How happy is Britain? 7.4

Remember General Well-Being – David Cameron’s attempt to come up with a new set of statistics to encapsulate all the things that GDP doesn’t? Well one aspect of it, the Office for National Statistics says, is ‘subjective well-being’. That is, how do people rate their own well-being? It’s not all there is to well-being, we’re told – health, personal relationships, job satisfaction and economic security will need to be added to the mix too – but it is an important part.

And so, the ONS has set about measuring it. Over the last few months, they’ve begun asking the public four questions:

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?

Is this good or bad? Well, neither really – just as a GDP figure of £x billion doesn’t tell us much in isolation. What’ll be worth keeping an eye on is whether, this time next year, the figure is higher or lower. This is the theory: that we’ll get a set of numbers that go up when things get better and down when things get worse. And, hopefully, we’ll work out what helps them go up and do those things – although that doesn’t seem to have worked so well with GDP.

So we’ll be keeping an eye out, and maybe in future we’ll be talking about ‘satisfaction growth’ – or perhaps a ‘happiness recession’, accompanied of course by a five-point plan for recovery.