According to the Office for National Statistics, there is more ‘personal wellbeing’ around today than there was last year.
The data are gathered from the Annual Population Survey. 165,000 adults in the UK are asked ‘how satisfied are you with your life nowadays’, ‘to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile’, ‘how happy did you feel yesterday’, and ‘how anxious did you feel yesterday’. Apparently, 77% rate their life satisfaction at 7 or more out of 10, 1.2% up on last year.
For the ONS, this is about ‘measuring what matters’ – getting a more rounded picture of how we’re doing as a nation. It is complemented by a series of other (and some might say rather more meaningful) measures, most of which showed hardly any change over the last couple of years. It’s interesting to note, though, the number of people who said they felt like they belonged to their neighbourhood was down (73% in 2008, 66% in 2009/10); women in particular feel less safe (57% felt safe walking alone after dark in 2012/13, compared to 65% in 2011/12) and rates of volunteering continue to decline (19% said they had volunteered in the last 12 months in 2008, 17% in 2010/11) A hint of an ‘I’m alright, Jack’ society? There’s an infographic here.
The personal well-being stats are eye-catching, and make for good newspaper copy, but are they helpful? I’m not sure they are.
Granted, it is a good thing that our national statisticians are thinking more broadly about what it is for a society to do well. After all, GDP is simply the monetary value of all goods and services delivered within a year, which tells us little of real use, even about the economy. From a GDP perspective, eggs is eggs; every pound spent is a pound spent. In his parable of the broken window, the French political economist Frédéric Bastiat demonstrated a problem with the idea that all observable economic activity is equally beneficial. Six francs spent fixing a broken window might help keep the local glazier in business, but maybe the shopkeeper with the broken window could have used his six francs to invest in his infrastructure, training his workforce, and so on. We could manipulate GDP, perhaps by the government building an entirely new city, or holding another Olympic Games. GDP might grow, but statistics can tell us nothing about whether those are good or bad things to do. I could pay you to look after my children, you will pay me to look after yours – again, GDP grows but there’s no real economic benefit.
But we shouldn’t substitute new meaningless measures for old meaningless measures. National wellbeing (Gross National Happiness, as pre-2010 David Cameron once called it) suffers from a similar problem as GDP. Not all economic activity is desirable, and not all wellbeing is meaningful or good. Subjectively, someone may perceive themselves to have wellbeing, but their idea of wellbeing might be a very bad one, divorced from objective reality or dislocated from any vision of the good. Robert Nozick’s famous experience machine (where you can plug yourself into a lifetime of pleasurable, yet illusory, experiences) is one way that you can demonstrate that we intuitively understand that pleasure alone is neither satisfactory nor sufficient. We want to be certain kinds of people, we want our experiences to be connected to a deeper reality and we want to make a difference in the world.
I’m overstating the case a little – after all, one of the questions asks if people feel the things that they do in their life are ‘worthwhile’, not just pleasurable – though even here, surely its quite hard to feel that our lives are in no way ‘worthwhile’. Are you an arms dealer? Well, everyone has to pay the bills!
Beyond all this, it’s pretty unclear exactly what the responses should entail in terms of political decision making, even if we could identify exactly what predicts wellbeing overall, or what drives fluctuations over time. Say you could identify something beyond the obvious decent homes and decent jobs that would substantially improve personal wellbeing - that, for instance, people who lived in mono-cultural, mono-ethnic, mono-religious areas had a greater sense of personal wellbeing than people in multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, religiously plural areas (and that’s not beyond the bounds of possibility)? What should we do then? In the world of pure evidence-based policy making, presumably we would segregate into isolated communities. Thankfully, we don’t live in that world, but in the world where deep down we know that what makes us feel good isn’t always right.
Paul Bickley is Director of Political Programme
Image by jetheriot from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence.
