This
blog by Paul Allin, Professor at Imperial College London, discusses a new book
that explores the meaning of wellbeing and why it should be measured, the
authors look at over 200 recent initiatives and summarise the
different approaches taken in this area.
The desire to
explore and understand the territory ‘beyond GDP’ is gaining momentum all the
time as we seek more relevant and meaningful measures of wellbeing and
progress. The topic features not only in
ProgBlog and WikiProgress, but increasingly in social media channels and in
many on-line forums. A new book “The
Wellbeing of Nations” reflects this interest and records many local, national
and cross-national initiatives to build measures of wellbeing and progress that
go beyond purely economic measures, and the headline measures of GDP and GNP in
particular.
The authors,
statisticians based at Imperial College London, take the view that national
wellbeing – how a country is doing – embraces quality of life, the state of the
environment, development and sustainability, as well as economic performance.
All these aspects are important to
people, so measures of real progress need these dimensions. (The same applies
if attention is focussed on a city or a neighbourhood, rather than on the
nation overall).
The book opens by asking what
is national wellbeing, and why measure it?
These are not new questions, as we can see from a “short” history of
national wellbeing and its measurement, from Plato in Ancient Greece through to
current developments to replace the Millennium Development Goals.
Looking
across some 200 or more recent initiatives, several different broad approaches
to measuring wellbeing and progress are summarised in the book. These range from making greater use of the
full national economic accounts, including with extensions beyond the core
accounts, through various sets of social and environmental indicators. Survey-based data on personal wellbeing are
also now being collected by some national statistical offices and other
organisations, either as a new overall measures of wellbeing, or to include
with other measures.
However,
the fundamental point for the authors is to ask what we mean by wellbeing and
progress, and how we will use new measures.
A key message is that we are still learning how to use wider measures in
public policy, business decision-making and in everyday life. Until we establish the requirement for new
measures, we are unlikely to be able to construct measures that will last in
the way that GDP has done.
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The UK Measuring National Well-being programme is featured as a case-study in the book. The authors are two of the technical advisors to the ONS work. In the photo above, author Paul Allin (on the left) is seen presenting a copy of the book to Glenn Everett, his successor as director of the programme, during a recent meeting in the UK Office for National Statistics.
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The
authors conclude that there is much research and development around the world
to help understand what people mean by wellbeing and by wider measures of
progress. There are a variety of motives
for going ‘beyond GDP’, including concerns about sustainability as well as
current quality of life. Robust and
valid measures are starting to appear.
However,
the authors report that they “have not found full, clear or widely accepted”
answers about the meaning of national wellbeing, the motive for measuring it,
and how it should be measured. There is
more to be done and more that should be done including, they suggest, widening
the system of national accounts (SNA) to become a system of national wellbeing
accounts. This should be taken forward by
the international organisations involved in SNA working with the many other
organisations and developers who already have a stake in all of this.
Allin
P. and Hand D.J. (2014) "The Wellbeing of Nations: Meaning, Motive andMeasurement", John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester.
Paul Allin, CStat, FRSA
Visiting Professor, Department of Mathematics, Imperial
College London
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