Name: The happiness gap.
Age: Five.
Appearance: Abstract.
What is it? It’s a metric.
I am none the wiser. Let me explain. You know happiness?
Fleetingly. Well, since 2011, the government has been measuring how happy people are, after a fashion, by asking them to rate it out of 10.
Seriously? Yes. There are four questions, asking how satisfied you are with life, whether you feel what you do is worthwhile, how happy you felt yesterday and how anxious you felt yesterday.
I see. And everybody is miserable because of austerity and politics and stuff, right? Far from it. General happiness has been rising steadily on all measures since the first data was published in March 2012. The three happiness measures average in the mid-to-high sevens, and the anxiety rating is in the high twos. Anxiety did rise slightly in the year leading up to September 2016.
Brexit! Perhaps. But Britons are still less anxious than they were between 2011 and 2014. Anyway, with the Life Satisfaction survey, as it is called, we can calculate where people are happiest and where they are unhappiest, on average. But, crucially, it also allows wonks at the What Works Centre for Wellbeing to show where the difference between the happy people and the unhappy ones is most stark.
Football stadiums? Good guess, but the numbers are more often broken down by local authority. Irrespective of how happy a place is, it may still have a big happiness gap. Or high “happiness inequality”.
Where, for example? Places such as Torfaen, Rhondda Cynon Taff, Caerphilly, Merthyr Tydfil, Neath Port Talbot and Blaenau Gwent. South Wales, basically. Some of England’s biggest happiness gaps can be found in Liverpool, Sunderland and Rotherham.
I see. By contrast, Enfield, Harrow, Cheshire, Warwickshire and Shetland have very small happiness gaps.
This is fairly interesting. Does it mean anything? Perhaps. Bigger gaps correlate quite well with unemployment, and they may have something to do with low levels of “social trust”. Intriguingly, the happiness of an area seems unconnected with how it voted in the EU referendum, but areas with bigger gaps were more likely to vote leave.
So we might have remained if Britain was more uniformly miserable? Yes. And we may yet achieve that, of course.
Do say: If only there was a way to tax happiness.
Don’t say: Just call happy people smug.
