If policy should promote happiness, we need to know what happiness is

This morning I read Alastair Campbell's short book The Happy Depressive.  In sum, it is mostly a discussion of what it means to be happy, set against the backdrop of Campbell's own - often troubled - life.  Alastair Campbell labels his interpretation of happiness as a 'dark theory'.  Happiness is, according to Campbell, something we can only know at the very end of our lives; when we look back at how we have lived and whether or not we feel we have been fulfilled.

The Easterlin Paradox: happiness is stagnant despite rising incomes

Happiness then is not a feeling, as such.  Rather, it is an evaluative process that we engage in throughout our lives.  Do we fulfil and challenge ourselves?  Do we do our best to cultivate our most important relationships?  Do we make a difference to other people's lives?  To my mind, Campbell makes an extremely important point: it is possible to feel anxious, grumpy and burdened but at the same time be happy.

This confusion - between feeling happy and being happy - is what I think is behind many social problems.  People too often seek out immediate pleasures that make them feel momentarily good: gambling; drinking; taking drugs; eating too much; buying expensive stuff we don't need.  There is a sense across society that to be happy is to seek out the feeling of pleasure; a dangerous and depressing idea.

Contemplating happiness is now at the centre of many policy discussions, as academics, politicians and other assorted wonks try to put the measurement of happiness at the centre (or least margins) of policy formation.  Yet as Campbell's discussion implies, in order to promote happiness and measure happiness, we need to consider what happiness actually is.

This means that there are two very different kinds of question we can ask people.

How happy is your life at the moment?  

and

How happy are you with your life?

I suspect when asked these two, very different questions, different types of people might give very different answers.

Are the unemployed getting unhappier?

A lot has been written and said about the rise in stigma attached to being unemployed.  This can come in different forms: either through shifting public attitudes against the welfare state or the constant media barrage against 'scroungers and dole cheats'.  The stigma of claiming benefits was brought to a wider public audience last week, with the publication of this new research by the charity Turn2us.  This heralds growing concern within activist, political and academic communities that the stigma of being on working-age benefits is reaching a dangerous tipping point.

One of the most commonly claimed consequences of increased stigma is a purported decline in the mental health of benefit claimants.  But how true are such claims?  To explore this further, I looked at 18 successive waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS).  Most of all, I wanted to know whether the average well-being of the unemployed has been declining over time, as the welfare state has got tougher and public attitudes less tolerant.

In the BHPS,  well-being is measured by the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ): a scale ranging from 0 to 36 that weights answers given to questions on a range of dimensions of psychological distress, such as poor concentration, loss of sleep, feelings of strain, loss of confidence and feelings of unhappiness and depression.  Crucially, higher well-being is represented by a low GHQ score and lower well-being by a high GHQ score.  Thus, if the average GHQ score for unemployed people is going up, it means their mental well-being is going down.

The results are shown in the graph below, which shows the mean GHQ score for each of the 18 waves of the BHPS.  At first, the graph doesn't seem too revelatory: well-being doesn't seem to have worsened particularly noticeably.

Figure 1. Mean GHQ score for unemployed people, waves 1-18 of the BHPS

However, if we pick apart the data a bit more forensically, we find that there are some solid signs that the unemployed are getting unhappier.  For example, the average GHQ score across all 18 years for unemployed people is 12.7: and this figure gives us a benchmark to assess whether more recent GHQ scores tend to be higher than the average across the whole series.

What we see is that they clearly are.  In the next graph, each year in which the recorded mean GHQ for the unemployed was above the overall average for the complete series is highlighted in big, bright red markers. Here, what we see is that in the second half of the time series - after Wave 9 - we see the well-being of the unemployed score higher-than-average GHQ on five occasions, compared to just two times pre-Wave 9.  And further, three of these occasions come in the final four, most recent waves of the surveys (15, 16 and 18).

Figure 2. Average GHQ score for unemployed people, waves 1-18 of the BHPS. 

Higher than average scores marked in red, with the total mean (12.7) marked by the horizontal black line

If we pick this apart even further, we can see that the average GHQ for Waves 1-9 is 12.5.   Crucially, the average GHQ for Waves 10-18 is 12.9.  I think this is a good (albeit tentative) indicator that over the past twenty years, the function of unemployment on people's mental health has been slowly, but perhaps surely, intensifying in its negative effect.

Why this might be is a matter for debate.  To my mind, it is an all likelihood a consequence of two trends.  First, as real benefit levels have fallen over time, the economic reality of unemployment has become increasingly precarious.

Second, and this is where my own research comes in, I would argue that the psychological impact of unemployment has also worsened.  There is now more shame attached to claiming benefits and a public who increasingly consider unemployment the fault of the individual.  Further, unemployed people are regularly faced with a constant stream of negative associations - from the press, politicians and in some instances their neighbours.  The combined effect of the intensified economic and psychosocial stress of unemployment appears - according to statistics like these - to have made unemployment a bigger burden to carry.  And a more miserable place to be.

Should policy promote well-being?

The ONS has released a new publication in its series on measuring national well-being.  Cue the now predictable and trite criticisms.  Waste of money.  Voters care about other things.  Cameron's vanity project.

A more interesting criticism is whether or not the state should promote policies that explicitly and deliberately try to promote well-being.  Libertarians tend to argue that it is not the role of the state to decide what makes people happy.  Yet this is a deceitful argument.  At its root, libertarianism is the belief that individual freedom - mostly from the state -  will maximise people's well-being.  If it didn't, it would be a futile ideology.

So, should well-being be an official objective of policy?  If so, this would involve a major reorientation of social policy.  Since the creation of the modern welfare state, I think there have been three objectives to policy: reducing material want, spreading greater freedom and supporting economic growth.  Even more traditionally social goals - reducing inequality for example - have often been justified by these three objectives, rather than for their impact on well-being.

Spreading greater well-being seems like an obvious goal of policy, but there are a number of problems here.  In particular, the increasing use of social science evidence to show the determinants of well-being raises some interesting debates.  For example, we know from social surveys that married people and religious people tend to be happier than those who are single and atheist.  Does this mean that government show use policy to promote marriage and religion?

My own doctoral research crosses such debates.  In short, I'm interested in whether unemployed people who are on welfare-to-work programmes have higher levels of well-being than unemployed people who aren't (the 'openly unemployed'). My preliminary findings suggest that welfare-to-work participants are happier.  But is this a strong argument that the government should put more of the unemployed on welfare-to-work schemes?  Campaign groups against welfare-to-work - such as Boycott Workfare - invoke other arguments: the denial of basic rights, the wrongful subsidy of multinationals and so on.  This shows that well-being is not the only goal of policy, and needs to balanced against other concerns.

Ultimately, emphasising that policy should promote well-being is an important and good development.  It makes us look beyond the usual indicators - GDP, inflation, household incomes - and consider how people actual feel about their lives.  Yet as we increasingly discover the determinants of well-being, we are left with awkward questions.  What if what makes us happy, many of those don't like the idea of the state promoting?

'One Nation Labour': all things to all people?

I really enjoyed Ed Miliband's speech to the Labour conference on Tuesday.  As someone who's keen on the ideas of 'Blue Labour', I felt the speech was a culmination of two years of ideas around the need for Ed Miliband to move beyond both 'New Labour' and more traditional social democratic concerns, and towards a more communitarian strand of social democracy.

But then, looking at the response to the speech, everyone seemed happy.  New Labour types starting comparing Ed to the 1994 Tony Blair.  The Labour Left celebrated his attack on the banks and promotion of the NHS.  And the more traditional, centre-left social democrats cheered on the attack on inequality and social divisions.

The broad appeal of the speech led me to think: does 'One Nation' mean all things to all people?  How is it possible, in other words, to philosophically appeal to such a broad spectrum within the Labour Party?  Was it just that people saw whatever they liked in the speech and claimed it for themselves?

These worries were confirmed when I saw this story on what 'One Nation Labour' would mean for the welfare state.  Intuitively, I thought it would involve a celebration and defence of universality and contribution and an attack on means-testing.  Means-testing is socially divisive and pits tax-paying non-beneficiaries against non-tax-paying beneficiaries.  Given that 'One Nation' is supposed to be all about reducing social divisions and uniting people, how does means-testing fit in with this concept and vision of social life?

Yet apparently, means-testing universal benefits for pensioners - such as winter fuel payments - is 'One Nation Labour'. To my mind however, rewarding pensioners for decades of work with something like a bus pass or a fuel payment is an important way for society to show an appreciation and honouring of a person's life contribution.  It says that the welfare state is for all - for 'one nation' - not just for the poor - for 'two nations'.

Ed Miliband's speech was striking in the positivity of its vision.  And successful too in baring for all the nasty divisiveness that typifies Cameron's conservatism.  Yet New Labour worked because its political philosophy matched a set of policies: investments in health and education; an 'active' welfare state; early-years support; marketization of public services.  Now, we need a clearer demonstration from Labour of how 'One Nation' relates to policy, and why.

Ed Miliband and predistribution: what does it mean and could it work?

Mark Ferguson at Labour List writes about Ed Miliband's new 'big idea': predistribution.  This is the idea that the market, rather than the state, should be the primary mechanism for delivering a fairer distribution of wealth.  In other words, people's wages should be more equal in the first place - so that the state has less need to intervene through the tax and benefit system.

The advantages of predistribution over redistribution are numerous.  First and most obviously, higher equality and lower poverty could be achieved whilst the state spends less money.  In a time when the electorate highly associates Labour with 'profligate spending', predistribution thus becomes highly attractive.

A second advantage of predistribution is that it's more attuned to many people's notions of fairness and redistributive justice.  To redistribute income through the state you need high levels of solidarity, trust and feelings of reciprocity.  For many complex reasons, we lack these in the UK.  This makes high redistribution - akin to the Scandinavian model - politically untenable.

Predistribution is not a completely new idea.  For those familiar with The Spirit Level, the example of Japan will be remembered.  Japan is one the most equal countries in the OECD world, yet it achieves this with levels of public spending more like the US than Sweden.  How?  Predistribution.  Wages are already more equal in Japan, so the state has less of a need to intervene.  Alternatively, the market distribution of wages in Scandinavia is much more like the market distribution in the US and the UK.  The Scandinavian approach then relies upon the state - in the form of high taxes, generous social transfers and quality services - to achieve a fairer society.

It sounds like a panacea - both for the economic problems the country faces and the political and philosophical impasse that Labour finds itself in.  But it's potentially not.  As Mark Ferguson writes, in a predistribution state that ensures high equality and low poverty through the market, there is the question of what happens to those excluded from the market: such as the disabled and the unemployed.

The second problem is even more profound.  This is that the UK economy is not built for predistribution.  Over the past three decades, successive governments have built a labour market that is high in flexibility but low - at the bottom end - in wages, skills and in productivity.  The problem is that predistribution only works in a high skill, high productivity labour market.

This is why the classic predistribution policy - the minimum wage - has an economic limit in a labour market like the UK's.  Increase it too much, and either unemployment will increase or prices go up - or both.  If Ed Miliband is to make predistribution a real policy goal, he'll need to flesh out how he would fundamentally restructure the British labour market.  And this will be the real challenge.

Are religious people more or less likely to support redistribution in the welfare state?

We are all familiar with many of the characteristics that distinguish people who support the welfare state and those who don't.  We might expect, for example, left-wing voters, women with children, ethnic minorities and the poor to be amongst the most consistent supporters of welfare.  But what is the role of religion?  Are religious more or less likely to support welfare measures - such as income redistribution - than their non-religious counterparts?

This is the question posed in this interesting new study in the European Sociological Review.  Before reading the paper, my intuition was that religious people would be more likely to support redistribution. This might be because religion, or more its purported values - charity, altruism, cooperation, community - seem more aligned with the kind of values associated with support for the welfare state.

However, the authors propose a different hypothesis: that religious people are less likely to support redistribution.  They suggest that this antagonism may be due to the historic transition between the church and state in the responsibility for social welfare, with the former and its devotees unhappy at the diluting of religion's responsibility for welfare.

In short, it transpires that this second hypothesis is true: religious people are significantly less likely to support redistribution than secular individuals, even after a whole host of other variables are controlled for.  The influence of religion on anti-redistributionist attitudes is equivalent to having a higher income or being more highly educated, with these latter two determinants also linked to weak support for redistribution.

I found these results surprising, but my (mistaken) intuition might say more about perceptions of religion in the UK.  Cities with strong Catholic communities - such as Liverpool and Glasgow - tend to be overwhelmingly associated with the Left.  And, as the old saying goes, Labour owed more to Methodism than to Marx.  This interesting study suggests the contrary.  The Conservatives might owe more to the Church than to Churchill.

Is it possible to make social security popular again?

I recently came across Ben Baumberg's paper - 'Three ways to defend social security in Britain' - in the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice.  It is an interesting read and, in short, assesses the success that three recent contributions to the social security debate have had in meeting what Ben argues are the necessary conditions required to improve the quality of social security.  These are that policies:

• Lead to reductions in poverty and inequality.
• Fit existing public attitudes on the deservingness of claimants.
• Aim to, in the long run, change such attitudes on deservingness.

Without going into great detail, Ben's central contention is that the challenge facing those who desire to make social security better is as follows.  First, there is a need to engage with existing public perceptions of 'who deserves what'.  Second, however, there is a need to ensure that engagement does not become accommodation; and that, in the long run, wider public notions of deservingness are changed.  Such a strategy will clearly involve a high degree of skilful political and policy manoeuvring. 

Can it be done?

The message then is that the kind of welfare state many on the Left would like - generous, supportive, personalised, popular - will not come over night.  And to achieve it, there must be a genuine engagement with the public: many of whom do not appear to like social security very much at all.

The key to this dilemma seems to lie somewhere in dealing with the realm of contribution and reciprocity.  The lack of engagement with these concerns is what Ben Baumberg criticises about the first two contributions he reviews: Decent Childhoods and National Salary Insurance.  The third - The Solidarity Society - attempts to deal with this dilemma (of engaging with, acquiring and changing public attitudes) much more centrally.

The problem that remains is how to rethink the relationship between social security and contribution/reciprocity without merely falling back to old ideas about social insurance or capitulating to seemingly popular notions of 'tough conditionality'.  Ben's argument is that such change will only happen in stages and that this will require engaging with the public whilst also leaving the scope open for future progress.

My own thought is that this could be partly achieved with a rethinking of conditionality (at least for claimants of JSA).  This could involve, for example, higher benefit payments to claimants who enrol on training, education, work experience or community placements.  To my mind this would a) reduce poverty, b) engage with existing public concerns of deservingness and c) change attitudes in the long-term.  

The latter is the hardest task that the Left faces with regards to social security.  Yet I would argue that a shift in rewarding claimants' contributions with higher payments would emphasise to the public what claimants do whilst they are unemployed, rather than what they don't do.  The obvious fact is that many present claimants are contributing in a wide variety of ways, yet because this is not rewarded, it goes unnoticed: and the public emphasis remains unchanged.  

As Ben argues rightly, focusing on conditionality carries certain dangers: such as that future governments will simply revert back to the type of conditionality on offer now.   Yet we have to see a better welfare state as a long-term goal.  As Margaret Thatcher found out, her goal of a worse welfare state did not come about immediately.  It took years of subtle changes to public and political debate.  Little rewards could offer big hopes.