24/07/2012 Newsnight Scotland

come to the family centres how a Tonight on Newsnight: if you are

married, retired or live in Orkney, congratulations. You are blessed

with happiness according to government figures. Is there any

point in this new happiness in the exquisite -- happiness index?

Scott and apparently contain some of the happiest places in the UK,

the Western Isles, and one of the most unhappy, North Ayrshire. That

is according to the National Well- Being Survey. How useful the

indicator of those? Do they tell us anything about these communities or

had to make them better? Hello. My name is a Jolly. Spelt

morbid. What sort of Christmas have you had? Was Santo good to you? Is

your house bulging with 12 year old moulds and Swiss watches? I got a

sock. There is this a true reflection of our happy souls?

could be people that this man represents be among the happiest of

the UK? The statistics have been gathered to gauge our well-being in

an effort to produce an alternative measure of national performance to

Gross Domestic Product. According to the results, people in Orkney,

Shetland and the Western Isles are the happiest in the whole of the UK.

When asked what their levels of happiness where, over 80% said they

felt at least seven out of 10 on the happiness scale, a feeling

shared on the streets of this town today. To date it is the weather

without a shadow of the doubt -- today it is the weather without a

shadow of their dad. Happiness is created by community, the fat you

can still walk up and down the street and feel as though you

belong in the place. One of the best things about Orkney is that it

is a safe place to live. It has not got the best weather but the people

are marvellous. Look at it, on a bonny day like this, it is a

beautiful place to be. The folk are relax, pretty cheery most of the

times. It takes a lot to get them down. This is North Ayrshire.

According to the statistics, this area appears to have some of the UN

happiest people in the UK. People were asked how happy they felt the

day before they took the survey. 34% of people living here said they

felt low or very low levels of happiness. In addition 31% of

people said they felt low or very low levels of life satisfaction.

Almost 26% of people living here said they fellow or very low levels

of worthwhile us. -- said they felt low. Do people here recognise

themselves? Possible a right, yes. Our you happy? We AIM, the sun is

shining. I am happy. -- yes. What makes you happy? The fact that you

can get money to live and do things with your little ones and there are

lots of things to do when the weather is nice. One makes you

happy? I am an easy-going person. People that live in north Cheshire

are among the least happy in the UK. What do you make of that? I do not

think that is true -- North Ayrshire. I have lived here most of

my life. My parents are still here. Most of the people I know are quite

happy. Why you happy? Yes. Tel me what makes you happy. Being able to

walk about the streets and not getting help to -- hurt. A you

happy? Very happy. What makes you happy? To us being here. It is very

difficult to think of a reason. Having your grandchildren with us.

Lots to do. A as a general trend, people who are married have a job

and their own house tend to be happiest. People who live in built

up or former industrial areas tend to be less happy than people in

rural areas. While wealth does not necessarily make us happy, people

say that the time of their lives when they were happiest was either

when they were a teenager or when they reached retirement age. Are

you happy? We AIM. One makes you happy? They everything. Because we

can do what we want. I think we are happy because we are young and can

do what we want. The data collected will now be used by the Treasury to

assess the value of public expenditure. Will the UK government

used happiness as and indicator? That has certainly made some people

smile. I think it is a joke in the case of this government because

they have created a double-dip recession and are creating problems

for young people especially which will give us a great deal of social

unhappiness because we are at the receiving end of the policies. The

marriage, babies, happy events. Will our happiness and what makes

us anxious or feel valued really be reflected when it comes to making a

hard political choices or will we just have to grin and bear it?

I am joined from New Hampshire by David Blanchflower and Juliet

Michaelson senior researcher at the Centre for Well-being at the New

Economics Foundation. And I enjoyed in the studio by Phil Hanlon,

professor of public health at Glasgow University. Hundreds of

years of the philosophy and it turns out the answer is get married,

moved to the Hebrides and retire. If you are asking simple questions

like that to assess subjective well-being of, these findings have

been replicated all over Britain, all over the world. We know that

bit. Why they have started asking these questions is that looking at

the period after the Second World War national wealth and national

happiness seemed to track each other. Europe, North America,

Australasia. In the 70s, we seemed to continue to get wealthier, but

we stopped reporting ourselves to be happier. People are dissatisfied

with single measures. They are dissatisfied with GNP, mortality.

If this is used to ask a good questions and it is used as a

basket of indicators, that could be useful. If it is used simplistic me

to compare one area with another... The happiest areas of others are

those which are furthest away from the parliament in Edinburgh. That

should warn us for any spurious associations. By definition, if we

all moved there, we would get very unhappy very quickly. Good

questions and part of a wider basket could be used far. What do

you think the intention is, Juliet Michaelson? As a snapshot of people

asked on Monday, but other than as a gimmick, is there any usefulness

in this? I think so. When David Cameron announced this programme in

November, 2010, he said that finding out what really improve

people's lives and acting on it is the real business of government. I

agree with him on that. These measures have been shown by a whole

range of different scientific evidence to be robust ways of

getting an overall assessment of what makes people's lives go well.

But ultimately is what we elect our governments to do. The problem I

think is that government policy- making has become too dominated by

economic measures which while useful are only a means to an end.

We want a good economy to produce good lives. But I think policy-

making has got sidetracked through those very narrow blinkers and what

these measures allow us to do is I'm at a loss to know how it would

guide you in any policy on anything, if you look at these figures?

is something in that. What's been released are the headlines of this

new data. What people like me are waiting to get our hands are the

data step from people across the UK. Then we can look at trends over

time. Once we start building up that rich analysis and time-trend

data, we will be able to do a lot more that will be of use to

policymakers. You have been involved in doing some work in this

area with international studies. Are you convinced of the merits of

these things? I'm convinced it is worth measuring happiness. The big

new branch of economic and it makes a lot of sense to go out and ask

people what makes them happy. Basically, almost everything in

these surveys that came out today we already knew. It is not as if

this is new stuff. We knew about marriage. This is a start of

actually observing what makes people feel good. One of the big

results that's come from it is unemployment appears to make people

unhappy. It looks that unemployment is more important to people than

inflation. We are a long way away from making policy recommendations.

These are a set of facts, confirmed things that we already know. This

is very early days. I don't think there are many policy prescriptions

sitting on the MPC who would say anything that came out today would

tell you anything different than it did a day ago. It is good idea to

ask people. Isn't part of the problem - you mentioned unemploment.

Few people would -- unemployment. Few people would argue that being

unemployed would make you happy. Obviously, one of the great

strengths of these data - I'm a wage person - one of the fact about

wage data, if you look at wages across all countries you get the

same patterns. You get the same basic patterns. Married people are

happier than single people. We can look at things through time. So you

can get to the causation. People follow people and say, "Were you

happy today?" And they can look at what happens as they get married

and later. It certainly appears that married people are happier.

That is a fact. You are right, that still doesn't tell us what we

should do about policy. There probably is nothing in there that

is going to tell you much about policy. What it will tell you is

that money doesn't buy as much happiness as social things and

health is really important. To make the step of what you do in terms of

policy I agree with the professor, unclear at this moment. We are a

long way from knowing that. This idea that over time, let's take the

marriage question, well, things could happen to married couples

over time that could be independent of the fact that they are married?

I don't see you how get round that? What is very interesting was that a

lot of this stuff isn't new. There is a broad wealth of evidence that

this is building on. You track a whole lot of people, thousands of

people, and you do that over time. That allows you to disentangle the

effect of getting married from all other things that might be

happening. Those are the techniques that researchers use to make fairly

confident claims about causality over time. What is new about this

data is that it has got political backing behind it. We have had the

Prime Minister say, "This is important." And that gives it a

much better chance that decision- makers will start paying attention.

Those sort of things have perhaps in the biggest picture not been

given their fullest place in big policy decisions. I think this can

start asking important questions about the direction we want to go

over all of the country. Can it? Let's take some of the issues we

have been talking about. Let's say it is a robust finding that people

who are married tend to be happier. Does that mean we want to have

governments encouraging marriage? People - from around the world,

studies show that people who are religious tend to report themselves

as happier. Should we have Government roles in promoting

religion? Promoting marriage and religion is the most problematic

end of the spectrum. Greater inequality is associated with less

happiness. Policies that promote greater equality could be justified

on the basis of some of this data. Equally, having strong social

networks and relationships make people happier than not having

those. So when Norman Tebbit says, "Get on your bike" which means

moving to get a job, you need to balance the economic benefit of

that with the social affective disbenefits of such a thing. If you

are saying that these are robust findings, and I think this is the

beginning of something that could be valuable over time, if that

proves to be as valuable as it might be, there could be a case for

saying, "Let's weigh up the economic, the social, the health,

and use them all in a decision- making nexus." To pin this down,

you could have economic policymakers saying, "We will

reject policies or policy X because while it will make Britain richer

in the sense of it will have good GDP growth, in favour of policy Y,

which will make us less rich but we will not have the increased

inequalities that X would have." That is the sort of thing that

measuring this type of material will help us get in a debate about.

You were on the Monetary Policy Committee. Let's say Juliet gets

her data over 30 years and you come up with some interesting results.

What do you do the next day on the Monetary Policy Committee?

certainly think that we have - the comments a moment ago about

relative things mattering are really important. Inequality does

have effect. The evidence is not clear. I think we do need to care

about distribution. It's hard at this point to see exactly what you

do. I took the view from this research that actually the

Government should understand right now that a 1% increase in

unemployment is much, much worse than a 1% increase in inflation. We

know that from happiness research. OK. That tells you about the ways