When a man is tired of life, he might just be tired of London: regional wellbeing in the UK

As many people know, the ONS - supported by the Prime Minister - has been expanding its efforts to measure the population's wellbeing.  This comes at a time when a lot of academic and think-tank work has argued that governments should take far more notice of 'happiness' indicators to judge the success of policies.

In practice, these expanded efforts have involved including four new questions into the Annual Population Survey.  These new questions measure four dimensions of wellbeing:

• Satisfaction with life
• Happiness
• Life worth
• Anxiety

Part of my PhD is exploring the relationship between wellbeing and labour market status, especially differences between welfare-to-work participants and other unemployed people.  But as part of my work I must also look at what other factors are important in determining a person's wellbeing.  These include, for example, gender, marital status, age and religious belief.

I've also been looking at the link between where you live and wellbeing.  And in the course of this research an interesting trend has emerged.  This is that London - for each of the four indicators of wellbeing outlined above - always comes last.  

Take a look at the tables below, which rank each the 11 regions in order - from those with the highest level for a particular indicator of wellbeing to those with the lowest (except 'anxiety', which is runs from least to most anxious).  London is bottom in each league table and - if you look in at the hard numbers - it is often way behind.

I don't know any academic research that explores why this might be.  But there are certain things we know are linked to wellbeing that London might have a poor record in: inequality, community, the environment.  We also know the family is often important for wellbeing and, considering many people move to London away from their families to pursue work, this could also be a factor.  Finally, we mustn't rule out the idea of 'the rat race' that, if these figures are anything to go by, may have something to it.

More research is needed on the link between area and wellbeing, but the ONS evidence looks robust.  The relationships in the table above hold even when a range of other factors are controlled for: such as employment status, age, gender, ethnicity and many more.

For years, health and social scientists have pored over the so-called 'Glasgow Effect'; that is, the unusually bad physical health outcomes associated with Glasgow.  Now, it might time to start investigating a possible 'London Effect' for mental wellbeing.  And, if you want to know where to live, it should be obvious from the table above: South West is the best (and Scotland isn't too bad either).
 

How Labour can win the 'welfare war'

I've just read this paper - passed on to me by Duncan O'Leary from Demos (who is doing some interesting work on attitudes to welfare) - about public opinion on the welfare state in the US since the mid-1990s Clinton reforms.

The paper is set up in a remarkably similar way to my own recent publication on attitudes.  Specifically, the authors argue that the Democrats - very much like New Labour did here - adopted some of the language of the Right in terms of welfare to actually try and refashion public attitudes to be more favourable to left-wing arguments.  This is something that seems to have been forgotten in recent years.  The rationale at the time was that in order to make real progress on poverty and inequality, the Left needed to acquire popular support for its favoured policies.  And to do this, it had to recognise public concerns with the welfare state.

The consequences  - as we now know in the UK - have not worked out as the Left planned; with much tougher attitudes towards certain recipients of the welfare state (especially those seen as 'undeserving') and a generally poisonous press climate.  This has made it profoundly tricky - if not electorally impossible - for Labour to defend social security.  Even the party's announcement last week of a Job Guarantee programme for all long-term unemployed people - something you'd think might appeal to all shades of Labour - drew the ire of the party's left for its accompanying emphasis on toughness, sanctions and personal responsibility.

The results from the US are broadly comparable, with welfare reform having no success in producing more favourable attitudes towards social security policies.  Whilst American attitudes have not undergone as deep a transformation as British ones, it is worth remembering that US opinion was already at a much lower base of support than in the UK.

So what are the messages from these very similar stories?  Well, firstly, the experiences in both the UK and the US suggest the opposite from what many commentators seem to accept as a truism: that politicians respond to public opinion.  Rather, the shift in attitudes in both countries strongly implies that what political parties say can have a significant effect on what the public think.  And once Labour realise this, they will be liberated from the destructive game they so often seem to play with the Conservatives on welfare.

The second message is argued by the authors of the US paper.  This is that for policy areas like social security - in which there is little 'proximity' to most people's lives - the 'visibility' of political messages becomes increasingly important.  This means that people pay little attention to policy detail and pay a lot of attention to policy message.  We can see this phenomenon at play in the debate about the benefits cap.  It won't affect the majority of people: so the Coalition frame it as a symbolic policy, about what is fair and what is not.  Labour, alternatively, complain about the sloppy detail of how the policy has been made and voice concerns regarding its consequences.

To win what some are already calling a 'welfare war', Ed Miliband and Labour need to learn two lessons from how public attitudes have shifted in the past decade.  First, that it is in Labour's power to shift the terms of debate.  And second, that in order to do this, it will have to win a war of hearts, not just of heads.

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.