‘If you treasure it, measure it.’ So Gus O’Donnell said when addressing the All Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics in November. Well, the government has decided it treasures our well-being, and so is determined to measure it. It’s an incredibly tricky task — as I’ve noted before — but it’s a significant step forward that the Office for National Statistics has at least begun to try, and has finally started collecting a wealth of well-being data.
In April, the ONS began asking people four questions to measure their subjective well-being on a scale of one to ten:
Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?
Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?
Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?
In December, it released the results of the first few months of that survey, and today, we have the results from the first full year, as well as more detail on the range of other metrics (from life expectancy and household wealth to crime rates and pollution) it will use to measure well-being.
Today’s figures show that 75.9 per cent of UK adults report a ‘life satisfaction’ rating of 7 out of 10 or higher — the average score is 7.4. More interestingly, the ONS breaks down the figures for various groups of people. For example, we can see that women tend to say they’re more satisfied with life than men, but also more anxious. Young people and old people report the highest well-being: it seems 16-19 year-olds and over 60s are the most likely to be happy. The worst age for well-being seems to be around 50.
Many of the characteristics associated with high levels of subjective well-being are not surprising. People in good health are more likely to be satisfied than those whose health is poor. Married and cohabiting people have higher satisfaction, on average, than those who are single, divorced or separated. Similarly, people in work tend to be more satisfied than those who are unemployed — and those working in a profession especially so. There is also, as you might expect, a strong correlation between the four questions. That is, a group with high average life satisfaction also tends be happier and think their life is more worthwhile, and (to a slightly lesser extent) be less anxious than one with low life satisfaction.
The ONS also breaks the results down geographically, so we can see which are the ‘happiest’ and ‘saddest’ places in the UK:
Slowly but surely, the government is building up a decent picture of well-being in the UK. And this work has great potential. We will be better able to see which places and groups have the greatest need when it comes to well-being (rather than just purely economic indicators like employment and income), and therefore be able to better target policies. We will also be able to better judge whether policies are working well to improve well-being. Indeed, the Legatum Institute has just announced that Gus O’Donnell will chair a commission to examine the policy implications of all this.
But for all the flaws of GDP as a measure of how well the country is doing (best set out by Bobby Kennedy in 1968), it will be a while yet before the release of well-being figures like today’s attracts a similar level of attention to that we can expect tomorrow when the new GDP figures come out. Why? Because for GDP, we get a nice, single number every three months — if it’s up a fair bit, that’s good; if not, that’s bad. It does, of course, almost always turn out to be inaccurate and end up being changed a few months later, but that doesn’t matter in terms of making the day’s headlines. For well-being, coming up with a single number that encapsulates all its various aspects seems impossible. Instead, we might well be presented with a release that shows satisfaction up, happiness down and life expectancy flat. And where does that leave the headline writers?
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