The upside of talking to real people

Yale President Peter Salovey cited a 2014 study from the University of Chicago on happiness. Asked their preference, people said they would rather be alone than speak with a stranger. Yet, the study said, research links such encounters with happiness — and tech developments like texting and online shopping are making them rarer.

• "A lot of things that gave us pleasure aren’t part of our lives anymore,” he says.
• Laurie Santos, whose class on happiness in spring 2018 had the largest enrollment in Yale history at 1,200 students, told us, “We’ve created an attention economy, and attention is a limited resource.”
• Social media reinforces the idea that anger and outrage are effective tools to get that attention, said Molly Crockett, a psychology professor. Outrage on social media is “like a habit,” she said, and has blurred the line between acting out and commenting genuinely.

Yes, but: Economics is still part of the picture. Salovey also cited a 2010 study by psychologist Daniel Kahneman and economist Angus Deaton that found income does correlate to happiness — but only up to $75,000. (58% of U.S. households earn less than that.)

The big question: United Way's Gallagher argues that the U.S. began shifting “from a ‘we’ culture to an ‘I’ culture” about four decades ago and that over time, “the values that hold us together … start to get stripped away.”

• “All of a sudden people didn’t want to pay for the education of other people’s children,” said Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber. “The question is, how do you rebuild a civic bond?”

Go deeper: Read the full Davos Special Report