Mind the gap: Well-being differences growing in several countries in the EU

This post, written by Saamah Abdallah of the new economics foundation (nef), is part of the Wikiprogress focus on How's Life? 2013 chapter on "Well-being and the global financial crisis" and or series on Subjective Well-being.

There is a strong perception that the economic crisis has ‘disproportionately hit those who are already vulnerable’ (European Commission) and has ‘deepened inequalities’. This month, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Working and Living Conditions has published a report showing that, in several countries in the EU, this growing inequality can be seen in well-being as well as more traditional metrics such as income inequality.

The report looks at how subjective well-being changed between 2007 and 2011 in the 27 countries of the EU over that time. As might be expected, average life satisfaction in several countries fell significantly, including in Greece and Estonia, as well as in some Nordic countries such as Sweden and Finland.  But it rose in several other countries, including the new accession countries (Romania and Bulgaria), Poland, Spain and Italy. Some countries presented mixed patterns, with some measures appearing to show increases in well-being, whilst others showed decreases (for example perceived social exclusion rose in Spain despite increases in life satisfaction). Overall, the pattern was one of declining well-being on the majority of measures.

What was more interesting, however, was the differences in trends when one looked at different population groups within countries. For example, whilst average life satisfaction did not change in the UK and Ireland, it fell significantly for those in the bottom income quartile, and rose significantly for those in the top income quartile.  Meanwhile in Spain, Italy and Portugal, the surprising increase in life satisfaction can only be seen for those in the top half of the income distribution – there was no increase in life satisfaction for people in the bottom half of the income distribution. Indeed, overall happiness fell significantly for those in the second income quartile and perceived social exclusion rose. Finally, in Greece, despite the brutal economic crisis, there has been no fall in life satisfaction for those in the top half of the income distribution.  In contrast, average life satisfaction fell by a whole 1.0 points (on a scale of 1-10) for those in the bottom income quartile.

In summary – the effects of the economic crisis are not being felt equally in many parts of Europe.  And whilst some people argue that high economic inequality is acceptable and even desirable because it stimulates effort, it is hard to see a positive side to growing well-being inequality. You can theoretically argue that people have chosen to forfeit income in exchange for more free time, for example, but you can’t argue that people have willingly chosen to have lower well-being.  And reducing the well-being of the poorest is hardly an effective way to increase their motivation, given that it is usually positive emotions that lead to people being able to improve their situation (according to broaden-and-build theory).  Growing well-being inequality is the clearest manifestation yet of the unfair impact of the economic crisis.

Saamah Abdallah

Read "Quality of life in Europe: Subjective well-being".

Measuring Progress at the British Business Bank – beyond GDP

This blog by Charles Seaford discusses the recommendations for a state owned business bank from the Good Jobs Taskforce that is presented in the report 'The British Business Bank'. 

By the end of next year, the UK government’s British Business Bank, currently under construction, will have landed. It’s mission? To boost the UK economy by increasing flows of finance to our cash-strapped small businesses.

It’s good news, for sure – but is that all the new institution could do? In a recent report, the new economics foundation (nef) makes the case for dramatically extending the mandate of the British Business Bank. We argue that its core purpose should be to support not just any small businesses, but specifically the kinds that create good, sustainable jobs. That is, jobs that deliver high well-being, contribute to a fairer society, and will remain viable as we move to a low-carbon future.

It’s an easy objective to state. But the details matter. That’s why our report aims to prove that it is possible in practice to create and deliver against a new set of economic policy objectives, beyond simply growing GDP or reducing unemployment.

All this means particular attention has to be paid to the bank’s performance indicator framework, which will be used to guide lending and investment decisions. For these will need to take into account questions such as: how good an employer is the loan applicant? How does its environmental record compare with other similar businesses? Is the business in a sector that is financially sustainable given global trends? What impact will it have on the rest of the regional economy? The report goes into a lot more detail about what such questions mean both for the indicator framework and targets set for the bank’s managers, and for the kind of products and processes they use.

It is important that the bank serves all parts of the country and the indicators would need to be constructed on a regional basis. In addition, international experience suggests the bank should work with a network of partner regional banks. Unfortunately the latter don’t exist in the UK – one of the UK economy’s big problems. However, we do have a possible way of dealing with this: it may be possible to break up the Royal Bank of Scotland (currently 82% owned by the state) to provide the necessary network of branches. This would have a number of other benefits – above all bankers who understand the localities they serve – and we are investigating just how feasible this would be.

Discussion of banking performance indicators may seem a rather dry topic – but this is the kind of low key policy lever that could make a big difference to people and small businesses for years to come.


Charles Seaford
Head of the Centre for Wellbeing at the nef (new economics foundation)

How to boost well-being - and prove it!

This blog, written by Saamah Abdallah of the new economics foundation (nef), is part of the Wikiprogress series on Human Well-Being and Subjective Well-Being.

 

Photo credit:   mikebaird

The Big Lottery Fund has published the final results from their Well-Being Programme evaluation which nef, alongside colleagues at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES), have been carrying out on their behalf since 2006.

The final report is available online. The headline findings are:

• Proportions of people eating five portions of fruit and vegetables daily increased from 48% at the beginning of the project to 57% at the end. Proportions of primary school children saying they helped their parents with cooking almost doubled from 12% to 24%.
• Proportions of people having high levels of physical activity rose from 23% to 32%. This increase went further at follow-up, three to six months after the end of the project.
• Proportions of people reporting substantial depressive symptoms fell from 33% to 22%.
• Average life satisfaction (on a scale of 0-10) rose from 6.5 at the start, to 7.1 at the end of projects. This coincided with significant increases in people feeling good about themselves, relaxed, close to other people, and all other aspects of personal well-being measured.
• The different aspects were all interlinked. Most striking was that projects which involved physical activity lead to big improvements in terms of mental health and healthy eating.
• Keys to successful projects included having a holistic approach, engaging the target group from the start and incorporating co-production, integrating activities into daily life, and ensuring that they are fun and involve social interaction.

For us, the findings are exciting news. They a) show that people’s experienced well-being can be improved and that these improvements can be sustained (something which some theorists have doubted), b) show that well-being can be used to evaluate a wide range of projects from cookery courses, to therapy sessions, and c) begin to provide evidence on the kinds of activities which work best, and about the inter-linkages between different aspects of people’s behaviour and well-being.

The Well-Being Programme was a £160 million programme funding a broad range of community projects improving mental health and increasing healthy eating and physical activity, delivered by partnerships lead by organisations such as the Soil Association,  MIND, Sustrans and the Greater London Authority.

The evaluation involved the administration of a questionnaire for project beneficiaries which they completed when they started being involved in a project, when they finished, and (where possible), three to six months after they left a project. Our colleagues at CLES also carried out extensive qualitative research, including focus groups and interviews with beneficiaries and project staff. 
The Well-Being Programme recently received a boost of another £40 million,   so some of the projects funded are set to continue. We look forward to seeing further increases in well-being as a result. The findings have also attracted particular attention from the Cabinet Office, who will be looking to see what lessons can be learnt from the evaluation to help realise the Prime Minister’s stated goal of focusing policy on improving well-being 

- Saamah Abdallah
Senior Researcher at the Centre for Well-being  at the nef

 This blog first appeared on 3 September 2013 on the nef blog.

Five ways to a happy childhood?

This blog is written by Saamah Abdallah, a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Well-being, and is part of the Wikiprogress Series on child well-being. It explains how the Children's Society used nef's Five Ways to Well-being to children in its Good Childhood Report 2013, as well as highlights some of the key findings.

Five years ago, nef launched the Five Ways to Well-being – five easy evidence-based things individuals can build into their daily lives to improve their well-being – as part of the Foresight Review of Mental Capital and Well-being produced by the Government Office for Science. They are Connect, Be Active, Take notice, Keep Learning and Give. The five ways have had a phenomenal success across the globe from Norway to New Zealand, and can be found on billboards in South London, and on the NHS Choices website.

But the Five Ways evidence was mostly based on studies on adults. So, the Children’s Society, who have set the standard for the well-being agenda for children, asked nef to help them explore the relevance of the Five Ways for those under 16. They used a combination of survey data, asking around 1,500 children about their behaviour (to see whether they engage in the five ways) and their well-being, and focus groups, directly asking children to explore how the Five Ways might improve their lives.

Last week, the Children’s Society launched the Good Childhood Report 2013, which presents this data for the first time (take a look at chapter 4). Overall, the evidence showed the Five Ways to Well-being to be important to children – those carrying them out reporting high levels of well-being. In regression analyses, certain activities seemed to be particularly important: noticing one’s surroundings (Take Notice), talking to family members about things that matter (Connect), playing sports (Be Active) and teaching yourself new things (Keep Learning). For example, children who reported noticing and enjoying their surroundings all of the time were on average in the top 25% of well-being scores, whereas those that reported never doing so were on average in the bottom 20%.

As telling as the relationships we found to be strong, are those that weren’t so strong. For example, whilst seeing friends was very important to well-being, chatting to friends on the phone or through social websites, had no effect whatsoever on well-being. Might Facebook’s intention to allow children under 12 to use the website encourage more to carry out this well-being neutral activity? Meanwhile, the evidence on Give was mixed – helping around the house was associated with higher well-being, but volunteering (which few kids did) wasn’t.

In a more detailed report which the Children’s Society and nef will publish later this summer, we will also present findings on the relationship between the Five Ways and socio-economic status. Preliminary evidence suggests that children in the bottom income quartile carry out fewer five ways activities than those in the top income quartile, despite the fact that most of the activities can be free or very cheap (e.g. reading books or playing sports).

 

The evidence from the focus groups suggested, however, that the biggest barrier to children carrying out Five Ways activities was lack of permission from parents or guardians. The Children’s Society have already highlighted the importance of autonomy and independence for children, and these data show how a society of over-protectiveness may be preventing children from doing things which could improve their well-being, such as seeing their friends, cycling to school, or simply kicking around a football in the park.

This blog first appeared on the nef blog 22 July, 2013.

Click here to view the full Good Childhood Report 2013.

Where is the Demand for Beyond GDP Indicators?

This blog by Saamah Abdallah, nef (the new economics foundation) profiles the recent report by BRAINPOoL*, Characterizing Demand for ‘Beyond GDP’. This article is part of the Wikiprogress series on Statistics and Data.

Where is the demand for Beyond GDP indicators? 

Which actors are interested in using such indicators and how do they want to use them? 

How might a societal demand for these indicators be understood? And, when there is a lack of demand, what factors explain it? 

These are the questions that are posed and answered in a recent report by BRAINPOoL, the EU funded project on bringing alternative indicators into policy. The presentation below provides a summary of the report.  Whilst there are some greenshoots emerging, it does highlight the many challenges faced by promoters of alternative indicators in terms of getting them to be use in the policy process.

Where is the demand for ‘Beyond GDP’ indicators? from Wikiprogress_slides

Saamah Abdallah

*BRAINPOol (Bringing Alternative Indicators into Policy) is a consortium of European partners with the aim of influencing policy makers to consider indicators for well-being and progress alternative to GDP. It was formed in 2010 following a push for further engagement in a beyond GDP society, and is funded by the European Commission’s 7th Framework Program. 

Read the report - Characterizing Demand for ‘Beyond GDP’

On the Practical Politics of Well-being

By Dr Sorcha Mahoney of the new economics foundation Centre for Well-being.

Last month the Centre for Well-being at nef (the new economics foundation) launched its latest pamphlet: The Practical Politics of Well-being. At the heart of this pamphlet is the idea that the well-being agenda has the potential to resonate across the political spectrum and appeal to those on the left, right and centre ground of politics in the UK. This is important; we believe that no matter which political party is in power, having high well-being for all as a basic orienting principle for policy making and political decision making can help to deliver improved well-being for UK citizens.

In this vein, The Practical Politics of Well-being presents personal contributions from a Labour (left wing), Liberal Democrat (centre) and Conservative (right wing) perspective on the well-being agenda and how this relates to particular party political principles. In his paper, Michael Jacobs argues that well-being provides a new justification and a new language for goals that Labour already espouses, whilst noting the difficulty of creating public support for the provision of public goods – a necessary pre-cursor for high well-being – and the major challenge that well-being science poses to decisions around economic and employment policy. In her paper, Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson argues that liberals and Liberal Democrats have also long appreciated well-being as an important goal of policy, whilst noting that findings from well-being science may bolster certain liberal principles and pose a challenge to others, which implies a need to consider how well-being sits alongside other key liberal values. In his paper, conservative commentator Jonty Olliff-Cooper notes that whilst Conservative backing of the well-being agenda may at first seem strange, conservatives – whichever strand of conservatism they represent – are interested in how the individual’s well-being can be maximised. He argues that well-being offers one possible route to turning conservative thinking into a practical guide for action.

Acknowledging and harnessing cross-party support for the well-being agenda is an important part of ensuring its practical application. In the UK, moves are now well underway to measure well-being at the national level. Last week the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) published its first round of test statistics on well-being from its Opinions Survey, and since April 2011 it has included four subjective questions in its annual Integrated Household Survey, which probes the well-being and circumstances of some 200,000 people in the UK. These questions are about how satisfied people are with their lives, how happy they were yesterday, how anxious they were yesterday, and how worthwhile they think the things they do are. The survey also asks a large number of questions about objective circumstances that are influenced by policy, for example health behaviours, housing, education, household income, employment patterns and benefit entitlements. With such information the way is paved for policy makers and political decision makers – of whichever political persuasion – to ask about the likely impacts of particular policies on well-being, and to make policies and decisions in a way designed to maximise well-being. This in turn implies potential changes to policy, some of which might be painful and resisted, whilst others will be less controversial.

Equally as important, however, is our contention – explicit in the pamphlet – that there is a need to change the central dynamic of our society. The current dynamic is inherently flawed. Without doing this, the danger is that despite small, incremental changes to policy and political decision making, the central dynamic will remain unchanged, and that in this the well-being agenda will be no more than a band aid for patching up the cracks in a fundamentally flawed system.

Whilst the well-being agenda appeals to people across the political spectrum, if we are to take it seriously this will mean not only ensuring that policy-making and political decision making at the margins are driven by well-being evidence, but designing core economic policies with well-being in mind. 

Measuring our progress: The power of well-being. The nef report.

It’s now been almost three months since the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, announced that the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) will measure the nation’s well-being, “measuring our progress as a country, not just by how our economy is growing, but by how our lives are improving; not just by our standard of living, but by our quality of life.” Since then the ONS has been holding a national debate about what progress (‘national well-being’) means to people and how it is best measured.

An important strand of the ONS’s work on well-being involves choosing 4 or 5 subjective well-being questions to include in the Integrated Household Survey (IHS) – the largest source of UK social data after the census – and deciding how these will fit into the broader concept of national well-being. An announcement on which questions will be used in the first instance is to be made on Thursday, but as the National Statistician, Jil Matheson, has explained, the resulting data will not determine the form of all future measurement, but will be regarded as ‘experimental statistics’, offering scope for further changes to the measurement process.

As a contribution to both the national debate and ONS’s deliberations about measurement, we – the Centre for Well-being at the nef (the new economics foundation) – have published our latest report: Measuring our progress: The power of well-being.

The report begins by reflecting on the range of recent initiatives which have all aimed to redress the over-emphasis on GDP as the dominant measure of social progress. The OECD, the Stiglitz Commission, Eurostat, Beyond GDP and many others have developed measurement frameworks which attempt to capture progress more meaningfully. There has been a broad consensus among them on the need to consider the environment alongside well-being and more objective conditions. The Stiglitz Commission in particular defined progress in terms of the economy, the environment and quality of life, whilst the OECD considered the relationship between the human system and the ecosystem. The nef report develops these ideas but separates the means (resources and human systems) and the ends (the goal of high well-being for all) that, measured together, capture the progress of our nation (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Conceptual framework for societal progress

The key relationship in this framework is between resources and goals: how efficient are we at achieving the goal we want – high well-being for all – given our limited planetary resources? This will largely depend on how efficient our human systems – things like the economy, democracy, peace, and other human activities – are at using resources sustainably, and also how efficient these human systems are at delivering high well-being for all citizens.

In the UK, the immediate responsibility of the ONS is to decide how this goal – well-being – is best conceived of and measured. We argue that it is best understood in terms of the dynamic model of well-being, first developed as part of the UK Government Office of Science Foresight project on mental capital and well-being. It uses the concept of ‘flourishing’ – functioning well in interactions with the world and as a result feeling good about life. The model (Figure 2) describes how people’s external conditions (such as their income, employment status, housing and social context) act together with their personal resources (such as health, resilience and optimism) to allow them to function well and feel good. The model really emphasises the idea that well-being is about more than just happiness – it’s also about having good relationships, autonomy, competence and a sense of purpose, and this is what leads to people feeling happy and satisfied with their life. This report recommends some specific questions that attempt to capture some of this complexity.

Figure 2: Dynamic model of well-being

The ONS also has the task of deciding how survey results should be presented: as just a single life satisfaction indicator, as a composite index or as a dashboard of several indicators? And if it decides to use more than one indicator, should it use only subjective indicators or a combination of subjective and objective ones? And which ones? We addressed these questions by considering how measures can be best designed to have public and political resonance. As a result we recommend that the ONS develops a headline index of well-being , reported as the percentage of people who are flourishing. We also recommend that there is a headline measure of well-being inequality, as well as a set of objective indicators of the drivers of well-being. In the long-run we advocate a much broader set of subjective well-being questions is included, to fully capture the lived experience of people in the UK.

But to make the exercise of measurement worthwhile, subjective indicators of well-being need to be designed so that they are used by policy-makers to change the way that policies are developed and implemented. As the Istanbul Declaration states ‘[A] culture of evidence-based decision making has to be promoted at all levels, to increase the welfare of societies’. The full value of well-being measures will only be realised when they are embedded in the processes by which governments aim to improve the lives of their citizens.

Find the new nef report at http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/measuring-our-progress and have your say in the ONS national debate at http://www.ons.gov.uk/well-being.

Blog post by Laura Stoll, The Centre for Well-being, nef

The nef blog: http://www.neweconomics.org/blog