Measurements of happiness and wellbeing allow policymakers to track progress over time. Bhutan was the first country to do so periodically, creating a Gross National Happiness Index in the 1970’s, as a measure of progress to replace GDP. We chose this to be the topic of our second research article because it is the area that happiness economics tends to get the most cynicism. Many cynics argue that measures of happiness are too weak to be used in statistical analyses, due to the lack of reliability in the subjective nature of the responses.
Our research shows that whilst happiness and wellbeing measures aren’t perfect, they do produce statistically significant and highly informative results. Importantly, due to the data being noisy, the accuracy of the results improve, as the sample size of participants surveyed increases.
There are a range of different happiness and wellbeing measures available, some are more useful in particular settings than others, depending on the policy purpose they are being used for. No one measure is superior all the time. We summarise these below:
UN Happiness Indicator: as part of the ‘World Happiness Report’, the UN produces a global distribution of happiness bringing together subjective wellbeing measures (SWB) and economic and development indicators into one overall measure. We have our reservations regarding the question used for the SWB measure (known as the Cantril Ladder), however the overall index produces results that are informative and intuitive at a macro level.
Happy Planet Index: this was developed by the New Economics Foundation and it is a measure of sustainable wellbeing. Given the goal, at Exploring Happiness, when developing research is: “increasing happiness and wellbeing in society in a sustainable way” , it is highly relevant for our work. Essentially, the aim is to estimate how efficiently residents of different countries are using natural resources to live long ands happy lives.
ONS Wellbeing Measures: these measure were developed in 2012 and we think the simplicity of questions asked will create more consistent results than other measures. In the UK, they ask participants in their quarterly ONS surveys four questions that relate to four different areas of wellbeing: life satisfaction, life worth, happiness and anxiety. The data only currently covers 6 years, so as the time series extends it will become more and more useful for policy analysis.
Cross-country surveys: the European Commission has been asking countries within the EU a life satisfaction question since 1973. The length of the data is great, unfortunately, the available answers to the question are limited, which doesn’t allow for much differentiation across participants. The World Values Survey is an extensive survey across 100 societies, which asks several wellbeing related questions in many different ways, which allows researchers to test consistency in responses. The Pew Global Attitudes Survey has collected 38,000 responses from 44 different countries to the same Cantril Ladder question as used by the UN.
Other Measurement Studies and Indexes: The OECD Better Life Index doesn’t actually rank countries, it allows the user to do it themselves. They identified 11 topics that they felt contributed towards wellbeing but leave the weighting (from 1-5) on each topic up to you. They also release results of how people within each country choose to weight the different topics, which offer an interesting insight into what people think matters most around the world. The Human Development Report is useful for research focused on quality of life and development. They have expanded on the human development index to also focus on poverty, gender development and inequality. The International Organisation of Migration produces reports that study wellbeing and development of migrants. Their migration data portal covers a highly diverse range of variables which are relevant for wellbeing policy analysis.
Our research has provided us with a great level of comfort in relation to the reliability of happiness and wellbeing measures from a range of different perspectives:
Hard evidence from Neuroscience: Experimental psychologists and neuroscientists have shown that happiness measures correlate with activities in the parts of the brain associated with pleasure and satisfaction. A recent study scanned 51 individual’s brains using MRI, before answering a series of questions about their happiness and satisfaction with life. They focused on the precuneus, a part of the brain related to consciousness, our sense of self, and as a consequence, happiness. And, fascinatingly, those who scored highly on the happiness survey exhibited significantly more grey matter in that part of the brain than those who scored low.
Linguistic differences are small: A frequent criticism of cross-country happiness measures is that linguistic differences across countries mean that responses are not likely to be consistent. Studies have shown that whilst a persons culture (e.g. collectivist or individualist) can significantly impact their happiness, this is consistent across individuals and cultures, and comparing for language effects has a negligible impact on the final results.
Personality traits matter less at a national level: Research focused on different types of measures of happiness, found that personality traits accounted for a significant portion of the variability in an individual’s self-reported happiness score. Further research is necessary to fully understand what are the personality traits that lead to differences in an individual’s happiness, but for policy analysis at the population level, these differences matter much less due to the approach of taking averages. Essentially, the policymaker is mostly concerned with the distribution of happiness within a country, while accepting that individuals characteristics mean they have a greater capacity for satisfaction than others.
For more detail on happiness and wellbeing measures and greater depth on their reliability, please click on the link below or check out the video above.