What is the Problem?

Over the last 10 years, the world is getting richer - but are we also getting happier? While wealth may be on the rise - so are sea levels, air pollution, and mental health disorders. Despite continued economic growth, it seems we sometimes fail to convert our wealth into wellbeing. So where should we invest our resources most effectively to improve quality of life?

India

From 2006 to 2018, GDP per capita doubled in size, while the average life satisfaction of the population dropped from 5.35 to 3.82 on a 0 to 10-point scale, a staggering 25% decrease. Today, only 3% of the Indian population can be considered ‘thriving’ according to the Gallup World Poll, one of the lowest rates recorded around the world.

China

A country that is perhaps the most impressive example of economic development and poverty reduction in human history. Between 1990 and 2010, GDP per capita swelled by a rate of fourteen, while average subjective wellbeing levels declined and suicide rates climbed to one of the highest in the world.

United States of America 

Many developed countries have also been subject to a decoupling of wealth and wellbeing. Steady economic growth and a record low unemployment rate in the United States haven’t safeguarded the country against a rise of adolescent depression, suicidal ideation, and self-harm.

Denmark 

In one of the world’s happiest countries, the rise in GDP per capita since the financial crisis has been accompanied by increasing loneliness, rising stress, and poor mental health particularly among younger people.

What is the solution?

To adopt of a common currency of impact based on evidence and experience for public and private organization to make better decisions that lead to better lives and a better world.

What are the benefits?

The metric we propose considers progress in terms of gains or losses in Wellbeing Adjusted Life Years (or WALYs). WALY is rooted in decades of research and extensively validated measures of subjective wellbeing. Relative to existing measures of impact, WALY has two primary benefits:

Where can it be applied to?

WALY serves as a key performance indicator where costs and benefits are combined into a single unit of effect to enable value comparisons across domains. At the Happiness Research Institute, we have successfully applied WALYs to evaluate the Happiness Return on Investment on both health outcomes and environmental impacts. The metric can also be scaled up to other domains of investment.

By instead rooting health evaluations in patient self-reports, WALYs can offer a much-needed new approach to evaluating health outcomes in terms of patient experience.

By offering WALY estimations of individual and societal wellbeing burdens for 16 diseases in 28 European countries, we find that depression and anxiety disorders are responsible for greater wellbeing losses on both an individual and societal level than almost any other illness under consideration and that symptoms affecting social and mental wellbeing prove to be significantly more important to patient self-reported wellbeing than physical symptoms.

Our analysis suggests that continuing with business-as-usual may lead us to undervalue potent sources of patient suffering and even disregard promising interventions to raise patient wellbeing.

It is often exceedingly difficult to tell whether progress brought about by transport and industry can outweigh the costs of air pollution. 

In an attempt to address this question, we ran a WALY analysis in which we compared the subjective wellbeing of residents living in polluted cities to counterparts living in similar cities with better air quality.

We find for example that reducing pollution levels to zero in Kraków could increase average life satisfaction by 0.29 points on a 4-point scale. This would be equivalent to an increase of 0.09 WALYs per person. In addition, we find that the wellbeing burden of air pollution in Krakow is roughly equivalent to a loss of €782 per year, or 15% in annual income for a household earning €5,000 per year (mean annual household income in Krakow).

As this analysis makes clear, the costs of urban air pollution can be substantial. In the most polluted European cities, WALYs lost due to pollution even approach average WALYs lost due to very severe diseases

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A metric for the future.

In the coming years, the need to direct human activity towards sustainable pursuits of individual wellbeing will only become more urgent. Many nations around the world are already reeling from the destabilizing effects of a diminishing sense of meaning in people’s lives, a trend that is likely to be exacerbated by rising automation and climate change. For public and private organization to tackle these challenges, we need a new approach, one that gives central importance to measuring, tracking, targeting, and improving subjective wellbeing over time and across generations.