Want to be happy? Get a job, be a woman – and move to Bath
Ever since I did some work a few years ago for the Commission for Rural Communities to look at examples of rural economic well-being I have been fascinated by the idea of happiness and well-being as an alternate measure of public policy success to economic growth.
This article profiling the results of the first ONS happiness index tells us:
“The most satisfied person in England is a middle-aged woman in good health, with a job, who owns her own home and lives in the rural county of Rutland or the honey-coloured city of Bath, according to the first attempt to measure national wellbeing.
People’s perception of their quality of life is affected by where they live and what they do as well as their gender, health, relationships and ethnicity, according to the Office for National Statistics which was asked by the Prime Minister in 2010 to develop a measure of human happiness. The aim is to provide a picture of what makes a successful society as a focus for policy-makers….”
Interestingly my CRC work involved an example of rural economic well-being from Rutland and the RSN Chair comes from there so we must be doing something right! My concern is that work like this only gets us to first base. The next challenge is to think about how we create the conditions to replicate the success of Bath and Rutland in places like Merseyside and Watford. Perhaps our initial work in looking at some projects in these places which have helped underpin well-being was not a bad place to start. If you want to see the report we produced in 2009, which still has some currency, particularly for rural places, let me know.