How do you measure cuddles?

There’s been a lot of fuss about this morning’s GDP numbers, but if David Cameron has his way we’ll soon be fretting about an entirely different set of statistics. The Prime Minister has given the data-crunchers at the Office for National Statistics a new mission: measure the nation’s well-being. The idea is to create new stats to accompany economic figures like the Gross Domestic Product as an additional gauge of how well things are going in the UK. It’s an idea that makes a great deal of sense. After all, the shortcomings of GDP are well-known. As Bobby Kennedy put it back in 1968:

“It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

It would be nice to put a number up in lights, and know that if it increases the country’s better off, decreases and it’s worse off. But there’s a hitch. Just what should that number be dependent on? And how could we calculate it? Given this, “General Well-Being”, or GWB, has been a distinctly nebulous concept ever since Cameron introduced it in his Google Zeitgeist speech of 2006. He described it thus:

“It’s about the beauty of our surroundings, the quality of our culture and, above all, the strength of our relationships.”

Lovely, yes, but just a little vacuous. And so the task of fleshing it out now falls to the ONS. They’ve been conducting a national survey, asking various people “What matters to you?” The results were published yesterday, and it turns out the answer is “pretty much everything”. All nine of the generic “things in life” — from education and low crime, to job satisfaction and the “ability to have a say” — were chosen by a majority of the respondents. And more than 50 per cent said that all of them should be included in “national well-being”.

This, essentially, is the problem. GWB is meant to encapsulate all those things that GDP doesn’t, and that’s one hell of a task. The funniest part of the ONS report is the responses from people whom they asked “What makes you happy?” One three-year-old boy simply answered “Batman”. A six-year-old said “Cuddles with my mummy”. Both excellent answers: honest, to the point, and a good deal better than one student’s “being able to deal with ambiguity and change”. But if GWB is about coming up with a measure of cuddles or the level of Batman-ness in the UK, even the brainiacs at the ONS may struggle.