Happy Planet Index
I strongly believe that “happiness that does not cost the Earth” should be the pursuit of all nations. The Happy Planet Index shows which nations are most successful at achieving this goal. Technically it is a global index of the environmental efficiency with which nations generate human well-being. It is probably the most influential piece of work I have been involved in. I came up with the idea of creating a simple (but not simplistic) index to hold the tension between people’s well-being and their environmental impact in 2005 (a fuller personal account of its birth can be found in the report). HPI 2.0, the updated version which we produced in 2009, reflects our most recent thinking and uses the latest available datasets.
Five Ways to Well-being
Pretty much everybody, whatever their circumstances, wants to be happy and lead a fulfilling life. We did this project for the UK Government Office of Science as part of their Foresight Project. The brief was to create a set of evidence based positive actions individuals could undertake which would improve their well-being. The “five ways” were thus born and have a life of their own as they are being picked up and used in a myriad of ways – they seem to have become contagious in a very positive way! You can order copies of the Five Ways postcards from the site.
Well-being@Work
I am very interested in systems theory and its applications to creating positive change within organisations. People spend a lot of their waking hours at work and it is clear that creating good experiences for the working population is a win-win-win situation. For the organisations there are productivity gains, greater staff retention & increased shareholder value; for individuals their work experiences are much more rewarding; and for society there is the potential for greater innovation – and with the serious social and environmental issues we face we will certainly need a lot innovation.
Working together with nef consulting I have created a software tool that assesses employee well-being and feeds back the results to the organisation via an interactive clickable database. It is all very intuitive and tactile. Running workshops with organisations to interpret the results together is one of my favourite elements of my working life. It is amazing how creating numbers that point to issues that are felt but not previously measured really supports an organisation to change for the better.
National Accounts of Well-being
In 2005 nef was part of a successful bid to the European Social Survey (ESS) to create a questionnaire module for round 3 of the survey. As a result, I worked as part of a group of international experts to design a set of 50 questions measuring subjective well-being. With the resulting data we created the first set of internationally comparable national accounts of well-being. We designed an interactive website to enable people to explore the data for themselves. In June 2010 we heard the exciting news that the ESS have agreed to repeat the module in the 2011/2 survey round. This will enable us to make robust comparisons over the intervening period which has seen a lot of change across Europe. We expect that a second report will be released in early 2013.
Meanwhile we also work with policy makers in the UK, including local governments and the devolved regions, as well as further afield, to explore the question of how the policy process would look different if improving well-being was its goal. It will be an exciting time over the next five to ten years as more governments and statistics agencies recognise the potential of subjective indicators.
www.nationalaccountsofwellbeing.org
The Great Transition
nef is seeking to create a groundswell of support for the idea that we need to enter a period of Great Transition towards creating a sustainable and socially just society that has high levels of well-being for all. It plans to organise all of its future activities around this idea and as well as launching a campaign, will be forming a new economic commission as well engaging in economic, social & environmental modelling to map pathways to this future. We will be looking for technical and financial support for this venture.
http://www.neweconomics.org/projects/the-great-transition
Gross National Happiness in Bhutan
I have, on occasions, worked over the last six years with the Centre for Bhutanese Studies (CBS) in Thimpu, Bhutan. I have shown them the way we do things at nef and have learnt a lot from them about the challenges of collecting data in a developing nation as well as a little about Buddhist understandings of happiness. The Bhutanese idea of systematically assessing their Gross National Happiness is exceptionally inspiring. They face many challenges, not all is rosy about the political and social situation with Bhutan, and whilst I have differences of opinions with some their ways of analysing and presenting GNH data I wholeheartedly support their endeavour.
www.grossnationalhappiness.com
Voter Power Index
An issue very much centred on the UK (unlike much of my more international focused work) which questions the efficiency of our electoral system. The Voter Power Index was created after the 2005 election and was first published in the nef report Spoiled Ballot.
For the 2010 election web-designer Martin Petts and I produced a website that enabled people to see how much their vote really counted. I was interviewed on Channel 4′s Dispatches about it and the web-site had about 650,000 hits during the campaign.
Since the election the Coalition Government has proposed giving the UK electorate a referendum on a new system called Alternative Vote. We will release an update of the Voter Power Index to reflect the impacts that AV might make on the power of people’s votes in the UK.