I spent last week in Lexington, Kentucky at the annual conference of the International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies, a global interdisciplinary society dedicated to advancing research and knowledge on quality of life (QOL), wellbeing, and happiness studies. For the past decade, I have served on the board for Gross National Happiness USA, a grassroots organization committed to changing measures of progress and success in the United States. The first Scioto Analysis study was released in conjunction with Gross National Happiness USA so we go back a while.
Why should we care about happiness? When I was at the think tank that I worked at before starting Scioto Analysis, I was excited to tell a colleague that I had joined the Gross National Happiness USA board. Her response to me was only to say “fun.” I saw this work as crucial work in the public policy space, but for a lot of people who consider themselves “serious” policy analysts and researchers, the concept of happiness is treated like a little treat rather than an important public policy undertaking.
Two hundred fifty years ago, Jeremy Bentham first argued “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” While Bentham widely popularized the idea, he was paraphrasing Irish Philosopher Francis Hutcheson, who argued that the best action produces “the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers” fifty years earlier. Suffice to say that people have been explicitly making the argument that morality is based on improving happiness for hundreds of years.
Despite this longstanding charge for morality and public policy, research on happiness has continued to be a fringe subfield in the world of public policy.
Part of this is due to a lack of data. Gross Domestic Product is calculated quarterly, and employment numbers are released monthly. Due to tax data and survey data, researchers have many places to turn to see what the impacts of public policy are on traditional economic indicators. Environmental data from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Information Administration give researchers data to see how policy impacts the environment. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes deep research on health, giving researchers opportunities to study health and public policy.
The imbalance between traditional economic indicators and well-being indicators is replete throughout government. The U.S. Federal Government has 36 “principal indicators,” none of which are well-being indicators. The U.S. Federal Reserve releases quarterly projections of GDP growth, unemployment, inflation, and interest rates. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’s monthly jobs report draws on approximately 60,000 households and 121,000 employers representing about 631,000 worksites. Its employer survey covers one-third of all nonfarm payroll jobs. Meanwhile, the CDC asks a life satisfaction question to only two-thirds of states.
While people in the United States do not often focus on statistics around happiness and well-being, progress has been made in other countries, especially in Europe. For over a decade, the United Kingdom’s Office of National Statistics has been asking the question “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?” to representative samples of people across the country. The United Kingdom has gone as far as to incorporate well-being measures into their cost-benefit analysis, though there is legitimate question whether this confuses both the practice of benefit-cost analysis and well-being research.
The United Kingdom is not alone in asking this question. Statistics Canada asks its residents “How do you feel about your life as a whole right now?” Germany’s Socio-Economic Panel asks “How satisfied are you with your life, all things considered?”
You can see that many of these formulations follow a similar pattern. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recommends the question “Overall, how satisfied are you with life as a whole these days?” as the core life satisfaction question for its member states. You can see this echoed throughout most of these questions.
Notably, the most common, headline-grabbing happiness report in the world does not use this question.
The World Happiness Report, known for its annual national happiness rankings, uses data from the Gallup World Poll. Respondents are asked to imagine themselves somewhere on a ladder, with the bottom rung being their worst possible life and the top rung being their best possible life. They then answer the question “On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”
In general, this “Cantril Ladder” question is treated as interchangeable with the “how satisfied are you with your life nowadays” question. Some are starting to question this assumption though.
At this year’s conference, I attended a talk where a researcher shared data from the Global Flourishing Study. One of the big findings she shared was that two questions people have about life satisfaction ended up having very different correlations with other questions, even though they are often treated interchangeably in happiness research.
The Global Flourishing Survey asks both the life satisfaction and the Cantril Ladder question, so researchers were able to compare how these questions interacted with other questions using the same respondents and the same survey. What they found was that the life satisfaction question correlated strongly with interpersonal connections and relationships. The Cantril Ladder question, on the other hand, was much more determined by income than the life satisfaction question was.
This intuitively makes sense to me. The Cantril ladder is more of a comparative question, where you are explicitly challenged to imagine your life as better or worse. If I think about my life in those comparative terms, I often think about having more or less money. On the other hand, if I think about how well my life is going nowadays, I think much more about how I spend my time, including who I get to see on a day-to-day basis.
It seems like both of these questions are illuminating and we probably should do some more research to find out how these two compare to one another. But whichever direction we go, well-being deserves a place at the table. Policymakers should have information on how policy impacts well-being. That is, after all, one of their most important jobs: to promote the general welfare and to help their citizens pursue happiness.
