Of the 50 members of the McGill University hosted World Wellbeing Panel (WWP), the vast majority have agreed that governments should place greater emphasis on how to measure collective wellbeing, when formulating public policy aimed at improving individual life satisfaction.
In the WWP’s summer 2024 poll, panel members were asked to consider two statements to this effect. First, “From the perspective of assessing overall human welfare, family and community wellbeing are best thought of as determinants of individual life satisfaction,” and the second, “If public policy targets measures of individual life satisfaction, it will also necessarily capture all the important drivers of collective wellbeing.”
“Those are the issues,” says Christopher Barrington-Leigh, Associate Professor in McGill’s Department of Equity, Ethics and Policy, the Bieler School of Environment, and WWP director. “It matters a lot if we want to have governments be confident that they are measuring something that is comparable across countries and that is getting at the heart of what they should be doing in their job, which is to improve lives.”
Professor of sociology at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Ruut Veenhoven, agrees with both statements. “Such interest is advocated by colleagues from collectivist cultures. From the perspective of overall human welfare, collective wellbeing can best be seen as a determinant of life satisfaction rather than as a distinct dimension of wellbeing. I agree completely, since a single dimension of wellbeing is clearly not overall wellbeing.”
Professor Daniela Andrén, a senior lecturer at Örebro University School of Business in Örebro, Sweden concurs. “Family and community values and norms shape individual cognitive and noncognitive skills, and therefore contribute to individual subjective wellbeing. But family and community values and norms vary across countries, driven by different formal and informal institutional settings. This implies that public policy can contribute to improving both cognitive and noncognitive skills of individuals as soon as possible in their life.”
There are detractors, however, and professor of philosophy Dan Haybron at Saint Louis University in Missouri is one of them. Haybron says life satisfaction measures should capture how people are doing in terms of issues they care about. “There is now a substantial literature by philosophers and others documenting the many ways in which this assumption is false, except as a very crude approximation with important exceptions.” According to Haybron, no single wellbeing metric will capture all the information people care about, “It’s just not possible.”
Perhaps the most important question is whether or not governments prioritize wellbeing in the development of socio-economic policy. “The answer would be in general, no,” says Barrington-Leigh, which he says is the reason why the WWP was created. “Most governments are not yet really prioritizing this. Canada is somewhat of a leader in that since 2021 we’ve had a quality-of-life framework in the federal government that does put life satisfaction at the centre of the definition of quality-of-life. There’s an effort to really embed this quality-of-life framework in how the Treasury Board measures program outcomes and how it vets and approves all budgetary requests.”
The main objective of the survey is to shed light on the big picture measurement question, notes Barrington-Leigh. “This relates to countries like Canada that have now built a framework, but also to other countries still thinking about the structure and definition of wellbeing — and how to integrate it into statistical agency measurements and into policy making.”
The poll should foster debate on the impact of policy on wellbeing, which optimistically, should lead to better policies and decisions. “International OECD guidelines for government wellbeing measurement are currently being updated. Clarity about how budgets and policy decisions should be accountable to human experience is fundamental to the purpose of governments. So far, the overarching objectives of government have been unclear, indirect, or confused.”