In July of this year the preliminary results of a ‘happiness survey’ carried out by the Office for National Statistics between 2011 and 2012 were published. For the first time the on-going Integrated Household Survey had included questions on what the OfNS prefers to call ‘well being’ rather than happiness. The results are in some ways quite encouraging. The 165,000 people surveyed had been asked to rate themselves on a scale of 0 to 10 on four questions:
- overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
- to what extent do you feel that the things you do in your life are worthwhile?
- overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?
- how anxious did you feel yesterday?
The averages scored for questions 1 to 3 in the UK as a whole were 7.41, 7.66 and 7.28 (suggesting that when people sit back and reflect on their lives they feel slightly better about the way things are going than they do when they think about their experiences on one particular day). On the last question we scored, on average, 3.14. If you look at the responses region by region, then Orkney and Shetland, Northern Ireland, and South-West England come out as the most happy and least anxious parts of the country. Looked at in terms of age, people are happiest in their teenage years and after they’ve reached retirement age. No surprise where the latter are concerned, but whatever happened to teenage angst? A bit of a myth, perhaps. And married or cohabiting people are happier than the single, the widowed and the divorced.
So we may be a nation of congenital moaners, but most of us are, it seems, reasonably content with our lives. This result seems to have been confirmed by our recent Olympic experience. During the Games we came over, somewhat to my surprise, as people who are to a large extent at home in our new, post-colonial identity. Apparently we like a bit of a do, volunteering, and being kind to complete strangers.
Perhaps the most important thing a survey like this can do is to help us understand why some people are unhappy. There’s nothing earth-shattering about the discovery that if you’re unemployed you’re far more likely to be dissatisfied with your life than if you’re not (45% of the unemployed scored less than 7 out of 10 on that particular question). But the fact that it’s predictable doesn’t mean we can ignore the finding. I have always been very much in favour of the introduction of ‘the happiness survey’, because like others I think we need measures other than those of pure economic output to show how we’re doing as a country. But the survey was certainly controversial, and one of the obvious dangers was that if the results showed us to be reasonably happy, then the Government might start congratulating itself on doing a good job. So if booing George Osborne at the Olympics isn’t enough, let Osborne and Cameron have a look at the survey returns for the unemployed, and then take some serious action.