There is a disconnect between how the general public is doing and how policymakers assess how the general public is doing. If a friend asked “how are you doing today,” it wouldn’t make sense to respond by telling them how much stuff you have.
That doesn’t mean how much stuff you have is a useless piece of information. It might be correlated with how you are doing, but it’s not the whole picture. But this is what policymakers are appealing to when they use the standard slate of economic indicators to determine how well society is doing.
At Scioto Analysis, we want policymakers in the United States to start directly asking their constituents how they are doing. In the academic world, we call these types of questions subjective wellbeing measures.
The goal of subjective wellbeing research is to find a way to scientifically measure how people believe their lives are going, and determine what factors influence their own subjective assessment. A good example of this is the United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics’ wellbeing research.
One of the earliest examples of a well defined subjective wellbeing measurement is Cantril’s Ladder, first proposed by Hadley Cantril in his 1965 book “The Pattern of Human Concerns.” Cantril’s ladder is an example of an evaluative measure. Evaluative measures are designed by researchers to try to generally understand life satisfaction among a population.
Below is the adaptation of Cantril’s ladder used in the Gallup World Poll:
Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. Suppose we say that the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.
If the top step is 10 and the bottom step is 0, on which step of the ladder do you feel you personally stand at the present time?
Cantril’s Ladder was an important addition to wellbeing research because it allowed respondents to define the upper and lower rungs of the ladder themselves. This means that by combining the results from the ladder with outside data, researchers can see what factors associate with people rating their wellbeing highly.
This is different from simply looking at income or health directly because it allows the respondents to indirectly say how valuable those things are. This information allows us to better understand what actually makes people happy.
One addition to the ladder that Gallup uses in their polling is the addition of a future wellbeing question. Specifically, they ask “on which step do you think you will stand about five years from now?”
This additional question can be useful for fully understanding how well our society is doing. For example, if people are reporting high levels of current wellbeing, but low levels of expected future wellbeing, we might be more concerned than if many people are going through a rough patch, but expect to be doing much better soon.
Subjective wellbeing data can be an extremely useful tool for policymakers in the United States to have. In 2022, the grassroots organization Gross National Happiness USA released the US happiness survey, a first of its kind look at subjective wellbeing across the US. Currently, We are working with a group of students from Ohio State to conduct a wellbeing survey in Ohio. Hopefully this kind of research can encourage policymakers to seek out this data.