morale. But then Chua Chin Kiat was appointed as Director of Prisons. He made each officer responsible for the rehabilitation of a group of prisoners in his block. He gave prisoners a role in the organization of prison life, and improved contacts between prisoners and their families, including tele-visits. He opened prisons to public tours. But, most important, he immediately introduced an after-care system, where care workers whom the prisoners already knew continued to support them after they were released.

There remained the issue of persuading employers to hire the ex-prisoners. So Chua established the Yellow Ribbon Project. It was named after a pop song ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree’, in which an offender begs his wife to forgive him. In four years some 300,000 Singaporeans participated in Yellow Ribbon activities designed to help ex-offenders. In 2007 and 2009 the Singapore Prison Service was voted one of the best employers in Singapore. It was recruiting with ease. And by 2007 recidivism had fallen from 44 per cent to 26 per cent.22

Most people in prison have mental-health problems.23 They should all be offered psychological therapy and, when necessary, medication. In Washington State, juvenile offenders given Functional Family Therapy by competent therapists were 38 per cent less likely to reoffend over the following eighteen months. And the programme saved much more money than it cost.24

But of course it would be best if we could prevent people from offending in the first place. That is the aim of Communities That Care (CTC), a large programme in twenty-four communities across seven US states to prevent problem behaviour by young people aged ten and upwards. The programme does not itself deliver services – it is a system for helping communities to develop the services they need. Specialist trainers hold six training events, roughly one per month in each community, followed by ongoing contacts. When it was trialled, the CTC areas experienced an 18 per cent reduction in youth anti-social behaviour, compared with the matched areas.25

Notice that at no point have I talked about criminals getting their just desserts. For that is no part of the philosophy of wellbeing. As Jeremy Bentham explained over two hundred years ago,26 punishment can only be justified by its consequences and not because it provides retribution. The consequences that matter are deterrence, protection and rehabilitation:

Sentencing should be proportional and based on the balance of these three sets of consequences. There is no role for retribution, or ‘giving the offender what he deserves’. Retribution is based on a primitive instinct for revenge. But the proper punishment for a crime is the one which produces the best consequences. If the motive is vengeance, the consequences are unlikely to be good. Indeed, even for the victim, it is generally a mistake to suppose that you will be happier if you seek for justice against the perpetrator. Typically this pursuit will simply prolong your agony, often for many years. By contrast, seeking to clarify what actually happened can often help. But eventually the best thing is for the victim to try to accept what has happened, and for society to try to re-establish the offender as one of us.

Ethnic diversity

The same principle of integration applies to people from different ethnic and cultural groups. But it is not easy. In the USA there is overwhelming evidence that people are less likely to trust people from other ethnic backgrounds. And, more than that, in areas of great diversity, people also trust their own sort less, and tend to withdraw from social contacts more generally. And they are less willing to pay for generous welfare benefits and other public goods.27

The story is similar in Britain – people are on average less satisfied in areas of mixed ethnicity.28 However, it seems to have been less true in continental Europe, where there is no long-standing evidence that immigration reduces life-satisfaction. In Germany a careful longitudinal study from 1998 to 2009 showed that people were at least as happy in high immigrant areas as elsewhere (other things being equal).29 Another study covering roughly the same period, and all European countries, had similar findings when looking at the flow of immigration rather than the stock of immigrants.30 Looking at the world as a whole, there is no evidence that countries with high proportions of people born elsewhere are, other things being equal, less happy.31

Even so, immigration is a highly explosive issue in many countries and has become more so since the wave of migration across the Mediterranean into Europe from 2015 onwards. This is particularly the case for unskilled immigrants, who can sometimes undermine the economic position of native unskilled workers and lead existing residents to move out of their neighbourhoods when the immigrants move in.32 As we argue in Chapter 11, there must be effective limits to immigration if we are to avoid major social tensions.

But, whatever happens, ethnic diversity will continue to increase worldwide, so how can we make it work for the happiness of all? Many factors are crucial. The first is the law. Laws against racial discrimination and religious hatred have been vital in producing decent, peaceful societies. The second is attitudes – of natives and of immigrants. The Gallup Organization has a measure of how accepting native populations are towards immigrants. And, across the world, both natives and immigrants are happier the more accepting the natives are towards immigrants.33 Equally, everyone will be happier if immigrants try to assimilate, and this will be easier if they have good access to language classes and to adult education in the ways of their new country. But in the end it is familiarity which breaks down the sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’ and turns them into us. So mixed residential areas help and so do mixed schools. There are real problems with schools that cater for children from only one faith or denomination.

Let me end this section with a heart-warming story from India. In 2007 private schools in Delhi were forced to take 20 per cent of their pupils from poor families, who paid no fees.34 They were also required to integrate the poor students into the same classes as students who were more privileged. The result was a striking change in the attitudes and behaviour of the privileged children. First, they became more inclusive in the friends they made outside school, and in the team-mates they chose at sport. And, second, they became more pro-social – more likely to volunteer for a charity at school and more generous and equitable in their behaviour in laboratory experiments.

Thus it is possible to create real communities from people of very diverse backgrounds – e pluribus unum (from many, one). The USA is still struggling with the problem of race relations; many countries struggle with religious and tribal divisions; and the whole world is struggling with immigration. But eventually those who once felt different discover what they have in common; they begin to inter-marry and the differences tend to diminish.

The physical design of cities

Loneliness, crime and diversity are powerful examples of the importance to us of the social context in which we live. But what about the physical context – the layout of our cities, our buildings, our houses, our transport systems and our contact with nature?35

In 2014 Britain’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics was taking evidence. Its aim was to investigate how far British policy-making was oriented to the happiness of the people. At one session the group took evidence from a senior official at the Department for Communities and Local Government, the department which regulates the planning system which in turn authorizes the building of new homes.

Planning is a crucial issue in Britain because so few houses are being built that house prices are amongst the highest in the world. One reason for this slow rate of building is the green belt around Britain’s major cities: building has not been allowed in these areas, even though much of the land is unattractive and has no public access.36 This prevents the building of homes in areas where many house-builders are most eager to build them – on the outskirts of our cities. As a result, we have very high rents and house prices. This imposes huge costs on all those looking to rent and on young people trying to buy their first home. It also provides huge gains to the relatively few landowners who are given permission to sell their land to be built on.

So the official was asked, ‘How do you think the green belt policy affects the wellbeing of the different sections of society?’ He replied, ‘You don’t understand. The policy is not influenced by wellbeing considerations. It is a simple principle of spatial planning that one community should not expand until it becomes contiguous with another community.’37

Fortunately, not all planners and architects think like this, and there is a small but growing number of them who believe in happiness research. Obviously we ought to know how people feel in different environments and, increasingly, we are able to study this – both by asking them and by taking biological measurements as they move around.38 This should be the basis of the new town planning. This is a massive subject, and here I will discuss only two issues:

  1. The provision of opportunities for social connection
  2. The importance of green space.

BUILDINGS AND SOCIAL CONNECTIONS

Our buildings, streets and transport systems all have a powerful impact on our experience of our fellow human beings. These processes have been studied over many years, at least since the work of the great urban thinker Jane Jacobs. The central issue is, how close do people want to be to other people if they are to be happy? And the broad answer is: fairly close, but not too close.

We seek a balance, where we can enjoy social exchange but do not have it forced upon us. The majority of humans like a degree of concentrated living (where they can walk to a familiar shopping area or meeting place), but they do not want to be piled on top of each other among hundreds of people they do not know. There is now a significant body of knowledge about how buildings affect people.

So town planning is a complicated business, with constant conflicts of interest between different uses of land and between different modes of transport. The ultimate test must be the citizens’ happiness. Let us hope that in future architects and planners will study the psychological and physiological responses of potential users of their buildings – before they build them.46

GREEN SPACE

One issue is how much land to use as open green space within cities. People are substantially happier if there is green space close to where they live. We can see this from the German socio-economic survey of the same individuals over a long period. Many of these people moved home during the course of the survey and we can therefore see how their happiness was affected by the amount of green space there was near each of their different homes, all else being constant.47 The data showed that it made a huge difference. If the nearest green open space is 100 metres closer to your home, your life-satisfaction is increased by 0.04 points.

So should we have more green open space in cities? We can begin with two facts. First, if there is an extra hectare of green open space within one kilometre of your house, you are happier by 0.007 points. Second, any hectare in a typical German city is (on average) within one kilometre’s distance of 6,000 households. It follows that one extra hectare of green space provides an extra 42 points of life-satisfaction.48 If the money equivalent of an extra point of life-satisfaction for a year is €150,000,49 then 42 points of life-satisfaction for a year are worth €6.3 million. In many cities this benefit of €6.3 million would exceed the annual cost of providing an extra hectare of parkland. By contrast, abandoned land close to where people live reduces their happiness – an added reason for turning such space into urban greenery.

But what about the happiness effects of green belts? The same German study showed that happiness was unaffected by how far you lived from the edge of the city.50 This shows that what people want is parks nearby, not countryside that few will visit – they want green fingers rather than green belts.

Numerous other studies in Britain and elsewhere confirm the positive effects of green space on happiness, on mental and physical health, and on crime.51 Many years ago Roger Ulrich (then at the University of Delaware) examined the recovery rate from gall bladder operations in a hospital. One group of patients were in rooms that faced trees, and the other group were in rooms that faced a brick wall. The patients who looked out on the trees recovered faster and needed fewer painkillers.52 Hospital patients also do better when surrounded by pictures of landscapes than when surrounded by abstract art.53 Crime rates too are lower in greener parts of a city, after controlling for other influences.54 And, in an interesting lab experiment, people were more generous with their money if they had just been shown slides of nature rather than slides of urban skylines.55

One can also see the effects of green space by tracing people’s movements day by day. This shows that people feel better in green space than in city streets, and even better when they are in the countryside (though they rarely go there).56 In one of these studies, people were given wrist cuffs to measure their skin conductance and thus their level of psychological ‘arousal’. The study showed that people are much more mellow in green surroundings.57

Of course there is nothing like a garden to keep you sane. As they say, ‘If you want to be happy for a day have a drink; if you want to be happy for a year have a spouse; and if you want to be happy for a lifetime, have a garden.’

Conclusions

Happiness requires a sense of belonging – not just to your family or your workplace, but also to your local community more generally. You need human contact and it needs to be enjoyable. To make this happen requires good town planning, effective approaches to crime and immigration and great community services.

We need a revitalized local government, committed to raising the wellbeing of its people. Any serious local government will collect data on wellbeing and compare it with benchmarks. It will address the pockets of misery, but all its policies will aim at improving the wellbeing of the people and their sense of local pride and belonging.58

We also need thousands of citizens’ organizations, running anything from sports grounds to old people’s clubs. These organizations cannot exist without volunteers, and the scale of voluntary work is one mark of a happy community. As always, we want the work to be effective, and there is more and more evidence on what really works and what does not.

In these last six chapters we have shown how different groups of citizens can contribute to a happier society. It is time to look at the overall scene, through the eyes of economists and politicians.

“I’d like you to meet Marty Thorndecker. He’s an economist, but he’s really very nice.”