There is something deeply and reassuringly British about the headline finding of David Cameron's inaugural Happiness Index: 7.4. Of course, this figure, which refers to people's judgment of their "life satisfaction", is an average, so it's hardly surprising that it feels middling. Nevertheless, as a summing-up of national attitude, it feels appropriate. The government's statisticians boldly set out to plumb the profundities of Britons' souls, to answer the most slippery of philosophical and psychological questions: what is happiness, and are you happy? And now the answer is in. Oh, you know – fine. Can't complain.
To be fair, we do learn more than that from the Office for National Statistics report, entitled Measuring National Wellbeing, based on surveys of around 200,000 people between April 2011 and March this year. It emerges that women are slightly more satisfied than men, though more likely to have recently felt anxiety; that 82% of people in marriages or civil partnerships describe their satisfaction as medium or high, compared with 71% of singles; that homeowners feel better than renters; that younger and older people are more satisfied than the middle-aged, and that people who live in the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland are most likely to say they were happy "yesterday".
Londoners are least likely to consider their lives worthwhile, although unemployment, unsurprisingly, makes a bigger dent than where you live. If you're an older, married, female, home-owning Outer Hebridean (especially if you're white or of Indian ethnicity, in good health, and not disabled), congratulations. You've won the wellbeing lottery – a far better recipe for sustainable happiness than winning the actual one.
The kneejerk criticism of this kind of undertaking is correct, but also so obviously correct as to be somewhat banal: no, you can't measure happiness – indeed, we can't even agree on what it means to begin with. But that doesn't mean that people's subjective reports about their wellbeing are useless. The ONS posed a variety of such queries: participants were asked to make broad judgments about their lives, but, recognising that such answers are often influenced by fleeting moods, researchers also asked them to describe their mood yesterday.
To some, it seems inherently sinister that government should be concerning itself with psychological matters at all. But a moment's reflection exposes that worry as incoherent: everything government does, from policing to education to rubbish collection, has psychological consequences. And politicians have always been supremely concerned with making people feel happy, or promising to do so if elected. That's how they get votes.
Still, there are reasons why even the most happily married Stornoway resident might feel troubled. What really matters, and what remains to be seen, is how the data gets used. Suppose it's true, as the survey suggests but cannot prove, that marriage makes most people happier. Does that mean more policies to encourage marriage would be a good thing – especially from the perspective of those people who wouldn't be happier if married? Measuring feelings of wellbeing risks reinforcing a particular, one-size-fits-all ideology regarding the circumstances of wellbeing: that being a married homeowner is objectively a better way to be. And the index might easily be used to provide a political distraction from bad economic news: times may be tough, the insinuation goes, but the Brits are coping, so why worry? It will be interesting to see what happens to life-satisfaction measures as the effects of the government's public service cuts are more acutely felt.
Lying beneath all this is a deep philosophical conundrum about happiness: that aiming for it, whether as a society or in our personal lives, often seems to make it harder to achieve. ("Ask yourself whether you are happy," observed John Stuart Mill, "and you cease to be so.") There's now convincing evidence, on an individual level, that many self-help techniques designed to cultivate positivity can have the opposite effect: positive-thinking "affirmations" can make people with low self-esteem feel unhappier, while visualising the successful completion of your goals can make them harder to achieve. We should be wary of the government-level equivalent: becoming so relentlessly focused on policies to inculcate wellbeing, and on encouraging lifestyles that seem to promote it, that they end up having the opposite effect.
In the end, the best response to this snapshot of Britain's wellbeing is surely a British one. It's nothing to get too excited about. On the other hand, it's probably not too desperately worrying. It could be worse.
