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Juliet Michaelson is a researcher at nef’s centre for well-being.
Writing on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website, Catherine Bennett is unconvinced that “it is the state’s business to meet those psychological needs” that the Young Foundation’s recent research has highlighted. She suggests that “since no nice person would want to set their face against general wellbeing”, using well-being as a political goal is utterly devoid of meaning. This inadvertently raises a crucial question: what is the overall goal of politics?
Economic growth is the most common headline measure of political success. Combating problems such as poor mental health or income inequality, although dismissed by Bennett, might also be candidates. In fact none of these pass muster in the role of ultimate outcome for societies. When examined closely, it becomes clear that they are all different means to the end of well-being: enabling people to experience their lives going well. As the economist Andrew Oswald has noted:
People have no innate interest in the money supply, inflation, growth, inequality, unemployment … Economic things matter only in so far as they make people happier.
Aiming for well-being is not about seeking an “immediate surge in collective pleasure”, as Bennett puts it. It is about a life well lived, not short-term happiness or pleasure seeking. What we do is fundamental to how we feel, and research shows that strong connections to other people and engagement in meaningful activities are among the most important determinants of well-being. This understanding informs our work at nef, where we have demonstrated that well-being outcomes can be robustly and systematically measured through a framework of national accounts of well-being.
There is broad public support for well-being being the ultimate political goal. A 2006 poll for the BBC found that 81% of people supported the idea that the government’s prime objective should be the “greatest happiness” rather than the “greatest wealth”. Furthermore, a sense of well-being is itself a means to traditional policy ends, with proven links, for example, to longer life expectancy and improved health outcomes.
Bennett suggests that it would be “surreal” for policy initiatives to aim to improve well-being. But what is truly surreal is that public policy has often been antithetical to well-being – encouraging long work hours and personal debt, and engendering intense competition from tests at primary school onwards. The evidence shows that our current turbo-charged consumption levels are largely driven by competition for status – a zero-sum activity where for every winner there is a loser.
Focusing on social position through material goods leads to the inescapable treadmill of working longer and harder to buy ever more – at the cost both to well-being and the planet. While some less empathetic members of the public may, as Bennett says, “feel quite happy with current levels of brittleness, inequality and mental ill health”, this is cold comfort to those suffering at the sharp end of these problems. And as evidence from epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson has highlighted, we all suffer under greater levels of inequality, given its associations with crime, low social capital and a host of other undesirable outcomes. There is a clear role here for policy to discourage the excesses of these damaging behaviours.
Fortunately, the evidence from fields such as behavioural economics and positive psychology also points to what enhances experienced well-being. The “five ways to well-being“, distilled by nef from a 2008 government review of the latest scientific evidence in the field, identify well-being-enhancing activities in everyday life. Current policy, directed towards maximising hours spent in paid employment and failing to value non-market activities, hampers people’s ability to get involved in the sorts of community and voluntary activities that offer some of the best opportunities to connect with others, be physically active, take notice of what’s around us, learn new skills, and give. It is not the state’s business to impose such activities on us. But it does have a clear role in establishing the conditions that allow individuals to maximise their own well-being. This is the true yardstick by which political success should be measured.
Juliet Michaelson is a researcher at nef’s centre for well-being.
Central Lobby, Palace of Westminster (Parliamentary copyright images are reproduced with the permission of Parliament)
Leading members of the three main political parties addressed the second meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics yesterday, with a striking degree of consensus that well-being should urgently rise up the political agenda. Labour peer Professor Lord Richard Layard, Oliver Letwin MP, Chair of the Conservative Research Department and Policy Review and Chris Huhne MP, Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary, all agreed that GDP fails as an adequate measure of welfare and pointed to the need for a new way of measuring the things that are really important. The comments of all three speakers supported the aims of the Group, for which nef acts as the secretariat, to challenge GDP as the sole indicator of wealth and promote new measures of societal progress.
The speakers agreed that policy-making should be much more focused on what well-being research tell us are the drivers of high well-being, with lots of emphasis given to the importance of supporting good relationships. But there was not unanimity on all points of policy. For example, only Chris Huhne mentioned, as a strong argument in favour of progressive taxation, the varying well-being value of an extra pound of income to people with different levels of economic wealth.
However, there was general consent to the proposition that without a strong headline measure to rival GDP, the well-being agenda would not get the attention it requires. Oliver Letwin perhaps went furthest in this direction. He spoke of the ‘terrible danger’ that the Conservatives would find themselves in government and under pressure to focus only on traditional political issues unless a ‘serious, competing measure’ of well-being could be produced. He pointed to the need for all three parties to act in step to create a ‘political licence to talk about what really matters’. As Chair Jo Swinson MP pointed out, this is exactly what the ongoing work of the All-Party Parliamentary Group will aim to bring about.
Juliet Michaelson is a researcher at nef’s centre for well-being.
This article first appeared at Policy Innovations.
A sunset in Costa Rica, the nation that topped the Happy Planet Index 2.0. | Image by Alexander Steffler
Governments around the world are caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place: We are now nearly two years into what is widely heralded as the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the ecological crisis of global warming threatens the foundations of human civilization. Should countries stimulate their economies at any cost? How should they prioritize the health of global and local ecosystems? The debates about whether government money should be used to shore up struggling car industries neatly encapsulate these sorts of dilemmas.
Many in government may feel that the best overall path is far from clear. Part of the problem is that they lack tools for making these sorts of policy decisions. The common yardstick since the 1940s has been GDP growth. Gross Domestic Product reflected the wartime concern with increasing economic productivity, and since then it has become synonymous with progress. As the United Kingdom’s Sustainable Development Commission notes, “The state has become caught up in a belief that growth should trump all other policy goals.”
Yet intrinsic to growing GDP is the need to produce more stuff. This is exactly what our planet cannot sustain. More stuff requires more of the Earth’s dwindling fossil energy supplies, with waste products that threaten the climate.
The kernel of the solution to resolving these competing demands lies within the structure of the problem itself. The fact that economic growth can be conceived of in opposition to the health of the planet suggests that neither can claim to be regarded as the true overall measure of success in human society. A much more convincing case is made by the concept of well-being. The experience of well-being is about feeling that your life is going well, something which is universally important to people everywhere. The concept of well-being enables us to define the ultimate aim of human endeavor to be healthy, happy, and meaningful lives.
The Earth’s resources are the fundamental input to this system. A well-regulated economy is just one means to produce well-being—along with others including community, technology, values, and governance. Systems thinking also shows us that using planetary resources so that they can be sustained into the future is vital to ensuring that human well-being can also be maintained in the long term.
The updated Happy Planet Index (HPI), published last month by nef (the new economics foundation), uses this view of society to formulate an indicator of overall progress. Scores on the HPI represent the amount of human well-being a country produces relative to its resource use. It is measured in terms of long and happy lives. The HPI is thus an efficiency index, measuring how much well-being is achieved per unit of environmental impact:
HPI ≈ (Life expectancy x Life satisfaction) / Ecological footprint
Juliet Michaelson is a researcher at nef’s centre for well-being.
In making the case for the regular collection of national level statistics on population well-being, our National Accounts of Well-being report highlighted the interesting model provided by the Gallup-Healthways Well-being Index. This is a survey which since January 2008 has conducted 1000 interviews almost every day of the year across the United States to produce detailed well-being data on a daily basis. As a privately-sponsored survey, the full dataset is not publicly available, but a new website allows the data collected in 2008 to be explored at state- and congressional district-level .
The approach to conceptualising and measuring well-being is somewhat different to our own: while our National Accounts of Well-being were based on seven key components of personal and social well-being, the Gallup-Healthways Well-being Index is built up of six domains of well-being. There are some similarities, with two of the Gallup-Healthways domains being built on measures of emotional health and evaluations of life as a whole, mirroring our emotional well-being and satisfying life components. But, in part reflecting the healthcare industry sponsorship of the survey, the domains also expand beyond subjective well-being to measure physical health, healthy behaviour, work environment and basic needs and services. It’s a useful point of comparison to our National Accounts of Well-being, and will help frame the debate about exactly which elements of population well-being it is most useful to systematically measure. It also demonstrates the growing recognition, in the private sector as well as in government and policy circles, of the value of rigorously collected population well-being statistics.
Juliet Michaelson is a researcher at nef’s centre for well-being.
A letter to the Financial Times, 30 January 2009.
Sir, As John Thornhill notes (“A measure remodelled”, January 28), those such as Simon Kuznets who developed the modern measure of gross domestic product were explicit that it should not be used as an indicator of social progress. More than 60 years on, in a classic example of mission creep, GDP remains the de facto measure of national success and is used as the standard against which virtually all macro-level policy decisions are judged. The consequences of this obsession with economic growth are clear: a financial system disconnected from the real economy, unsustainable levels of debt and intolerable strain placed on the planet by our high-consuming lifestyles.
The new economics foundation has long called for governments to establish national accounts of subjective well-being – systematic measures of how people think and feel about their lives. In a report launched last weekend, we provided the first ever detailed proposal for how they could be structured and implemented – see www.nationalaccountsofwellbeing.org
An approach endorsed by, among others, Enrico Giovannini, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s chief statistician, and Prof Daniel Kahneman, the economics Nobel laureate, national well-being accounts provide a direct measure of meaningful outcomes in people’s lives.
By enabling policymakers to understand the real impact of their actions on people’s experience, such accounts would reconnect government with its core purpose: improving the lot of the people it serves. It is a reconnection that must be swiftly expedited. As we enter uncharted territory it is clear that we need a better compass to guide us; National Accounts of Well-being would be a significant step in the right direction.
Juliet Michaelson
Sam Thompson
Centre for Well-being,
nef (new economics foundation),
London SE11, UK
See also: Reuters, ‘On wealth versus well-being’
Juliet Michaelson is a researcher at nef’s centre for well-being.
Today’s Financial Times includes a full page of analysis discussing the growing movement among economists and others towards producing alternative measures of economic performance and social progress. If you’ve already read our National Accounts of Well-being report , published last weekend, or looked at the accompanying website, much of the content will be familiar: the strong caution issued by Simon Kuznets, the designer of the original GDP measure, that it should not be used to infer the welfare of a nation; the perverse nature of the way GDP is calculated by mechanically counting productivity, so that spending on things like divorce proceedings is counted as a benefit; and the current work of the commission headed by Nobel-laureate economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen to develop new measures to enable us to change “our political priorities and build happier, greener, societies”.
The article concludes by highlighting what it describes as “perhaps the most controversial issue” being examined by the commission, namely “whether to create some kind of ‘happiness index’ based on surveys of people’s attitudes”. What it doesn’t mention is that this is precisely what we have done in our work on National Accounts of Well-being. While we don’t claim that our indicators are the final word on how governments should measure people’s experiences of their lives, they certainly show how, by using high-quality survey data, robust and detailed measures of well-being are not only possible, but now a reality.
It remains to be seen what the Stiglitz-Sen commission will conclude when it reports in April. But crucially, to enable policy-makers to truly understand the impact of their actions on the reality of people’s lives, societies must start paying attention to the ways in which subjective well-being can be carefully and seriously measured. We think that our National Accounts of Well-being represent a substantial step forward along this path and our growing band of expert supporters suggests that many others are beginning to think so too.
Juliet Michaelson is a researcher at nef’s centre for well-being.
What is the best way to measure whether a country is successful? For most of the last 100 years, we have tended to assume that the answer lies in observing the growth of headline economic indicators, such as GDP. Plenty of criticisms have been levelled at GDP – it is far too narrow a measure, takes no account of the distribution of resources or environmental costs, and so on. And recent events hammer home the point that chasing ever-increasing economic growth is a fool’s errand. Even Gordon Brown, since 1997 the de-facto Chief Financial Officer of UK PLC, has had to admit that there’s no such thing as boom without the bust.
Our new report, National Accounts of Well-being: bringing real wealth onto the balance sheet, published on Saturday, provides a different response to the question. It argues that the success of nations is best measured in terms of the things that really matter to the people who live in them: their experiences, feelings and perceptions of how their lives are going. In other words, their subjective well-being. After all, as British economist Andrew Oswald noted almost 30 years ago:
“Economic performance is not intrinsically interesting…People have no innate interest in the money supply, inflation, growth, inequality, unemployment…Economic things matter only in so far as they make people happier.”
What does matter to us, and is arguably the ultimate goal of all human endeavour, is that we feel good about ourselves and the people around us, and do things in our lives which give us a sense of meaning and value.
Of course, the current economic situation is going to seriously hurt a lot of people. But in the post-crash world, we need to ask ourselves whether we want to rebuild the system according to the same flawed blueprint, or find a better compass to guide us.
The first set of National Accounts of Well-being, which nef has produced for 22 countries across Europe, are a tangible means by which governments can monitor their progress in promoting the well-being of their citizens. Using the most comprehensive international survey data on subjective well-being ever collected, we have designed a framework of measures which describe a nuanced picture of people’s experiences. For example, as well as measuring whether people have good feelings, we also look at whether they undertake activities which are meaningful, engaging and which make them feel competent and autonomous. And alongside our first headline measure of personal well-being we also measure people’s social well-being – whether they have supportive relationships and a sense of connection with others.
The results – which can be explored interactively on the website accompanying the report – show how far we still have to go when measuring success in these terms. While Denmark retains its oft-cited position with the highest well-being levels in Europe, Sweden, so often singled out to be praised for its policy success, does not feature among the top five countries on personal well-being. The UK’s performance according to the headline indicators is distinctly middling, and on the trust and belonging component of social well-being it comes a very poor 20th out of the 22 countries.
By redefining success in terms of how people actually experience their lives, National Accounts of Well-being set out a challenge for anyone interested in shaping the future of their society. But they also provide a crucial tool in efforts towards creating brighter tomorrows, in a classic illustration of one of nef’s key principles: that measuring the things which matter is a crucial step in getting them to change.
So how quick will governments be to adopt these new measures of success? Given the growing political interest in well-being we’re optimistic that it won’t take too long. In the meantime, we’ll be keeping a close eye on the reaction to our proposal, and carrying on making the case that we should be measuring what matters most…
Juliet Michaelson is a researcher at nef’s centre for well-being.
The Obama victory is seen to represent the hope of achieving the seemingly unattainable: clearly an important symbol for organisations like nef whose primary objective is nothing less than changing the world. While part of the wonder of the moment comes from basking in the thought that “Only a few years ago, no one could have imagined that this was really possible”, there is an interesting sense in which this isn’t entirely true.
One of the most concrete ways in which America does imagine possible futures for itself is through that most American of art forms – high quality television drama. Two of the most popular American drama series that emerged early in the Bush era provide images of an African-American presidential candidate who overcomes adversity to win the presidency (24), and of an avowedly intellectual and highly-educated president whose intelligence is of more importance than his popular touch (The West Wing).
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