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How should David Cameron measure the nation's happiness?

The prime minister wants to gauge national happiness, but how easy will that be, asks Alan Walker
A happy office worker
The former King of Bhutan coined the phrase "gross national happiness", but how do we measure it? Photograph: Alberto Incrocci/Getty

Where King Jigme Singe Wangchuck leads, David Cameron will follow. The former King of Bhutan coined the phrase "gross national happiness" in 1972 and it was adopted as a national goal. This was re-affirmed by the present King in his November 2008 coronation address.

In practice though it has proved difficult to define precisely enough for either statistical or policy purposes. This has something to do with its spiritualist Buddhist origins, which were expressed in the form of four pillars: promotion of sustainable development, presentation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment and the establishment of good governance.

To make the concept more usable these pillars have been turned into various broad indicators of happiness such as physical, mental and spiritual health, cultural vitality, time-balance and ecological vitality. This still leaves open the question of what happiness is and whether it is possible to define it in anything other than narrow individual terms: like beauty it is in the eye of the beholder. This is why most empirical researchers have preferred what are regarded as more tangible concepts such as quality of life or wellbeing. In practice though these are often as hard to pin down as happiness and what happens is that researchers are forced to fall back on proxy questions concerning physical health or psychological wellbeing.

So where does this leave David Cameron's project? It is easy to scoff at attempts to assess 'soft' individual or social evidence as opposed to 'hard' economic data (this is always how the story is told). But the endeavour in Bhutan is certainly serious and it has contributed to a growing global movement that criticises the myopic focus on GDP in developed countries. This culminated in President Sarkozy's 'Beyond GDP' Commission headed by Nobel Laureates Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz.

What Cameron's move signals is the breadth of the unease with purely economic measures of progress, whatever more base political motives he may have for raising it at this time. The office for national statistics (ONS) will no doubt do a highly professional job of synthesising the host of tried and tested wellbeing indices.

The big problem with all such measurements is that they are concerned with subjective wellbeing, which is a highly individual concept. What should be done, in policy terms, with the data generated by such questions is, to say the least, a major challenge. For example, the European Union regularly polls life satisfaction in all member countries. The latest results show that 91% of UK citizens are fairly to highly satisfied with their lives compared with 82% in France and 96% in Sweden. What are we to make of this and, in particular, what policy implications follow from it? What would a government say in response to the 2 percentage point rise in life satisfaction in the UK during 2009? What would be the response to a 20 percentage point drop? This emphasises the distinction in quality of life research between individual and social perspectives. Whereas the former focus on individual wellbeing, the latter are concerned with the quality of society and, therefore, with factors that governments may have some influence over.

The leading 'quality of society' approach is 'social quality', a concept born in Europe and which has already influenced the European Union's social policy agenda.

Social quality is the extent to which people are able to participate in society under conditions that enhance their individual potential and wellbeing. Thus the spotlight is on the social context in which people are able to thrive or otherwise. The facilitators or inhibitors are socio-economic security, social cohesion, social inclusion and social empowerment, each of which is measurable and each speaks directly to policy makers.

Adopting a social quality approach would be highly challenging for the government because it reflects the large body of evidence, such as Wilkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level, demonstrating that the quality of society has a crucial bearing on individual wellbeing. It is not difficult to see why a Conservative leader would choose a safer route. In launching the happiness initiative Mr Cameron rightly suggested that government may be able to influence wellbeing but the analogy he used of setting the context for business by "cutting taxes, slashing red tape and so on" does not inspire confidence that he would be prepared to take the most important step towards both social quality and individual wellbeing: to create a more equal society.

Alan Walker is professor of social policy at Sheffield University

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