Paying off the public debt may avert more misery, but what will make us happier? Colin Marrs reports on plans to measure public wellbeing, as they do in Bhutan, Canada and France, and use the results to shape policy.
It is widely acknowledged that measuring Gross Domestic Product paints only a partial picture of the state of the nation. The importance of emotional happiness has long had a place in economic theory – with roots in the utilitarian doctrines of economist Jeremy Bentham – and in 1968, US politician Robert Kennedy claimed that the statistic measures “everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile”. Now, our own government is waking up to the idea of measuring the wellbeing of the nation.
Indeed, prime minister David Cameron consciously echoed Bobby Kennedy’s words when he said last year that measuring wellbeing would “help bring about a re-appraisal of what matters; and in time, it will lead to government policy that is more focused not just on the bottom line, but on all those things that make life worthwhile.” Cameron announced that he had asked the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to investigate how it might add satisfaction measures to its official dataset. Facing down press mockery, the PM said the process would lead to a fresh approach to policymaking.
As an example of the limitations of the GDP measure, Cameron cited the example of a city suffering earthquake damage, where spending is boosted by people buying security equipment to protect their possessions. Mark Williamson, director of Action for Happiness – an offshoot of charity and think tank the Young Foundation – gives another example: “People binge drinking are increasing the wealth of the country, but the activity is not good for overall wellbeing.”
In trying to measure happiness, our government is following a well-trodden path. The Kingdom of Bhutan developed a sophisticated measurement of “Gross National Happiness” in the early ‘70s, and collects data on how residents say they felt the previous day. The survey measures “wellness” in the following areas: economic, environmental, physical, mental, workplace, social and political – the results are used by the Bhutan government to screen new policies.
The Bhutan project was led by a leading scientist from Canada, a country whose government now undertakes its own regular wellbeing surveys. However, the Canadian results are not included in the country’s official dataset, and John Helliwell, a member of Canada’s National Statistics Council – who is one of 45 advisers appointed by national statistician Jil Matheson to guide the UK process – admitted recently that the effect on policymaking has been limited.
The European Commission ran its first European Quality of Life Survey in 2003, featuring a set of indicators including subjective measures of wellbeing. The commission is currently working on incorporating the survey into a wide-ranging set of data aimed at moving beyond GDP in formulating policy. And in 2009, French president Nicholas Sarkozy appointed Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz to produce a report which this year recommended that wellbeing data be incorporated into official statistics.
However, according to Charles Seaford, head of the Centre for Wellbeing at think tank the New Economics Foundation, Cameron’s move “has seen the UK sneak up on the outside to become the first European country to include happiness statistics in official data”. Following Cameron’s intervention, the ONS commissioned a report by academics including the LSE’s Lord Layard, a leading authority on happiness economics. The report argued that GDP and traditional cost-benefit analyses have some value as a measure of “objective” wellbeing. But it said that it would be desirable to add “subjective” measures to official data.
The report argued for subjective wellbeing to be measured in three ways: evaluative, where respondents are asked to assess their level of contentment with their life, or with aspects of it; experiential, where questions focus on feelings of pleasure at a particular point in time; and ‘eudemonic’ measures, focusing on feelings of control, autonomy and connectedness to society. Each area should be measured separately, it said.
Following the report, the ONS included four experimental questions in its Integrated Household Survey (IHS). In line with the ONS report’s recommendations, the first question was evaluative: “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?” Two were experiential, asking how happy and how anxious the respondent felt yesterday. And the final one was eudemonic: “Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?”
ONS programme director Paul Allin says that although the questions draw on existing research, the results will be regarded as experimental: “There is more work to be done to check that the questions work and that they meet public policy and other needs, including international developments.” Alongside the IHS process, the ONS has just completed a consultation on the future role of wellbeing measures in official statistics; a report is due by July, says a spokesman.
In the UK, pollster Gallup has been producing independent data on life satisfaction for a number of years, while the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has collected life satisfaction data since 2007. However, Seaford is convinced that the ONS survey will provide a much more powerful tool for policymakers. “Whereas the Defra survey covers just 1,500 people, the IHS goes to more than 200,000 people,” he says. “This means you can break down the results by region and even local authority area. The fact that the subjective data is included in a survey that also measures objective data means you have a very useful method of identifying issues affecting particular population groups.”
Seaford agrees, arguing that over time the IHS data could greatly help people estimate the impacts of proposed policies. “It is possible that this sort of survey will create a database that will allow you to say a particular policy could create ‘x’ amount of wellbeing,” he says. “At the moment, that process would involve a resource-intensive separate survey for each policy.”
Moreover, such data could strengthen the basis of wide areas of government thinking, and offer a new set of evidence to inform policymaking. “In education, there is currently a huge focus on exam results,” says Seaford. “But it may be that life satisfaction measures discover that emotional skills are more important to individuals’ success in later life. The emphasis of the curriculum might change to reflect that.”
As yet, policymakers have barely begun to explore the potential uses of wellbeing data; but if the tool proves to have real value in creating policies that are more popular or effective, it is likely to have a significant impact on policymaking. In the long term, says Williamson, the wellbeing measure might even find a home in the Green Book – the Treasury guidance on how policies and programmes should be evaluated. But he warns that data on happiness will not, alone, enable government to ensure the population is content.
“Research shows that 40 per cent of happiness comes from conscious, individual choices,” he says. “Although government has a huge role, to a large degree it is down to us to make ourselves happy.”