Progress on measuring progress
For many years, a key question in our field of wellbeing science was “how can we measure happiness?” There’s been much debate among psychologists, economists and philosophers, but an ever-expanding group of scholars are throwing their weight behind subjective wellbeing, i.e. people reporting how they feel about their lives.
In 2009, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) held a meeting in Florence of national statistical offices to consider how to collect the necessary data.
These discussions led to a set of guidelines for the collection of subjective wellbeing data. Now that most national statistical agencies collect measures of life satisfaction, how can they be put to use to help design policies to support better lives?
It was clear at this month’s 7th OECD World Forum on Well-being in Rome that most national and international organisations use multi-dimensional dashboards to track wellbeing, with life satisfaction as one of the indicators.
Even 15 years after the Florence summit, Mariana Kotzeva, Director-General of Eurostat, reported that their dashboard of nine indicators is considered by some as eight objective indicators plus a subjective ninth component. It deserves its place, she argued, because it is “highly appreciated by citizens and also by researchers […] we cannot just look at objective indicators, we have to look at perceptions”.
At the World Happiness Report, we argue that life evaluations have a special role to play as they provide a single independent measure, direct from citizens, about how their lives are going. These data can then be used to estimate the relative importance of many supports for wellbeing, including other items in a dashboard. These estimates of relative importance can support a broader cost-benefit analysis, as shown by Richard Layard, that ranks policy options by how much they contribute to wellbeing.
This analysis will, in turn, require collecting a broader range of perceptions, since how people feel about the communities they live in determines not just how happy they are, but how they act (including how they vote).
At the 3rd OECD World Forum, in Busan in 2009, I spoke on trust and wellbeing, showing that peoples’ sense of belonging to their communities, and their confidence in the benevolence of others (including their willingness to take the time and effort to return a lost wallet) are of primary importance to how people feel about their lives.
Now – more than ever – these perceptions matter for those who collect data, conduct research, and lead organisations and governments.
Prof John Helliwell
Editor, World Happiness Report
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