Well-being goals for all

On October 16, 2012 almost 400,000 babies were born in the world. On that same day, approximately 1000 people from around the world, including economists, statisticians, policy-makers and representatives from business and civil society, met to talk about the future lives of these babies. The 4th OECD World Forum on Measuring Well-Being for Development and Policy Making was held in New Delhi, featuring around 70 presentations, four roundtables and several keynote lectures. The Forum provided a great opportunity for sharing knowledge and networking on Well-Being and Development.

Photo sourced by OECD

Issues discussed by participants included: factors shaping trends in poverty and inequalities; business models and practices holding greater promise to improve well-being at work and beyond; links between effective and responsive institutions and people’s well-being; obstacles to gender equality and the type of environment needed for the start-up and success of women-owned businesses; policies helping children and at-risk youth to move into adulthood; preventing environmental degradation; improving the capacity of people, business and policy-makers to manage the consequences of disasters and conflicts; how to strengthen social cohesion.

The OECD World Fora on ‘Statistics, Knowledge and Policies’ have become one of the most important rendez-vous of the global community working on Well-Being. 

The 4^th OECD Forum followed those held in Palermo (2004), Istanbul (2007) and Busan (2009). However, this forum marked a shift in the international well-being agenda. While previous Fora focused mainly on the “why” and the “how” to measure well-being, the 4^th OECD Forum looked at how well-being can be made actionable. The discussions at the Forum built on the OECD Better Life Initiative, an initiative which lies at the heart of this attempt to use improved well-being metrics to influence policy making.

But knowing what matters to citizens and where societies want to go is not enough to ensure that we will get there; this is one of the main messages coming out of the discussions held in New Delhi. 

We need to build our knowledge regarding what works or does not work to achieve better lives. We need new evidence and models to understand how people think and behave, and how policies can raise well-being given our new understanding. Part of the evidence is already there, though, and models are being developed. But the journey is long and will require the involvement of all actors—researchers coming from a range of disciplines, decision-makers, business, ordinary citizens.

Four additional key messages came out from New Delhi, and you can read the summary of conclusions here. The first is that the well-being agenda has made giant steps all over the world and that it is based on a common understanding of the issues. The second is that progress in measuring well-being has been uneven, with great advancements in areas such as subjective well-being but much more modest ones on measuring sustainability for example. The third is that more research is needed on the determinants of well-being, particularly on the role of policies. The fourth is that the well-being agenda is relevant for both developed and developing countries, although priorities may differ. The next OECD World Forum will take place in 2015 and be aligned with discussions on the outcomes of Rio+20 and the post-2015 agenda. The 5th Forum will thus be an important landmark to judge whether Development Goals will have become, indeed, Well-Being Goals for all.


By Martine Durand, OECD 

This blog fist appeared on the OECD Better Life Index site on 23 November, 2012 and is also available in French here. 

For further information on the 4th OECD World Forum on Measuring Well-Being for Development and Policy Making.

Can the number of vegetables you eat define your mental well-being and progress?

Flicking through different UK papers and websites, you would be forgiven for not knowing that the 4^th OECD World Forum on Measuring Wellbeing for Policy Making and Development had taken place in New Delhi in October.    What’s more, nobody heard a word in the press about David Cameron’s address to the event – albeit by video link.  The mainstream press has had its hands full of other dreadful stories, which you could say show a distinct lack of progress and wellbeing in our society.

Conventional indicators of economic performance* and equality* in Wales point towards increasingly disadvantaged communities in this country. Professor Sir Michael Marmot might say that such inequalities give a good indication as to the lack of fairness in Welsh society*.  Which begs the obvious question, how can we make our communities fairer?  And how do we know when we’ve got there?

                                                                                                                       

This is a point made by Nobel Prize winning economist and conference speaker in New Delhi, Professor Joseph Stiglitz. 

“What we measure effects what we do.  If we measure the wrong thing, we do the wrong thing.  GDP measures the busy-ness of our economy.  But the big question is whether we are busy doing the right things.  Our preoccupation with GDP makes it difficult for politicians to back policies that are good for society and for the environment but which might not result in an increase in GDP.”

So how about a couple of alternatives? The University College of London’s English Longitudinal Study of Ageing has suggested that future disability and poor health could be predicted by the state of a person's mind.  Professor Andrew Steptoe points to the “protective effect of enjoyment,” with nearly three times more people dying in the lower enjoyment group than compared to the greater enjoyment group.  Imagine public services whose performance was measured using indicators of user enjoyment.

Another alternative might come from a Warwick University study that found mental wellbeing appeared to rise with the number of daily portions of fruit and vegetables consumed.  Seven a day was the magic number. 

What about a national indicator of organic, locally sourced vegetables consumed per person as a key measure of societal progress.  Its not a bad idea.  It implies a local economy, that’s sympathetic with the environment, meets the needs of the community and has the added bonus of being healthy.   It also has a certain wider, public appeal if you have ambitions of wanting to do things differently.  I wonder if it’ll catch on?

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* Welsh GDP is just under 80% of the EU average and is lower than any other part of the UK with 9.1% of the population being unemployed (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-17656891).

* Public Health Wales Observatory, Measuring inequalities: trends in mortality and life expectancy in Wales, 2011 shows an increase in the inequality gap in life expectancy, healthy life expectancy and quality of life in Wales.

Wellbeing Wales

The Measurement Revolution - 4th OECD World Forum

Every so often an idea comes along that will change the world.  Not instantly though. A historical glance shows how big ideas that have gone on to transform societies are not often born with a Eureka moment: paradigms usually shift slowly. When Michael Faraday discovered the electric current it took almost half a century for Swan and Edison to create the light-bulbs which showed the world in a new light and greatly increased the amount of potentially useful hours in a day.

It takes time for people to understand and explore the potential of new ways of doing and being. That’s what was happening at last week’s OECD World Forum. There is now a consensus (following on from the creation of the Human Development Index and the Sarkozy commission) among many of the world’s leading statisticians and economists that we have to have a radical rethink about how to assess a country’s performance.

Not only is there consensus, there’s action. A group of technocrats you would never expect to challenge orthodoxy are engaged in a deeply political act. Countries at all stages of development from Canada to Mexico and Bhutan are actively trying to measure wellbeing, going beyond GDP to measure other aspects of life that seem to matter to people. The UK has heralded the 'Happiness Index’ and spawned a number of other initiatives aimed at quantifying the feelgood factor such as the Happy Planet Index. The old adage that ‘there’s more to life than money’ seems to have got through – at least in these quarters.

The move to broaden definitions of national progress has its roots in the wide realisation that GDP, so long the gold standard measure of performance, is seriously flawed. In his keynote speech at the conference Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz outlined how the economic focus has blinded us to other factors that affect our lives such as equality and the environment. It’s good for showing us how busy an economy is, he said, but too easily skewed by leaky tax regimes such as that currently found in Ireland. Other ready examples can be found in states with high levels of oil wealth. Progress may appear on the national balance sheet, but it rarely materialises as much- needed cash for cash-strapped pockets.

So if we don’t just measure the money, what else should we measure? That was the main focus of the discussion in Delhi. Health and education outcomes were obvious candidates but there was also elbow room for the suggestion that issues such as housing, quality of life in old age, nutrition, discrimination and even power are all worthy areas to measure  in terms of improvements in the collective human condition.

At this point the conversation tended towards the technical. There’s a broad agreement that we should be using multi-dimensional measures. There’s also much thought being devoted to whether such multiple measures can be brought to heel in the form of one composite mega-measure. It’s something the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative are looking to achieve.  Development Progress’s latest paper outlines a multi-dimensional dashboard approach to measurement of wellbeing and highlights some of the unexpected and encouraging results a broader look at the performance of African countries in the past decade can bring.

There remain good reasons not to get carried away just yet. Princeton Professor Angus Deaton contributed a reality check when he revealed evidence to suggest that money does make us happy after all, showing that, when taking a different look at the latest available data (admittedly from 2005), there was a clear correlation between higher income and higher assessments of happiness. It was left to Professor Deaton to make explicit too that happiness and wellbeing are highly subjective concepts. Whilst the utility and reliability of such emerging data can be called into question, it will remain a challenge to convince policy-makers to start applying any new findings to national decision-making.

In an interview shortly after his keynote speech Joseph Stiglitz was asked to explain why measuring wellbeing matters so much. ‘It’s quite simple,’ he said. ‘If we measure the wrong things, we do the wrong things.’ To capture a snapshot of people’s contentment with their lot in life will not prove an easy challenge, but on the evidence of the past week the crusading number-crunchers look set to rise to that challenge. One day we may well be thankful to them.

Jonathan Tanner
Development Progress

Development Progress interviewed a number of delegates at the 4th OECD World Forum in Delhi, including Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs, to get their views on the conference and wider issues involved in debates about the measurement of well-being.

This blog first appeared on 24 October 2012 on the Development Progress site and can be found here.