Part of Scioto Analysis’ mission is to change the way people think about the economy. We believe in looking beyond GDP and output, and actually trying to measure how well-off people are. We think that this base understanding will be a better basis for good public policy than the current tools we have.
To do this, our goal is to conduct a series of five analyses looking at different ways to measure the economy. We’ve done three already: the Ohio Poverty Measure, an Inequality Report, and most recently our GPI 2.0 report.
We are currently working on the fourth leg of this plan, a human development report that we are working on with the help of a group of undergraduate students at Ohio State University’s Department of Agriculture, Environment, and Development Economics. The final step that we will tackle sometime in 2024 is going to be a report on subjective wellbeing.
Our subjective wellbeing report will come just over a decade after the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released their initial guidelines on how to do subjective wellbeing measurement. Just last month, OECD released a new working paper exploring the current practice of measuring subjective wellbeing. Below are some of the highlights from that report.
What we want to measure
The OECD report breaks up subjective wellbeing measurement into four categories:
Evaluative - Overall life satisfaction
Positive Affect - How often people feel positive emotions
Negative Affect - How often people feel negative emotions
Eudaimonia - Feelings of purpose, motivation, and optimism/hope
Exploring all four of these categories is necessary to capture a more complete picture of how people feel about their wellbeing. These four categories are a great example of how to design an effective survey.
These four categories may be correlated with one another. For example, we might expect someone with higher overall life satisfaction to have more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions. But without all four categories, we could be missing a key piece needed to understand how people feel.
A good example of these questions in practice is the recent US Happiness Survey released by Gross National Happiness USA. This is a grassroots organization that Scioto’s principal Rob Moore is president of. Their work is focused on measuring subjective wellbeing at the national level.
How wellbeing can influence policy
One of the main findings from OECD’s follow-up was that despite a growing desire to measure subjective wellbeing, there are still very few examples of policy decisions being made with these figures in mind. Some of this may be because policymakers still don’t understand how to use this new data to make decisions.
One area subjective wellbeing could help improve policy decisions is when analysts examine policies that are going to have large non-market effects. Our economic toolbox often relies on market principles that sometimes aren’t relevant. In these cases, it may be better to take a subjective approach that more accurately represents how people act than to try and fit our current models to the situation.
Future considerations
Finally, the report talks about how future subjective wellbeing research can help advance the field. One of the main points of interest is what other categories we can use to measure wellbeing.
Some potential affective measures could be how often people feel tired or relaxed. Generally, how often people feel things that don’t exactly fit into a positive or negative box. However, before we start asking these questions, we need to know how they relate to our current subjective wellbeing measures. The promise of subjective wellbeing measurement is big: we could help craft policy that makes people happier.