Britain Etc.

by Mark Easton

  Bentham defined happiness as the excess of pleasure over pain or the difference between well-being and ill-being. ‘Taking the whole of mankind together,’ he mused, ‘on which side of the account does the balance lie, on the well-being or ill-being side?’ Despite extensive lists of pleasures and pains, Bentham never found a convincing way to measure social well-being. Nor did other utilitarian thinkers. Happiness appeared to be a candyfloss concept, attractive but ultimately fluffy and insubstantial — hardly the handy ready reckoner that government needed to decide its priorities.

  So it was that another yardstick for progress came to be accepted: money. Economists, not social scientists, were invited to sit closest to the seat of power. Tangible wealth, rather than ethereal well-being, became the fundamental political goal.

  Even finding a single accepted measure of affluence proved tricky, and it wasn’t until the 1930s that Russian-born economist Simon Kuznets came up with the concept of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). For industrialised countries such as Britain, trying to recover from the deprivations of the Second World War in the 1940s and 50s, GDP was embraced as the best way to monitor material and social development. Despite Kuznets’ own warning that his measure should not be used as a surrogate for well-being, those three letters became the focus of UK government activity, recited mantra-like as an incantation for a better life. National advancement and greater GDP became almost indistinguishable.

  However, not everyone was content with this state of affairs. In 1960, a paper published by the United Nations warned that ‘one of the greatest dangers in development policy lies in the tendency to give to the more material aspects of growth an overriding and disproportionate emphasis.’ Poorer nations, particularly those looking to break free of a colonial yoke, argued there was more to progress than money. ‘The end may be forgotten in preoccupation of the means,’ the UN report added.

  Eight years later, Robert F. Kennedy, campaigning for the US Presidency in Kansas, gave an impassioned speech arguing the same point:

  Our Gross National Product… counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armoured cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities… and the television programmes which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

  The following year the UN General Assembly issued a declaration stating ‘each government has the primary role and ultimate responsibility of ensuring the social progress and well-being of its people.’ It might almost have said ‘happiness’. The Assembly stressed it should be the objective of every state to raise not just material, but spiritual standards of living. The list of goals included the elimination of hunger and poverty, the eradication of illiteracy, adequate housing, and the highest standards of health. But the UN went much further, demanding nations strive for ‘a just and equitable distribution of income’, ‘the encouragement of creative initiative under conditions of enlightened public opinion’ and an ‘integrated society’. Getting rich was not enough — progress was about human rights and social justice.

  This was 1969, and I was watching Neil Armstrong and thinking of everlasting gobstoppers, the UN was watching anti-Vietnam protests and thinking of world peace, and thousands of hippies were heading for Woodstock and thinking of free love. But none of these visions of progress was embraced by political leaders around the world who, for decades to come, would still stick doggedly to the idea that increasing GDP should be the basis for deciding policy.

  Then something changed. Perhaps it was the impending millennium that prompted a reflective mood. Or maybe it was environmental concerns about the state of the planet. It might simply have been that, in the developed world at least, enormous new wealth was not really making people any happier. With the imminent arrival of the twenty-first century, old questions began to be asked once again.

  In 1998, for instance, an article appeared in the magazine Forbes ASAP, by Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for US Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. ‘History has handed us one of the easiest rides in all the story of man,’ she wrote. ‘It is all so fantastically fine.’ Then she added: ‘Lately this leaves me uneasy. Does it you?’ Here was someone who had spent her life arguing the case for capitalism, writing in ajournal for the super-rich and questioning the comforts of wealth. ‘The more you have, the more you need, the more you work and plan,’ Noonan observed, complaining that affluence ‘carries within it an unspoken command: More!’

  The article was to gain prominence because, three years before 9/11, it contained within it a prediction of a terrorist attack on New York, ‘the psychological centre of our modernity, our hedonism, our creativity, our hard-shouldered hipness, our unthinking arrogance’. But, for me, the anxiety that drove the essay was an almost visceral fear that the richest nations on the planet might have missed the point, that the West had got its priorities wrong, was so busy making money it had lost the plot. ‘Does family life spill over into work life? No. Work life spills over into family life,’ Noonan argued. ‘This is not progress.’

  At almost the same moment, three eminent American professors completed a book that would, ultimately, transform British politics. Entitled Well-being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, Daniel Kahneman, Ed Deiner and Norbert Schwartz announced the existence of a new field of psychology striving to achieve what Jeremy Bentham and the utilitarian movement failed to do — to measure happiness. ‘Our hope is that hedonic psychology will be relevant to policy,’ the authors wrote. ‘We recognise, with a large degree of humility, that scientific understanding in this field is currently woefully inadequate to provide a strong underpinning for national policies. We believe, however, that in the decades to come there will be much greater success in understanding hedonics, and that principles will emerge that can be used by policy makers.’ The book was hailed as ‘the handbook, guidebook, compass and bible’ for what might be called the new utilitarians — a global group of academics and intellectuals pledged to transforming economics and politics around well-being rather than wealth.

  It was a damp November afternoon in 2002 when, over tea and biscuits at Her Majesty’s Treasury in Whitehall, a cell of British new utilitarians plotted their opening gambit. A pamphlet entitled Life Satisfaction: The State of Knowledge and Implications for Government was circulated the following month and clearly stamped: ‘This is not a statement of government policy.’ Its motive was far more radical.

  The apparently innocuous conclusion of the 2002 tract was that ‘there is a case for state intervention to boost life satisfaction.’ Who could argue with that? But it implied a redefinition of political purpose. ‘This is a revolution in how we think about everything,’ argued the economist Professor Richard Layard, one of those gathered in Room 2/18 that day. ‘Government has got to rethink its priorities,’ he insisted. ‘I am hoping that each department will review its objectives and see how closely they are in line with the idea of promoting the happiness of the people.’

  What lay behind the challenge was the claim that it was now possible to measure well-being at least as well as economists measure wealth. The hedonic psychologists had produced good evidence that happiness was an objective phenomenon and that there were ways of counting it.

  At around this time, I paid a visit to Daniel Kahneman — author of one of the gospels in the happiness bible. ‘It tu
rns out,’ he told me, ‘something like fifteen per cent of the overall time that people spend is bad time, unpleasant time. Now that gives you something to get your teeth into. If you manage to reduce that number from fifteen per cent to fourteen per cent, you would be doing a great service to humankind!’ Kahneman was aware that the pursuit of happiness, although enshrined in America’s constitution, was too easily dismissed as a nebulous and naïve ambition by hard-nosed policy advisors in Washington. Reducing unhappiness, however, was accepted as a legitimate and noble aim.

  In Britain, the new utilitarians were beginning to grow in confidence: the government was pledged to evidence-based policy and they hoped the science of happiness could become a driving force in determining the political direction of travel. Within Number Ten itself, Tony Blair’s strategy team included enthusiastic advocates of the new utilitarian cause. Geoff Mulgan and David Halpern were quietly encouraging the Prime Minister towards the politics of well-being, but the Labour leader was never totally convinced.

  The problem was not just that the science was new, but that its findings cut across political ideologies. In fact, it appeared to turn conventional arguments on their head. The accepted wisdom in Britain was that the twentieth century had seen ‘the right’ win the economic case and ‘the left’ win the social case. Happiness science suggested, up to a point at least, that well-being was improved by conservative social policies and socialist economic policies. The left embraced findings that suggested redistributing wealth is good for our well-being; that state intervention in public services raises joy in the national heart; that policies encouraging a work-life balance are good for the general well-being. The right preferred the scientific papers suggesting that marriage (rather than cohabitation) has a hugely positive effect on happiness; and that God and the Boy Scouts add to the sum of human contentment, while entertainment TV and multiculturalism tend to reduce it.

  As the Westminster party apparatchiks struggled to fit the new philosophy into old ideology, it became clear that the message of the new utilitarians was striking a chord with the public. After decades of economic growth, Britain was richer than at any point in its history. Yet, as Geoff Mulgan put it, ‘society’s ability to meet people’s psychological and psycho-social needs appears to have declined.’ Delivering almost inexorable economic growth was stubbornly refusing to create the feel-good factor politicians yearned for, and so it was that the happy evangelists were quietly able to gain access to the corridors of power.

  They still tended to operate in the shadows, working in little happy cells secreted within the state machine. One group had successfully infiltrated local government some years earlier, achieving legislation stating that the ‘promotion of well-being’ was a responsibility of all councils in England. At national level, the Whitehall Well-being Working Group kept a low profile (W3G to those in the know) and few took much notice of the report published by the Department of Environment advocating that well-being be used to inform future policy development and spending decisions. Nevertheless, the new utilitarian message was feeding into the system.

  Richard Layard became the public standard bearer for the happiness movement in the UK, an eminent economics professor with excellent political contacts. His power base was the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, a body that included on its board Gus O’Donnell, the man Whitehall called GOD.

  Then the top official at the Treasury, O’Donnell would go on to head the civil service, a bureaucrat whose professional life was devoted to measuring progress in government. Fascinated by Layard’s claims that wealth was failing to translate into well-being, he became convinced that the arguments of the new utilitarians went to the very heart of what government is actually for, and how we can measure its success. The civil service and, critically, the Treasury were engaged in the debate. Senior officials had been persuaded that it was no longer a question of whether one could measure well-being, but how its measurement might change the business of government and the definition of social progress.

  ‘It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money,’ a fresh-faced politician announced in 2006. ‘It’s time we focused, not on GDP, but on GWB — General Well-being.’ David Cameron had recently been elected leader of the Conservative Party when he gave a speech that echoed the words (if not the poetry) of Robert F. Kennedy from almost four decades before. ‘Well-being can’t be measured by money or traded in markets. It can’t be required by law or delivered by government. It’s about the beauty of our surroundings, the quality of our culture, and above all the strength of our relationships. Improving our society’s sense of well-being is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times.’

  The idea was mocked in the popular press, but some commentators believed the Conservative leader was on to something. I went to interview him, to see if he was serious about putting well-being at the heart of his politics. ‘We should be thinking not just what is good for putting money in people’s pockets but what is good for putting joy in people’s hearts,’ David Cameron told me.

  Richard Layard’s book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, published a year before, had become a surprise bestseller and a must-read for both political and social scientists. He demonstrated how, beyond a certain point, additional wealth does not translate into extra well-being, the so-called Easterlin paradox. Most Western countries, he argued, had passed that threshold and the pursuit of economic growth was actually becoming counter-productive.

  Suddenly, it was fashionable to question the hegemony of GDP. In the summer of 2007, representatives from many of the rich nations’ clubs gathered in Istanbul to do just that. The OECD, the United Nations, the European Commission and the World Bank signed a declaration committing them to ‘measuring and fostering the progress of societies in all dimensions, with the ultimate goal of improving policy making, democracy and citizens’ well-being’.

  The Secretary General of the OECD stood to address the 1,200 delegates in the cavernous conference hall. ‘It is time to call for a global effort to find better measurements of progress,’ Angel Gurría told the conference. ‘In the end, what we are trying to do is not just to measure progress and well-being but to achieve it.’ There was, perhaps, a hint of urgency in his remarks: a sense that the economic architecture that supported Western society had developed dangerous cracks, but no stable alternative had yet been erected.

  Governments around the world recruited the greatest minds to address the problem. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy invited no fewer than five Nobel prize-winning economists to join a panel of experts pledged to finding more relevant indicators of social progress. The Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress first assembled in February 2008, headed by the former chief economist at the World Bank, American professor Joseph Stiglitz. They were not to know on that damp winter’s day in Paris that severe economic storms were gathering just over the skyline. Within months, the world’s banking system would teeter on the brink of collapse and, with the resulting recession, political focus would shift from the philosophy of social progress to concerns over how to restore economic growth.

  The global financial crisis was a reality check to the new utilitarian movement, and the question was whether its ideas would survive in a climate of (relative) austerity. Stiglitz and his team of economic all-stars finally agreed a 300-page report in September 2009, their conclusions to be launched in the Grand Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne as outside, on the streets of Paris, more than a million protestors demonstrated at government plans for economic belt-tightening. The French President stood to speak, the marble faces of Descartes, Pascal and Lavoisier watching him from their pillared alcoves. Would he, in the face of mass public protest at spending cuts, support his experts’ conclusion that the measurement of progress should focus less on wealth and more on well-being? Would he agree to be a leader in a global debate as to whether we are really striving for what is important?

  Yes
, he would. ‘France will open the debate on this report’s conclusions everywhere,’ he announced. ‘France will fight for every international organisation to modify their statistical systems by following the commission’s recommendations.’

  In Britain, those recruited to the new utilitarian cause were more circumspect but no less determined. Three months after Sarkozy’s rallying call, buried in a report on mental health strategy, the UK’s Labour government committed itself to putting well-being in all policy. The Health Secretary Andy Burnham explained how his officials would liaise with other departments to ensure that policies considered the impact on well-being, as well as using it to inform future policy and research.

  Behind the scenes, a team of British statisticians had been quietly working on a measure of societal well-being for years, but it was not until David Cameron moved into Downing Street that the project won official approval. I was among sixty journalists, academics and civil servants invited to the Treasury in late November 2010. The PM breezed onto a purpose-built podium to address his audience. ‘From April next year, we’ll start measuring our progress as a country, not just by how our economy is growing, but by how our lives are improving; not just by our standard of living, but by our quality of life,’ he announced.

  Was he serious? ‘People often regard the “happiness agenda” as being a bit like candyfloss; it is sweet but insubstantial,’ I suggested to Mr Cameron. ‘Will this change people’s lives, do you think?’