Measuring well-being: a tough but important job

‘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.