Gross National Happiness?

The United Nations held a historic UN Conference on Happiness on April 2 to discuss wide discrepancies in levels of happiness worldwide and whether countries should track happiness in addition to other more standard economic measures. The meeting drew 600 delegates, including leaders and scholars from around the world.  The main consequence of the meeting, in addition to exploring what is known about happiness research was to focus on happiness and wellbeing at the Sustainable Development Rio+20 conference in June.   It is also likely that when the new new Sustainable Development Goals come out in 2015 (a re-working of the Millennium Goals) happiness will be on the list of priorities, joining the stalwarts like anti-poverty  and educational goals.

The UN meeting follows on the visible efforts of Nicholas Sarkozy (the so called Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission) in 2009 and the decision in 2010 of the UK government to begin measuring happiness regularly.

Attending the conference were, among others, my colleague Robert Putnam, Richard Layard, Jeffrey Sachs, Costa Rican president Laura Chincill, Bhutan’s Prime Minister Jigmi Thinley.

“The US has had a three time increase of GNP per capita since 1960, but the happiness needle hasn’t budged” [Jeffrey Sachs]

Sachs suggested that there were much more efficient strategies, as shown by other countries, for how to achieve higher levels of average wellbeing than to focus on boosting the size of the economy, as the US has done.

P.M. Thinley (whose country Bhutan has endorsed Gross National Happiness) suggested that focusing on happiness worldwide was essential if the world was to get on a sustainable trajectory.  Last summer, led by Bhutan, the UN unanimously adopted a measure “Happiness: towards a holistic approach to development.”

Sachs, John Helliwell (a friend and colleague) and Richard Layard, helped produce the interesting background World Happiness Report for the conference which both discusses worldwide variation in happiness and scientific evidence that happiness can be reliably measured and is meaningful.

The Guardian article by Mark Williamson also describes a conference the day before the UN Conference: “[G]lobal experts debated the cutting edge of wellbeing research. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist, had explained how happiness is a skill that can be learned; public policy expert Robert Putnam showed us the vital importance of social connections; economist Joseph Stiglitz highlighted the flaws with GDP; Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard explained the reciprocal benefits of altruism; and Martin Seligman, founder of positive psychology, reminded us that there’s much more to a flourishing life than just the absence of misery.”

Excerpt from World Happiness Report:

We live in an age of stark contradictions. The world enjoys technologies of unimaginable sophistication; yet has at least one billion people without enough to eat each day. The world economy is propelled to soaring new heights of productivity through ongoing technological and organizational advance; yet is relentlessly destroying the natural environment in the process. Countries achieve great progress in economic development as conventionally measured; yet along the way succumb to new crises of obesity, smoking, diabetes, depression, and other ills of modern life.

These contradictions would not come as a shock to the greatest sages of humanity, including Aristotle and the Buddha. The sages taught humanity, time and again, that material gain alone will not fulfill our deepest needs. Material life must be harnessed to meet these human needs, most importantly to promote the end of suffering, social justice, and the attainment of happiness. The challenge is real for all parts of the world.

As one key example, the world’s economic superpower, the United States, has achieved striking economic and technological progress over the past half century without gains in the self-reported happiness of the citizenry.  Instead, uncertainties and anxieties are high, social and economic inequalities have widened considerably, social trust is in decline, and confidence in government is at an all-time low. Perhaps for these reasons, life satisfaction has remained nearly constant during decades of rising Gross National Product (GNP) per capita.

The realities of poverty, anxiety, environmental degradation, and unhappiness in the midst of great plenty should not be regarded as mere curiosities. They require our urgent attention, and especially so at this juncture in human history. If we continue mindlessly along the current  economic trajectory, we risk undermining the Earth’s life support systems – food supplies, clean water, and stable climate – necessary for human health and even survival in some places. On the other hand, if we act wisely, we can protect the Earth while raising quality of life broadly around the world. We can do this by adopting lifestyles and technologies that improve happiness (or life satisfaction) while reducing human damage to the environment. “Sustainable Development” is the term given to the combination of human well-being, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability. We can say that the quest for happiness is intimately linked to the quest for sustainable development.”

Prince Charles, who attended and gave a talk, said: “The grim reality is that our planet has reached a point of crisis. The time for us to act is rapidly running out. We are facing what could be described as a ‘perfect storm’: the combination of pollution and over-consumption of finite natural resources; the very real risk of catastrophic climate change; unprecedented levels of financial indebtedness, and a population of seven billion that is rising fast.”

For prior reports on happiness, read here and here is a summary of recent happiness research.

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in his introductory remarks commented: ““Gross National Product (GNP) has long been the yardstick by which economies and politicians have been measured. Yet it fails to take into account the social and environmental costs of so-called progress. We need a new economic paradigm that recognises the parity between the three pillars of sustainable development. Social, economic and environmental wellbeing are indivisible. Together they define gross global happiness.” Read his introductory remarks here.

[BBC report on the conference here.]  NYT pre-Conference story here by Timothy Ryback.

For more on the link between social capital and wellbeing, read “Social Capital, The Economy, and Wellbeing” (John Helliwell).

The connection between religiosity and wellbeing

Our colleague, Chaeyoon Lim, wrote a summary of his research findings on the connection between religiosity and wellbeing using the amazing Gallup- Healthways data (that has surveyed 1,000 people a day for several years).

Excerpt: “Americans who attend a church, synagogue, or mosque frequently report experiencing more positive emotions and fewer negative ones in general than do those who attend less often or not at all. Frequent churchgoers experience an average of 3.36 positive emotions per day compared with an average of 3.08 among those who never attend. This relationship holds true even when controlling for key demographic variables like age, education, and income.”

Not included in Chaeyoon’s published comments, he also found that, even controlling for other factors like age, gender, race, and the like, Americans would have either had to increase their income by $90,000 a year or gain a college education to have the same increase in life satisfaction as they get from weekly church attendance.”

If you click on the below graph, you can see that all religions and even respondents with no religion frequently reported higher life satisfaction  as they went to church more often (controlling for all the standard factors like age, region, gender, income, education, etc.).  You may ask how those with no religion attended “church” frequently;  most typically in our Faith Matters surveys it was when a religious spouse got their non-religious spouse to accompany them.

Chaeyoon’s work also shows that while all Americans are happier on the weekend, secular Americans experience a drop from Saturday to Sunday in their happiness;  religious Americans are happier every day from Monday through Saturday and then their happiness, rather than declining on Sunday, goes up even higher than Saturday.

Read “In U.S., Churchgoers Boast Better Mood, Especially on Sundays: Those who don’t attend religious services often see their mood decline” (by Chaeyoon Lim)

For other work on the connection between happiness, life satisfaction and religiosity, see American Grace (end of Chapter 12) and “Religion, Social Networks, and Life Satisfaction” by Chaeyoon Lim and Robert Putnam, American Sociological Review 2010, Vol. 75(6): 914–93.

Update on British government measurement of happiness [UPDATED 7/24/12]

Dancing in Bankside London-Flickr photo by ChrisJL

I reported earlier on the British government’s recent foray into measuring the happiness of its citizens.

Cameron charged their Office of National Statistics (their equivalent of the Census Bureau) with asking respondents to rate themselves on a 1-10 scale on the following items:

• How happy did you feel yesterday?
• How anxious did you feel yesterday?
• How satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
• To what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?

The first results of the Measuring National Wellbeing Programme (MNWP) or “Wellbeing Index” were released on July 24, 2012.

Among their results, they found that: 16-19 year olds and 65-79 year olds were the most happy Brits as were married Brits, the Indians and folks living on Orkney, or the Western or Shetland Islands.

Roger Cohen reports that Andrew Oswald, a well-respected economics researcher on happiness at Warwick believes this is “a good start, although he would have added, ‘How well have you been sleeping?’ — an important mental health indicator — and ‘How pressurized do you feel your time is?’  The important thing, he argues, it to shift ‘from the concept of financial prosperity to the idea of emotional prosperity.’ Perhaps that’s the 21st-century indicator we need: gross emotional prosperity, or G.E.P.”

Roger Cohen’s own views of the happiness initiative: “So I’m ready to give Cameron the benefit of the doubt and even give a wary nod to his related “Big Society” project, also the source of much guffawing. The essence of this idea is that people can give more to one another — British A.T.M.s, for example, would automatically give customers an option of donating to charity. It’s a tough sell in a grim economy, but it captures a need among dislocated people to connect more.

“That’s also true in the United States. Liberty is an inalienable right of Americans, along with the pursuit of happiness. Note the distinction here, evidence of the wisdom of the founding fathers. The Declaration of Independence guarantees freedom but, when it comes to happiness, only the quest for it is underwritten. Still, perhaps it’s time to measure just how that quest is going.”

See, “The Happynomics of Life” (NY Times column by Roger Cohen, 3/14/2011).

Import of best friends and socializing at work

Flickr photo by gwilmore

Bob Putnam and I were recently meeting with Jim Clifton, CEO of Gallup.

Jim related an interesting “social capital” finding of Gallup.  That employees having a ‘best’ friend at work is vitally important to the success of a company.   Gallup faced considerable opposition to this question from CEOs who didn’t want Gallup asking this of their employees and who said they wanted their employees focused on doing their job, not developing a best friend at work.  Gallup tried reformulating the question to ask about ‘close friends’ at work, but found that this question was not nearly as predictive of a whole host of beneficial outcomes.

Those who had best friends at work (only 30% of Americans) were 7 times more likely to be engaged with their job, they exhibited higher sales and profitability, better engaged customers,  produced higher quality work, had greater commitment to the firm’s mission,  had better safety records (since friends often made sure they were complying with safety precautions), were happier at work, and had a higher chance of sticking with a firm.  If workers didn’t have a best friend, only 8% of them were engaged in their job.

Gallup also observed that employees who report having a best friend at work were:

• 43% more likely to report having received praise or recognition for their work in the last seven days.
• 37% more likely to report that someone at work encourages their development.
• 35% more likely to report coworker commitment to quality.
• 28% more likely to report that in the last six months, someone at work has talked to them about their progress.
• 27% more likely to report that the mission of their company makes them feel their job is important.
• 27% more likely to report that their opinions seem to count at work.
• 21% more likely to report that at work, they have the opportunity to do what they do best every day.

Gallup also found other social capital measures to be key to successful business organizations: having someone at work who cares about you, and having a mentor.

This finding gibes with workplace social-capital work that we have done and work of John Helliwell and Haifang Huang on the importance of trust of management in ensuring wellbeing of those at the workplace.

Two MIT researchers (Sandy Pentland and Benjamin Waber) also found using sociometers that even apparently idle workplace socializing increases productivity.  [Here’s a link to earlier work of Sandy Pentland.]

Gallup also noted that they do 1000 US surveys a day and one question they ask is for people to give their weight, and they can actually see American obesity inching up day by day.

In two other social capital results, not focused on the workplace:

1) Gallup has also found that people need 6 hours of social time a day (on the phone, at work, at home, talking to friends, on e-mail) in order to “thrive”.  with no social time in a day, one has an equal chance of having a good or bad day, but with 3 hours of social time, the chance of a bad day drops to 10%.

2) Through Gallup we also learned of an experiment by researchers at Ohio State University  on the connection between stress and physical health.   42 married couples were given 8 tiny identical blisters; the skin was removed and a suction devices put on top that monitored the rate of healing. Researchers found that in marital relationships with hostility, wounds took almost twice as long to heal.  The magnitude was shocking; such hostility and lack of relational closeness could rival or exceed traditional physical factors.

For more background on some of this, see Gallup Management Journal piece or  Tom Rath, Vital Friends: The People You Can’t Live Without or Wellbeing (with James Harter)

For the Ohio State University study, see Kiecolt-Glaser, Janice K., Timothy J. Loving, Jeffrey R. Stowell, William B. Malarkey, Stanley Lemeshow, Stephanie L. Dickinson, Ronald Glaser, “Hostile Marital Interactions, Proinflammatory Cytokine Production, and Wound Healing,” Archives of General Psychiatry. 2005;62:1377-1384.

Alternative measures to US GDP to air this summer

Flickr Commons photo

The NYT Magazine section (5/16/10) had a long article describing efforts of economists and other social scientists to develop measures for the US that go beyond GDP.  As many have remarked before, what’s good for the GDP is not necessarily good for the US or its citizens:  post hurricane rebuilding efforts, a crime wave that forces people to buy burglar alarms, clear-cutting old growth forest, are but a few examples of activities that boost GDP but don’t necessarily boost welfare.  The article summarizes this as “High GDP Man” vs. Low GDP Man” with the former engaged in lots of activities that boost GDP (hiring a nanny, running a dryer, commuting to work) but don’t necessarily increase his welfare or happiness.

The article discusses the efforts of Chris Hoenig, spurred by the august National Academy of Sciences and various leading national foundations, to develop scores of alternative measures to the GDP.  His effort, called State of the USA, will go live this summer.

Jon Gertner reports: “Hoenig’s State of the USA will become a national-indicators panel, run by the National Academy of Sciences. Think of it as a report card meant to show a country’s citizens the exact areas — in health, education, the environment and so forth — where improvement is called for; such indicators would also record how we improve, or fail to improve, over time. The State of the USA intends to ultimately post around 300 indicators on issues like crime, energy, infrastructure, housing, health, education, environment and the economy. All areas of measurement will be chosen by members of the National Academy; all will be reviewed for rigor and accuracy by a panel of accomplished experts. With easy access to national information, Hoenig told me optimistically, Americans might soon be able ”to shift the debate from opinions to more evidence-based discussions to ideally a discussion about what solutions are and are not working.”

The article also summarizes the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission, that advised Nicholas Sarkozy, on potential alternative measures to GDP to measure French wellbeing.  Robert Putnam, was on the all-star commission, and was quoted in this article.  [See earlier blog post on blue-chip Sarkozy Commission’s recommendation of measuring social capital.]

Putting a Number on Happiness

As difficult as it might be to compile sustainability indicators, it’s equally challenging to create measures that describe our social and emotional lives. In this area, there’s a fair amount of skepticism from the academic establishment about putting happiness onto a national dashboard of well-being. William Nordhaus of Yale told me that some of the measurements are ”absurd.” Amartya Sen, too, told me that he has reservations about the worth of statistics that purport to describe human happiness.

Stiglitz and his colleagues nevertheless concluded that such research was becoming sufficiently rigorous to warrant its possible inclusion. At first the connection to G.D.P. can be puzzling. One explanation, however, is that while our current economic measures can’t capture the larger effects of unemployment or chronic depression, providing policy makers with that information may influence their actions. ”You might say, If we have unemployment, don’t worry, we’ll just compensate the person,” Stiglitz told me. ”But that doesn’t fully compensate them.” Stiglitz pointed to the work of the Harvard professor Robert Putnam, who served on the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi commission, which suggests that losing a job can have repercussions that affect a person’s social connections (one main driver of human happiness, regardless of country) for many years afterward.

When I caught up with Putnam, he said that the ”damage to this country’s social fabric from this economic crisis must have been huge, huge, huge.” And yet, he noted, ”We have plenty of numbers about the economic consequences but none of the numbers about the social consequences.” Over the past decade, Putnam has been working on measures — having to do with church attendance, community involvement and the like — to quantify our various social links; just recently, the U.S. Census Bureau agreed to include questions of his in some of its monthly surveys. Still, his efforts are a work in progress. When I asked Putnam whether government should be in the business of fostering social connections, he replied, ”I don’t think we should have a government Department of Friendship that introduces people to one another.” But he argued that just as registering the social toll of joblessness would add a dimension of urgency to the unemployment issue, it seemed possible that measuring social connections, and putting those measures on a national dashboard, could be in society’s best interests. As it happens, the Canadian Index of Well-Being will contain precisely such a measure; and it’s very likely that a related measure of ”social capital,” as it’s often called, will become a State of the USA indicator too. ”People will get sick and die, because they don’t know their neighbors,” Putnam told me. ”And the health effects of social isolation are of the same magnitude as people smoking. If we can care about people smoking, because that reduces their life expectancy, then why not think about social isolation too?”

It seems conceivable, in fact, that including various measures of emotional well-being on a national dashboard could lead to policies quite different from what we have now. ”There’s an enormous inequality of suffering in society,” Daniel Kahneman told me recently. By his estimate, ”if you look at the 10 percent of people who spend the most time suffering, they account for almost half of the total amount of suffering.” Kahneman suggested that tremendous social and economic gains could therefore be made by dealing with the mental-health problems — depression, say — of a relatively small fraction of the population. At the same time, he added, new measures of emotional well-being that he has been working on might soon give us a more enlightened perspective on the complex relationship between money and happiness.

Currently, research suggests that increased wealth leads us to report increased feelings of satisfaction with our lives — a validation, in effect, that higher G.D.P. increases the well-being in a country. But Kahneman told me that his most recent studies, conducted with the Princeton economist Angus Deaton, suggest that money doesn’t necessarily make much of a difference in our moment-to-moment happiness, which is distinct from our feelings of satisfaction. According to their work, income over about $70,000 does nothing to improve how much we enjoy our activities on a typical day. And that raises some intriguing questions. Do we want government to help us increase our sense of satisfaction? Or do we want it to help us get through our days without feeling misery? The two questions lead toward two very different policy options. Is national progress a matter of making an increasing number of people very rich? Or is it about getting as many people as possible into the middle class?

While Jon Gertner notes that there is some political opposition to this, Enrico Giovannini, the head of Italy’s national statistics agency, observes that a half-dozen countries, including Germany, the United Kingdom and France, have expanded their “productivity” measures to focus on wellbeing rather than merely economic growth.    The Stiglitz Commission recommended a “dashboard” approach, honing in on a few more critical dimensions; so far in the US, the metrics are diffuse enough that it may be harder to keep one’s eye on all the instrumentation and see how we are doing.

Some fear that while the US looks great internationally on GDP measures (for example, because Americans take very little vacation), it may look less stellar measured in “well-being terms”.  To those who exalt our free markets and entrepreneurship as a singular deity, this is heading us toward troubled waters; to the architects of such a revamped system, that’s exactly the point — we ought to keep our eyes on the prize (our wellbeing) and not be heeding a flawed gauge.

See “The Rise and Fall of the GDP” (NYT Magazine, Jon Gertner, 5/16/10)

Sarkozy’s blue-chip Commission recommends measuring social capital

French President Nicholas Sarkozy, convinced that GDP was not properly measuring French citizens’ well-being, appointed a 25-member blue-chip commission (chaired by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and largely composed of the world’s best economists, including 4 other Nobel Laureates) to advise him on whether GDP adequate mesured well-being and, if not, what else to measure. [The findings are supported by Gallup World poll surveys.]

The Commission has reported back, and strongly recommended, among other things, measuring social capital (social connections, political voice, etc.).

Their descriptions of: 1) what is social capital; 2) why is social capital important, especially to subjective well-being (or happiness); and 3) how to measure social capital are among the best things written on this subject.

On what is social capital, they say the following (pp. 182-183):

Like political voice and the rule of law, social connections and the attendant norms of trust and trustworthiness are important for people’s QoL. These social connections are sometimes subsumed under the heading of “social capital”. Definitions of social capital (as were other forms of “capital” at an equivalent stage in their conceptual development) have been much debated, but there is now convergence towards a “lean and mean” definition: social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness. Since it is impractical to measure social networks at large geographic levels, researchers generally rely on proxies for these networks (e.g. number of close friends, political participation, membership in voluntary associations, religious involvement, doing favours, etc.). The core insight of the concept of social capital is that, like tools (physical capital) and training (human capital), social connections have value for QoL.

Social connections have value, first, to the people who are in the networks. For example, labour markets are permeated by networks, so that most people are as likely to get their jobs through whom they know as through what they know. Similarly, social connections bring benefits for health: as a risk factor for premature death, social isolation rivals smoking (Berkman and Glass, 2000). Evidence also suggests that social connections are powerful predictors of (and probably causes of) subjective well-being. Finally, the same personal activity can have different impacts on subjective well-being, depending on whether it is conducted alone or with others.

All these are “internal” effects of social networks, since they represent ways in which
social networks benefit people in those networks. Social connections, however, also have “externalities”, i.e. implications for bystanders. The literature on “social capital” has brought out clearly a number of examples of positive externalities. For example, neighbourhood networks can deter crime (Sampson 2003), and this effect also benefits residents who sit at home in front of their TV. The performance of democratic government and even the pace of economic growth may also depend on the quality of social connections within a jurisdiction.  Finally, several (mainly US) studies suggest that both child welfare (infant mortality, teen pregnancy, low birth-weight babies, teen drug use, etc.) and school performance (drop-out rates, test scores) are robustly predicted by measures of community social capital. However, the “externalities” stemming from networks can also be negative. A strong sense of belonging to one group can strengthen a sense of a unique personal identity in terms of the group to which he or she belongs (Sen, 2006). This may generate fissures in national communities, and breed a climate of violence and confrontation. More generally, a longstanding tradition in economics has stressed the potential for groups to generate benefits for insiders that weigh heavily on the opportunities and QoL of outsiders. In other words, groups can foster bonds among participants but also erect walls with respect to outsiders and members of other groups. To account for these multiple effects, research distinguishes between two types of social capital, “bonding” and “bridging”, but practical implementation of this distinction in empirical research remains a challenge.

In short, a rich literature from several disciplines shows that social connections benefit people in the networks, with effects on non-participants that depend on both the nature of the group and the effects being considered. In some cases, like health, studies have demonstrated that social connections can have positive effects at both the “individual” and “aggregate” level: people with more friends live longer in part because of the biochemical effects of social isolation, and in part because public health systems are more effective in areas of higher social capital. Many of these “causal” claims are yet to be tested with an experimental or quasi-experimental design, but even on this score progress is slowly being made. A high priority for research in this field is more work on causal linkages using natural or randomized experiments.

On why social capital is important to subjective well-being, they note:

Much evidence at both the aggregate and individual level suggests that social connections are among the most robust predictors of subjective measures of life satisfaction. Social connections have a strong independent effect on subjective well-being, net of income.  Moreover, the available evidence also suggests that the externalities of social capital on wellbeing are typically positive, not negative (Helliwell, 2001; Powdthavee, 2008). In other words, increasing my social capital increases both my own and my neighbours’ subjective well-being, and thus represents a coherent strategy for improving QoL for the country as a whole.

The analysis of the effects of social connections on subjective well-being is in its infancy. Much of it does not account for unmeasured individual characteristics, and most of it relies on cross-sectional data. That said, recent analyses have strengthened the case that the link between at least some forms of social connections and subjective well-being is causal. Krueger, Kahneman et al. (2008)  report that, when controlling for individual fixed effects (such as personality traits), most pleasurable activities involve socializing — religious activities, eating/drinking, sports, and receiving friends. Similarly, in a recent large-scale US panel survey on religious attendance and subjective well-being, Lim and Putnam (2008) found that religious attendance at time1 (or time2) predicted subjective well-being at time2, controlling for levels of subjective well-being at time1, as well as many other covariates; the essential mechanism involved in this relation is neither theological nor psychological, but rather the strong effect of “friends at church” on well-being. Fowler and Christakis (2008) also report evidence suggesting that subjective well-being can spread in a beneficially “contagious” way from one person to another. For no other class of variables (including strictly economic variables) is the evidence for causal effects on subjective well-being probably as strong as it is for social connections.

And on measurement, the report notes:

As research on social connections is relatively new, national statistics are still rudimentary. Most researchers have relied on unofficial sources. One proxy of social connections often used is the number of associations in civil society or church to which each person belongs. However, the fragility of such measures is, by now, well recognized. A formal organization with a name and address may not correspond to any actual individual members, much less to social networks among those members. Moreover, the role of associations differs from country to country. Because of these reasons, measures of organizational density are generally not good measures of social connections, despite their frequent use for that purpose.

A related approach measures the activities assumed to be the result of social connections, such as altruistic behaviour. Thus, some research has used blood donations, membership in voluntary organizations or charitable giving as proxies. Other studies have relied on some aggregate measures of individual behaviour like voting turnout, based on the argument that, even though balloting is a private activity, participation in voting is higher in countries with a dense network of political parties or civic organizations, and that in all countries members of
these organizations have a higher probability of voting. Other studies have used proxy measures of social connections based on information on family ties, such as marriage rates, though social changes throughout the world have made these an imperfect measure of enduring interpersonal ties.

Ultimately, however, all these indicators are inadequate proxies of social connections, and reliable indicators can only be constructed through survey data. Only personal reports allow measuring the many and evolving forms of social connectedness. In recent years a number of statistical offices (in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, and most recently, the United States) have begun to gather and report survey-based measures of various forms of social connections. As an example of these endeavours, Appendix 2.2 presents the list of the questions included (since early 2008) in an annual Supplement to the
November US Current Population Survey, which has traditionally probed respondents about voting in national elections.56 These questions have been selected after extensive vetting by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics for reliability, intelligibility, and inoffensiveness; they cover several manifestations of civic and political engagement, as well as other forms of social connections (such as number of friends, or frequency of contacts and
favours done for neighbours).

Measuring social connections, however, goes beyond measuring these particular aspects. Also needed are suitably tested questions assessing people’s experience in a range of other domains. Some of the most important domains that could be explored through dedicated surveys include the following:
• Social trust. Despite only moderate test-retest reliability, the canonical social trust question has been asked thousands of times in many countries: its behaviour is well understood, and it allows many comparisons across time and space.59 Moreover, at the aggregate level (e.g. states/nations), responses are highly stable over time (even when individual-level stability is low), suggesting that this question measures a very predictive characteristic of communities. Data on social trust are also significant determinants of subjective well-being. Compared to this canonical question, questions about “lost wallets” are potentially more reliable, since they are more specific and quasi-behavioural. Opportunities for comparison across time and space are, however, scant, and we still lack studies of its variability across time for the same person.
• Social isolation. Lack of contacts with other people in normal daily living is both a symptom and a cause of social distress, and it can lead to a downward spiral affecting morale and reducing social and economic opportunities. Social isolation can be measured through questions asking people about the frequency of their contacts with others or about how often they spend their time socializing with family members, friends and work colleagues or with other people in sports, religious and cultural associations. Social connections are also a function of living arrangements (i.e. living alone) and employment status (e.g. having a job). Research has highlighted strong associations between the degree of social isolation of each person and measures of their well-being, self-assurance, ability and power of action, and activity (Ringen, 2008)
• Informal support. Questions about the availability of social support in case of need have been used in many countries. The Gallup World Poll includes a yes/no question about friends or relatives “you can count on”; answers to this question are highly predictive of subjective well-being but have little discriminatory power (about 90% of respondents answer this question affirmatively). This suggests that alternative formulations or more nuanced responses may be needed (e.g., “if yes, how many?”, or specifying the type of help expected in various specific contingencies).
• Workplace engagement. For many people in many countries, a large fraction of all their social connections are with workmates, either in the workplace or outside of it. Helliwell and Huang (2005) found that trust in workmates is a robust predictor of life satisfaction. Questions about trust in workmates have been tested in some countries (e.g. North America).
• Religious engagement. While there is general agreement that religion is an important form of social connections, the introduction of specific survey questions (even when extensively vetted) raises issues of political sensitivity. Identifying suitable formulations of these questions is important as, in most countries, religious engagement is a robust predictor of subjective well-being and (in many countries outside Europe) it is a large fraction of all social networks.
• Bridging social capital (i.e. friendships across lines of race, religion, class, etc.) is the most important under-measured form of social connections for many outcomes. The informal advisory committee to the US Current Population Survey recommended that a suitable measure of bridging social capital could take the form of follow-on probes of the form, “Of these close friends, how many are… (White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, Catholic, Jewish, college-educated, etc.)”. This bridging question is least susceptible to response bias and political correctness.

The Economist reports on the commission in Measuring What Matters:

” Man does not live by GDP alone. A new report urges statisticians to capture what people do live by…HOW well off are Americans? Frenchmen? Indians? Ghanaians? An economist’s simplest answer is the gross domestic product, or GDP, per person of each country. To help you compare the figures, he will convert them into dollars, either at market exchange rates or (better) at purchasing-power-parity rates, which allow for the cheapness of, say, haircuts and taxi rides in poorer parts of the world.

“To be sure, this will give you a fair guide to material standards of living: the Americans and the French, on average, are much richer than Indians and Ghanaians. But you may suspect, and the economist should know, that this is not the whole truth. America’s GDP per head is higher than France’s, but the French spend less time at work, so are they really worse off? An Indian may be desperately poor and yet say he is happy; an American may be well fed yet fed up. GDP was designed to measure only the value of goods and services produced in a country, and it does not even do that precisely. How well off people feel also depends on things GDP does not capture, such as their health or whether they have a job. Environmentalists have long complained that GDP treats the despoliation of the planet as a plus (via the resulting economic output) rather than a minus (forests destroyed).”

See later blog post about spillover from the Sarkozy Commission on measuring social capital as an alternative to GDP in the US.

See earlier Social Capital blog post on “Advances in Social Capital Measurement“.

See full 292 page “Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress” here.

See Economist’s article, “Measuring What Matters” (9/17/09)