Why measure subjective well-being?
© CEP
Richard Layard, Director, Wellbeing Programme, London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Performance
The search for measures of progress that might replace GDP is a timely and necessary one, but only a single metric will do the trick. What an achievement! Only 8 years ago the OECD first asked “What is progress?”. Since then we have had three major OECD conferences on the subject and now a major OECD initiative on the international measurement of subjective well-being. Last year Britain became the first advanced country to take its own measurements, and there is worldwide demand for an alternative to GDP as a way of assessing how we are doing. But what should the alternative be? Until now both the OECD and the UK government have, probably wisely, been pulling their punches. They have been saying that many things are important–subjective well-being, yes, but also education, health, law and order, governance, income, and so on. Visitors to the OECD Better Life Initiative website are invited to choose their own weights in deciding how much each of these matter. But, if so, what is happening may not make much difference. After all, we have had the Social Indicators movement for
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about fifty years, during which time the grip of GDP as the talisman of national performance became ever stronger. We shall only displace the use of GDP by providing a single, convincing alternative. That alternative is, to me, obvious. It is the quality of life as people subjectively experience it. In a fully democratic world the weights that policymakers attach to different aspects of life should reflect the importance they have to the population at large. In other words, policymakers should take the subjective well-being of the population as their goal and think of all other goods like education, health and income as means to that end. If you ask why, I would argue as follows. There is one simple test of what is the ultimate good for humans–that we find it self-evidently good. So we can list all the goods we consider important: freedom, health, achievement, income, happiness and so on. We can then ask of each “Why is it good?”. If we ask, for example, why freedom is good, people will say slavery makes people miserable. Similarly with ill-health, and so on. But if we ask, why does it matter if people are miserable or happy, no reason can be given. It is self-evident.
This is the philosophical reason for the long-established tradition of thought which believes that the best societies are those in which there is the most happiness and the least misery. In the 18th and 19th centuries this was a commonplace view, and it helped to usher in a more humane social order. But in the early 20th century it took a severe blow from the growth of philosophical scepticism about whether you could know how anyone else felt. This was compounded by the behaviourist revolution in psychology which believed that all you could study was behaviour and not feelings or motives. Fortunately psychology has changed track in the last 50 years, and returned to the view that feelings have an objective reality. For example, researchers have correlated the happiness which an individual selfreports and the corresponding estimate made by a friend. The correlation is good–which (when you think of it) is an essential condition for effective friendship and social life. But more decisive for the intellectual debate has been the discovery by neuro-psychologists of the areas of the brain where happiness and misery are experienced. Here we have good correlations–both across time and across individuals–of self-reported happiness and electronic readings in the brain. This I believe should settle the argument about whether our feelings have sufficient
Policymakers might wish to give more weight to reductions in misery, compared with increases in happiness objective reality to be taken very seriously. It should also make us reasonably confident in using self-reports as the main way in which we measure how happy people are. That is why it is so encouraging that the OECD are now developing standard ways in which to measure subjective well-being that could be used by governments for