Wellbeing science can help revolutionise government, work, school and life. Schools shouldn’t train people only for work, and work should be enjoyable. People are now studying how to make this happen, because the well-being movement will only succeed if it has the evidence base to win the argument. In the year he turns 90, Richard Layard writes about the wellbeing day at the LSE Festival.
How fitting! On the first day of the LSE Festival, a one-day conference on wellbeing. Wellbeing was, of course, the goal that inspired the founders of LSE, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and its greatest director, William Beveridge. They were all utilitarians. They thought the objective of policy should be to maximise the wellbeing of the people. And they thought that social science should be about how to do that.
Now at last that is becoming operationally feasible. We can measure wellbeing and we can say a lot about what affects it. The best measure of wellbeing is “life satisfaction” (Overall, how satisfied are you with your life these days? 0 = not at all 10 = extremely satisfied). And there is a whole mass of evidence about how it is determined. So I am on the warpath to persuade governments to choose their policies to maximise wellbeing.
I have been at LSE for sixty years and one of the first books I wrote was on cost-benefit analysis (CBA). When CBA came in, it represented a huge step towards more rational government. But it has its limitations. To measure how each change affects wellbeing it asks how much people would be willing to pay for the change. This requires evidence of what people actually pay when they choose similar changes. But no one makes a choice to be offered a job they have applied for, nor to be robbed in the street.
By contrast, wellbeing science provides hard, quantitative evidence on how finding a job or being robbed actually affects people’s wellbeing. So I’m hoping that soon it will become routine practice to use this new type of evidence (together with the traditional sort). We have a team in the Centre for Economic Performance calculating cost/benefit ratios across the board, from roads and R&D to education and mental health. At the Festival, we’ll give a foretaste of our report on all this. It will imply a massive change in spending priorities – with more on mental health and other services which have comparable impacts on our wellbeing.
We hope that this new method of policy analysis will take root in Britain – and then across the world. It would contribute to much better decisions. In Britain, Keir Starmer has said “With every pound spent on your behalf we would expect the Treasury to weigh not just its effect on national income but also, its effect on well-being”. And this September the heads of government across the world will be at the UN for the Summit of the Future. Shouldn’t they be saying that the purpose of all governments should be to promote wellbeing?
For that is actually in their interest. If you try to explain the government’s share of the vote in a general election, the wellbeing of the people explains it better than the state of the economy does. This is true both in national elections in Europe since the 1970s and in recent US presidential elections.
So wellbeing science can revolutionise government. It should also revolutionise schooling. Schools should not be exam factories training people only for work. They should train people for life. This requires in many schools a new ethos, plus the weekly teaching of life skills, using well tested materials and curricula. Some years back I helped to promote an evidence-based life skills curriculum with weekly lessons for 11 to 15 year olds. It raised average wellbeing by 10 percentage points.
After leaving school, we spend much of our life at work. As wellbeing research shows for the average person, work is about the least enjoyable of all experiences. Yet it is possible to raise wellbeing in ways that increase rather than reduce productivity. Better work organisation and better systems of pay would make a huge difference.
And then there is what we can all do. If we want “a happier world”, that has got to be our objective. Members of the Action for Happiness movement, which I co-founded, pledge “to create more happiness and less unhappiness in the world around me”. It’s not easy, but the movement provides wonderful courses and groups that help people live that way.
At the World Happiness Summit we included all these points in a Wellbeing Manifesto. Do sign it. And all these issues and more will be covered at the LSE Festival. We have wonderful speakers. Gus O’Donnell is the former Cabinet Secretary who made Britain the first country to measure its peoples’ wellbeing. We will discuss the role of government. Paul Dolan will examine whether it’s low wellbeing which is producing the new polarisation in politics. Andrew Oswald, the father of wellbeing science in Britain, will discuss the role of the welfare state in wellbeing. Others will cover mental health, schools, work and personal life. And a final event will be chaired by Sarah Cunningham, who leads the new pressure group on policymakers and industry called the World Wellbeing Movement.
So this is an army of people on the move, seeking to promote a happier society. LSE has a crucial role to play in this, because the movement will only succeed if it has the evidence base to win the argument. So thank you, LSE, for putting us up first in the Festival.
- This blog post represents the views of the author(s), not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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