The Office of National Statistics has just completed it’s major annual poll of well-being. 165,000 Britons were asking about their levels of happiness, life satisfaction, worthwhileness and stress.
People might be surprised to know that the scores have gone up, not down, every year since they were first collected in 2012. Contrary to the doom and gloom narrative, this means that people really do think that their lives are going better.
Typically, we ignore well-being scores. But I think we do so at our peril. We tend think they aren’t as weighty or serious as traditional metrics like GDP growth or unemployment. This is a mistake because the well-being scores, unlike the other two, actually tell us how people feel. Ultimately, this is what matters: you could be rich and happy or rich and unhappy. What we want to know is how happy you are, not how rich. We might think wealth makes people happy and that’s why we’re interested in it, but studies, including this one by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, show that’s a very questionable assumption.
A result that will certainly irritate smug Londoners (such as myself) is that London has lower scores on all 4 levels than the national average. The top five happiest places in the UK from 2014/15, according to the ONS, are:
- Fermanagh and Omagh
- Ribble Valley
- Eilean Siar
- West Somerset
- Orkney Islands
And the least:
- Bolsover
- Cannock Chase
- Dundee City
- Dover
- Liverpool
A casual reading suggest that life is happier in the countryside, and worse in big cities, particularly those suffering economic decline.
But the interesting question, the one the ONS doesn’t answer, is “why are some places happier than others?” Without an account of what makes people happier the data is mere curiosity, rather than a guide for policymakers or individuals.
My suggestion is that happiness is caused by how we feel about what we pay attention to. In contrast, this means the objective circumstances of our lives (income, job, health, etc.) aren’t nearly as important as we’d imagine they would be. Why? Because we get used to them and stop paying them any attention. So whilst, on paper, London might be the greatest city in the world and Londoners richer than the average Brit, Londoners can still be less happy. This is because they are not thinking about the cultural richness of their city or their income compared to those in Bolsover. Instead they are thinking about how they’re wasting their lives on the Underground, nose-to-armpit with strangers and they’ll never be as rich as those bastards in Goldman Sachs anyway.
