There is more to well-being than a large income. A trivial insight, maybe, but enough for the Government to launch a project into how happiness can be measured. The aim is to go beyond mere economic measures, such as GDP per capita, to include subjective evaluations about peoples’ satisfaction with the lives they lead.  

The idea prompted some scoffing from those who suggested it was a useless enterprise. To counter the sceptics, David Cameron said the goal was not to present an all-in-one definitive index, but a wider range of indicators that could be used intelligently to make a better assessment of how people live in the UK. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) was instructed to run a large-scale consultation designed “to develop measures based on what people tell us matters most.”

The consultation took place, and thousands of people responded to the online questionnaire or visited public debates to offer their views. It sounds like a real success story with a lot of input that that the ONS can now use to develop the best possible indicators.

But some concerns need to be raised. Anyone who has ever engaged in survey research must have felt disconcerted when reading the questions in the consultation document. Some sounded as if they needed considerable analytical expertise (“Which of the following ways would be best, to give a picture of national well-being?”), while others merely sought personal opinions (“What things in life matter to you?”). So who were they really directed at?

Apart from the imprecision of the questions, it is not clear how the responses a researcher might have provided could be compared against those merely offering a personal view. Both are valuable responses, but they certainly need to be read differently. The answers, however, do not allow for these different groups to be separated. This suggests that it was the general public whose views were really sought, implying that somehow this “survey” might be a representative snapshot of the British people. That is not only naïve, but also violates basic standards of methodologically sound survey research.

But even if this problem did not arise, the answers from which respondents could choose did not allow for great insight. All the options for Question 5, for example, which asks about how the results of such a project might be used, refer to absolute uses of subjective well-being only.

That means that some person, some group of people or some region is happier than another one. The option of using well-being as an instrument to understand economic processes such as unemployment or health-related issues, which many researchers do, is not even offered as a possibility. Instead, absolute measures of well-being seem to be suggested as the intended outcome, quite contrary to the open approach claimed for the consultation. Such measures would, of course, allow one area to be ranked against another, creating happiness “league tables” for the regions of the UK.

The working paper published by the ONS implies the same conclusion: that direct comparisons of geographic areas are a core focus. Simple correlative relationships are presented, neglecting a decade of research that cautions against assuming that any findings in well-being research are causal. But none of that research is cited in the report anywhere. Instead it seems that the “happiest country in the world” accolades that have been awarded in the past to such different societies as Costa Rica, Bangladesh and Denmark are now going to be applied to regions in the UK. Most researchers agree that such rankings are meaningless. The values of these subjective measures cannot be compared in an intelligent way, because happiness is constituted differently in different places.   

Besides that, there are also empirical grounds to question the project. A simple analysis of data from the British Household Panel Survey, which asks questions about subjective happiness across 34 different regions of the UK, reveals a breath-taking result: there is no variation! Satisfaction with life, as it is measured currently, does not seem to vary geographically at all, but simply between individuals according to their personal socio-economic characteristics.

Of course such an analysis is very simple – a different, more disaggregated breakdown might reveal different results – but it raises a very significant question: why does the ONS report not investigate whether there is any variation in subjective well-being with the measures currently available, so as to identify at what level of measurement effects might be discernible, and where they might not?

ONS might counter that the new measures will of course be better, more extensive and deeper – the whole point of this project. But if you had the chance to go to one of the public discussion events, such as the one held in Manchester in April, you would not have your hopes raised. After some critical concerns were raised by the audience, the panel presented four questions that will be part of the new survey. This was while the consultation was still going on. So the openness of the process seems to have been prejudiced by predefined notions of its outcome, even before it had finished.  

Is this a complete surprise? Not at all: David Cameron first talked about a “Happiness Index” back in 2005, and in 2008 the Conservatives commissioned several think tanks to investigate how subjective well-being might be measured as a counter-weight to economic measures.

And as the announcement of the project was preceded by the announcement of gigantic budget cuts, it may not be too far-fetched to see the ONS happiness project as a comforting discourse at a time when many people face reductions in their material well-being. Is this project aiming to provide the evidence upon which “money alone does not buy happiness” can be rewritten to read “you do not need money to be happy”?

If so, it’s a shame, because measuring well-being is a meaningful activity, and one to which many people devote a lot of time and effort.  This project could have been a progressive step towards a methodologically better way of doing this that would have been considered by a wider audience and become part of informed policy debate.

Instead I would not be surprised to see rankings published listing in order the happiest regions in the UK (even when these regions do not show substantial differences in happiness). It will not be the poorest regions that will show the lowest levels of happiness, because the new index, according to Mr. Cameron, will include “all those things that make life worthwhile.”

Jan Eichhorn is a Doctoral Student at the School of Social and Political Science (Sociology) at the University of Edinburgh.