Photo by Sam Thomas
Last week, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy welcomed the publication of a report by his Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. The commission is headed by Nobel prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amayrta Sen, and its membership is a who’s-who of the academic social sciences. With good reason, too, for behind the Commission’s dust-dry title lies a hugely important remit: to examine how we currently measure the success of a society, and ask whether these measures — the basis for every decision governments make about social and economic policy — are any good. Their report, which you can download (PDF) from the Commission’s website, is worth investigating, but the take-home message is this: societies should be judged not solely on their economic production, but on the degree of well-being experienced by the people who live in them, and whether this well-being can be sustained into the future.
It’s a grim coincidence, given the conclusions of Sarkozy’s brain trust, that their report was published in the same week as French politicians faced up to a spate of suicides at France Télécom. Didier Lombard, chairman of the ex-state monopoly (which operates the Orange mobile phone brand) was summoned by the French labour minister to discuss the fact that 23 employees of his company have taken their own lives since February. There has been talk of a culture of “management by terror” at the company; here is one particularly harrowing example, from a feature in Saturday’s Guardian:
Last week, Stephanie, 32, who dealt with business customers over unpaid bills, emailed her father from her open-plan office. She wrote of her fear at changing boss – the latest in a long line of changes to her work. “I’m more than lost,” she typed, before jumping from her office window. She had struggled with depression before, but was living what her father called “hell” at work. Some days she could not get up, or if she did, was in tears.
Although this is an extreme case, there’s no doubt that mental health in the workplace is a serious issue. A 2007 report from the Work Foundation on stress at work found evidence to suggest a “stress epidemic” amongst UK workers, with the HSE estimating that 12.8 million working days each year are lost through stress-related absence. Their analysis identified the key causes of stress as increased workload, staff cuts and the effects of change: this was in 2007, before a recession which has amplified all of these factors, so matters have no doubt worsened since. Given its focus on the human aspects of economic activity, one might hope that the Commission’s report could shed some light on the relationship between economic and social status and personal well-being.
The report does shed some light, only to reveal how much of what we know about the human effects of economic policies remains in shadow. While it’s well and good for government to take an enlightened interest in people’s lives, there is very little consensus on how well-being should be measured. In their report, Stiglitz, Sen et al take a two-pronged approach: firstly, we ought to use a range of objective measures of well-being, such as material living standards, health and access to the political process, and measure their distribution across whole societies; secondly, we ought wherever possible to employ subjective data, such as people’s evaluations of their happiness or satisfaction, or their experience of positive and negative emotions.
It was this second element of their recommendations that captured the imagination of the commentators, who wrote of quantifying “joie de vivre”. However,while measuring self-evaluated happiness in this way is valuable, it doesn’t necessarily tell us what brings it about. Things we often assume as contributing to happiness — having a wide range of choices available in our lifestyles and careers, for example — can in certain circumstances bewilder and unsettle us. Or, to return to the France Télécom case, the fact that someone has a well-paid job at a successful company doesn’t in itself tell you anything about their self-esteem and sense of fulfilment. The only way to understand why this happens is to examine people’s lives in great detail, but it’s hard to see how the nuanced, contingent picture that would emerge from that kind of study would translate into a statistical model that applies to a whole society.
The report admits that effective measures of mental health are “sparse”, and this means we can capture it only as a product of other, measurable factors. That may be the best we can do, and it doesn’t change the fact that the Commission’s recommendations, if implemented, would represent an infinitely richer way of approaching public policy. What worries me is that it might also lead us into thinking that we’d untangled the knot that separates our economic, political and social status from the emotions we experience, and the way we value ourselves as employees or consumers. What seems to have been happening at France Télécom is particularly unsettling because it involves men and women who (in at least some cases) were materially well-off and content in their personal lives, but were driven to kill themselves by feelings of fear, uncertainty, and inadequacy that they had on coming to work each day. We need to understand why, and that demands more than better statistics.
The report makes use of a distinction between ‘objective’ and ’subjective well-being’, which is interesting in a lot of ways. The message seems to be that there exist a number of goods (monetary, environmental, health, education etc.) which are important because they are actually *constitutive* of ‘objective well-being’, rather than because they are causally connected to the – perhaps more familiar – concept of subjective well-being.
In the pragmatic world of politics and policy-making, this emphasis on relatively easily measured objective factors is perhaps inevitable. By contrast, the options for measuring subjective well-being seem to be limited to self-reporting, which is open to doubts about the privileged position of the individual in knowing about their own well-being, and the measurement of electrical activity in the brain, which at best can only measure short-term hedonic states.
On the other hand, the ‘multi-dimensional’ account of well-being favoured by the report risks leaving us with a collection of incommensurable goods with no way of choosing where to focus activities in order to maximise aggregate well-being
Paragraph 32 of the report acknowledges this problem and attempts to start addressing it, but it is difficult to see how any meaningful aggregation of goods could be achieved without taking them as in some way subsidiary to a single good which we can at least make some meaningful attempt at measuring.
in third world countries, mental health is never a priority.*`-
mental health should be our very first priority but often times it gets ignored”;”
mental health is of course very important but most people just ignore it and focus more on their body -**
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