24.04.12
A wealth of wellbeing
Oxfam’s new Humankind Index offers an ‘improved’ measure of wellbeing, compared to traditional measures of GDP. But are these measures radically different and better than Cameron’s ‘happiness agenda’?
There are so many different ways to measure quality of life, and without a standard definition for what this even means, it can be difficult to arrive at the best practice for evaluating this.
These are also simply prerequisites for the real work; influencing policy to reflect what the public want and what would improve their collective wellbeing.
With the rise of scientific evidence to support the importance of happiness, the concept of prioritising wellbeing over simplistic variables such as economic success, is gaining credence.
Yet there is still much to be done to align these different streams of research to highlight what exactly we want to measure, how to best gather evidence for this, and how to turn this from theory into practice.