Measuring global progress through subjective well-being

Happiness Studies Book Series, 2013

Journal of Happiness Studies, 2000

This paper argues that both the relativist and the pessimist critiques of the idea of progress are inadequate. Progress is defined as increase in global quality of life (QOL). Such QOL is intrinsically subjective, but not relative. It can be reliably measured through “life satisfaction”-type questions. The “World Database of Happiness” provides extensive data on social, economic and psychological factors that correlate with overall QOL. They include wealth, health, security, knowledge, freedom and equality. Various statistical data suggest that all these QOL indicators have undergone significant improvements during the last half century, in most of the world. This gives strong support to the thesis that progress objectively occurs.

2020

The use of GDP as an indicator of social progress and quality of life has been challenged since the last quarter of the 20th century. The publication of the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission Report in 2009 was decisive in highlighting the limitations of GDP and in confirming the need to shift focus from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being. The Report also emphasised the multidimensional nature of well-being and recommended it to be assessed using both objective and subjective dimensions. An increasing number of governments are aiming at applying the Report’s recommendations and have decided to put people’s well-being at the centre of what they do. Most initiatives have decided to incorporate both metrics from objective indicators and subjective well-being measures, obtained from surveys, into their policy decision making. Quite a lot of criticism has emerged though around the use of subjective wellbeing data to design or to evaluate public policies. Critics...

2015

Human wellbeing a highly debated topic from many disciplines have been tried to quantify by the usage of Social Progress Index, which has taken into account fifty-four indicators. This can be considered as the best possible way of quantifying it from quite many angle. This analysis has compared often known indicator with the SPI. Currently many have come up with the view that GDP has to retire. This can be seen as a probe into the same category. The outcome seems to be quite disgusting from an economic perspective.

International Journal of Community Well-Being, 2019

International institutions, national governments and communities are promoting and measuring happiness in various ways. However, as of the writing of this article, there is not an agreed upon happiness index that institutions, governments, and communities use to gather and compare data. On the other hand, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which have a set of indicators commonly shared by institutions, governments, and communities, do not explicitly consider happiness even though SDG Goal 3: Good Health and Well-being references well-being. In this article, we construct an Aggregated Happiness Index (AHI) based on five indices in use and applied at different governance levels. Based on common domains and indicators from these indices, the AHI is composed of twelve domains, thirty-one indicators and distinguishes between objective and subjective indicators. The AHI domains and indicators are benchmarked against the SDGs goals and indicators respectively using a grading schema based on a traffic light. Our analysis reveals that at the domain level the SDGs cover 66.7% of the AHI, however the coverage at indicator level drops to 48.6%. The SDGs indicators cover 61.1% of the AHI objective indicators and 17.9% of the AHI subjective indicators. Major gaps are found in the domains of community & social support, subjective well-being and time balance. We found a lack of subjective metrics in other domains, including economic standard of living and health. We discuss the opportunities and drawbacks of approaching SDGs and happiness metrics separately or synergistically. Given the potential benefits of integrating both approaches, we propose the framework we term SDGs for Happiness composed of 18 indicators of which 61.1% are subjective that should be considered in addition to the SDG indicators to measure happiness within the SDGs.

In recent years considerable interest has developed in going ‘beyond GDP’ to develop measures of economic progress which are more explicitly based on human wellbeing. This work has been inspired, in part, by Sen’s non-utilitarian approach to welfare economics, but has been constrained by a lack of empirical indicators relating to human potential. In this paper, therefore, we develop a framework for understanding wellbeing, drawing closely on Sen’s seminal contributions to welfare economics, as well as the economic literature on life satisfaction, and use it to generate novel data for the USA and UK consistent with all the components of the theory. We use these data to illustrate some of the life quality analyses that might follow. Specifically, we investigate how various indicators of capability are distributed by ethnicity and gender, and compare and contrast the types of capability which appear relatively strong/weak within each country. In addition, we consider the extent to which life satisfaction and daily activities depend on resources and non-cognitive skills. The paper concludes that with an expansion of the scope of routinely collected survey data, it is feasible to empirically implement fully Sen’s theory to provide a much richer account of the wellbeing outcomes that derive from economic progress than is currently the case.

International Journal of Wellbeing, 2020

The science of wellbeing has come a long way from the early days of measuring wellbeing via a nation’s GDP, and wellbeing measures and concepts continue to proliferate to capture its various elements. Yet, much of this activity has reflected concepts from Western cultures, despite the emphasis placed on wellbeing in all corners of the globe. To meet the challenges and opportunities arising from cross-disciplinary research worldwide, the Well-Being for Planet Earth Foundation and the Gallup World Poll have joined forces to add more culturally relevant constructs and questions to existing Gallup modules. In this white paper, we review the discussion from the international well-being summit in Kyoto, Japan (August 2019), where nine such additions were proposed and highlight why a more global view of wellbeing is needed. Overall, the new items reflect a richer view of wellbeing than life satisfaction alone and include hedonic and eudaimonic facets of wellbeing, social wellbeing, the role of culture, community, nature, and governance. These additions allow for the measurement of a broader conceptualization of wellbeing, more refined and nuanced cross-cultural comparisons, and facilitate a better examination of the causes of variation in global wellbeing. The new Gallup World Poll additions will be trialled in 2020, with additional inclusions from this summit to be made in 2021. https://doi.org/10.5502/ijw.v10i2.1037

2014

Individuals, communities and governments are increasingly interested in using subjective wellbeingbased on how individuals rate the quality of their own lives-to supplement or even supplant more conventional economic measures of individual and social progress. Some countries, including Bhutan since 1970, and more recently the United Kingdom and China, have made higher subjective well-being (SWB) an explicit goal for public policy. This flowering of interest has naturally sparked efforts to increase the quality and quality of subjective well-being data, research, and policy analysis. These have included the Stiglitz/Sen/Fitousi (2009) report, the simultaneous launching of public consultations and widespread SWB data collection in the UK, and efforts by the EC and the OECD to develop international standards and uniform surveys for the measurement of subjective well-being. Reflecting this increasing interest, the Centre for the Study of Living Standards (CSLS 2011) sponsored in December 2010 a conference in Ottawa to introduce and extend discussions of the policy implications of well-being research. Thus it is a good time to take stock of what is known and what most needs to be done to move the analysis and policy agendas from demonstrated interest to well-founded change. This paper attempts such a stock-taking in several stages. I shall first review a range of the most policyrelevant measures of subjective well-being, then outline some research results with direct bearing on policy issues, and finally illustrate how these results, and others like them, can be used to improve evidence-based policy choices by governments, companies and communities.

Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2006

Direct reports of subjective well-being may have a useful role in the measurement of consumer preferences and social welfare, if they can be done in a credible way. Can well-being be measured by a subjective survey, even approximately? In this paper, we discuss research on how individuals' responses to subjective well-being questions vary with their circumstances and other factors. We will argue that it is fruitful to distinguish among different conceptions of utility rather than presume to measure a single, unifying concept that motivates all human choices and registers all relevant feelings and experiences. While various measures of well-being are useful for some purposes, it is important to recognize that subjective well-being measures features of individuals' perceptions of their experiences, not their utility as economists typically conceive of it. Those perceptions are a more accurate gauge of actual feelings if they are reported closer to the time of, and in direct re...

Social Indicators Research, 1991

It has long been recognized that more needs to be known about the dynamic behavior of measures of subjective well-being. As the Social Indicators Movement matures, it becomes possible to explore issues of stability and change in measures of perceived life quality. To contribute to this research need, this paper reports results of administering similar measures of subjective well-being to several representative samples of the adult American population assessed 16 years apart — in 1972 and in 1988. Results show that in the United States, which has experienced reasonably continuous economic prosperity and no major social disruptions during these 16 years, thestructure of the subjective well-being measures (i.e. how they relate to one another and how concern-level measures predict global-level measures) has remained remarkably constant. This is in accord with expectation and enhances confidence in the validity and usefulness of the measures. Changes were found in thelevels of some of the measures: For the total population, feelings about life-as-a-whole, oneself, and one's own health became notably more positive; evaluations of own income and the national government also gained; but assessments of one's own family life, social relationships, community, and job remained fairly stable. Some of these gross changes were general throughout the population, but others occurred only for certain age, racial, or socioeconomic groups. Younger cohorts and people with higher educations and incomes showed more gains in subjective well-being than other groups.