Prioritise pleasure (… and purpose in policymaking)
As the UK general election approaches, I want to take the opportunity to encourage the incoming government to put happiness front and centre of its agenda. The time has come for politicians to address the importance of happiness not only as a key consequence of policy decisions but also as a vital cause of economic and social prosperity.
To help make the case for happiness in policy, I looked back at a report I wrote with colleagues from the LSE during the pandemic, “Shaping the post-Covid World: Moving towards wellbeing over the lifetime as the unit of analysis in policy”, which set out how to embed subjective wellbeing (SWB) – the academic term for happiness – into policymaking in the post-Covid world. Much of below is précised from that report.
It remains my contention that the main aim of government should be to improve wellbeing and reduce suffering by as much as possible in those whose suffering matters the most to society. A full appraisal of any policy intervention requires us to capture and quantify all its possible short and long-term ripple effects, and not simply the most immediate and obvious splash it creates. This means that we need to identify, measure, and quantify a wide range of effects of policy responses that allow for the various consequences of value to be compared to one another.
Ultimately, any policy will affect one or both of two main welfare concerns for individuals: life expectancies and life experiences, which can be valued using people’s reports of SWB – an umbrella term for how people evaluate their lives overall, and/or how they feel about their moment-to-moment or daily experiences. SWB can be combined with life expectancy data to estimate wellbeing-adjusted life years (WELLBYs). This single metric allows for the value of all possible uses of scarce resources to be estimated in terms of their relative cost-per-WELLBY.
At the societal level, citizens and policymakers care not only about how many WELLBYs are being generated per pound spent but also about how those WELLBYs are distributed across people. Just as we care about national income and about inequalities in income, we care about the size of the wellbeing cake and about how fairly the slices are distributed. Social welfare will be maximised when a “sweet spot” is found between maximising WELLBYs and reducing inequalities in WELLBYs that are deemed to be unfair. One of the most important distributional considerations is wellbeing over the lifetime.
Major policy decisions affect all of us in different ways. The policymaking process should therefore be informed by people with different voices, disciplines, perspectives, and experiences. Diversity has been shown to increase performance in organisational settings. Moreover, the decisions we take as public officials can never be completely cleansed of self-interest and bias, and so decision-making must urgently involve a greater diversity of professional perspective and personal experience.
In academia, attempts have been made to encourage adversarial collaboration, which explicitly brings together academics with different prior beliefs to work on a research question. In a similar way, we must start to embed practices in policy-making that actively encourage criticism and critique. In so doing, we will be better placed to avoid the pitfalls of group think. The government should be required to be more transparent about the data it is using to inform its decisions, and from whom it is seeking advice.
The mainstream media can play a crucial role here in holding the government to account, and in ensuring that data are presented in context. There has been much discussion of fake news, but much less consideration given to “distorted news”. We need more and higher quality discussion of when the media should be used to assist in government information programmes, and when it should challenge them.
There is good evidence from the literature on procedural justice that people benefit from having their voice heard. Even in cases where this does not change the decision in any substantive way, it adds legitimacy to the decision. Fair processes are not only a goal themselves, but will also show up in improved wellbeing and, therefore, ultimately affect the acceptance and effectiveness of a given policy intervention.
In our report, we proposed setting up a wellbeing commission comprising different voices, including those from advocacy groups e.g., such as those involved in palliative care. There is no better time than now to set up that commission. Amongst other activities, the commission would ensure that the ways in which WELLBYs are generated have widespread support. It would serve to make a small but significant contribution towards ensuring that reducing inequalities in wellbeing over the lifetime is pushed to the forefront of politicians and policymakers’ minds. Above all, a wellbeing commission would signal just how important happiness is to us all.