On the International Day of Happiness, 20 March 2013 the OECD released a detailed set of
Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being. This is essentially a handbook for
statisticians involved in collecting and publishing information on subjective
well-being (measures of life satisfaction, happiness, and similar
concepts). All of this, one might think, sounds very worthy,
but extremely dull. Why does the release of the Guidelines matter, and why
should anyone not professionally obliged to wade through statistical manuals
care?
There are two reasons. The first relates
to what the Guidelines signal in terms of the wider agenda on measuring
progress. One of the main reasons that Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) retains such a high profile as an indicator of progress is
that it is collected in the same way across countries. The international
standards that are embodied in the System of National Accounts, or SNA provides
a common framework to ensure that when we compare the GDP of two different
countries, such as Iceland and Chile, we are – so to speak – comparing apples
with apples.
Most measures of the non-economic aspects
of well-being lack such a common measurement framework. In 2009 the Sen/Stiglitz/Fitoussi Commission highlighted that it was important that measures of quality of
life “move from research to standard statistical practice”. Similarly, the
OECD’s How’s Life
report in 2011 argued that the statistical agenda ahead for measuring
well-being must involve standardising the measurement of quality of life. The
OECD Guidelines represent a crucial first step towards indicators of quality of
life that are as robust and comparable as GDP.
The second reason why the Guidelines
matter is that, if national statistical agencies respond to them by starting to
collect comparable data, it has the potential to revolutionise our
understanding of subjective well-being. Currently most of what we know about
measures of subjective well-being derives from academic research and public
opinion surveys with small samples (often as low as 1000 people). By way of
contrast, official statistics tend to involve survey samples in the thousands,
tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands. For example, the UK Office
for National Statistics collected information on subjective well-being from
over 165,000 respondents in the annual
population survey in 2011/12.
The last ten years has seen the
measurement of subjective well-being take a central role (having been a niche academic interest) in work to better
measure the progress of societies. With high quality official statistics on
subjective well-being coming on stream over the next few years, the next decade
promises to be even more interesting.
Conal Smith
Further reading:
No comments:
Post a Comment