This month, the city of Florence, one of the birthplaces of banking, was host to two events that form part of the process which is changing the way we understand and measure progress.
The first event, the annual conference of the International Society for Quality of Life Studies (ISQOLS) in Florence, took a decidedly more pragmatic turn compared to earlier years, with significant support from the OECD’s Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies. The Happy Planet Index took centre stage at the event – presented in a special panel session alongside nef’s other key project in measuring well-being – the National Accounts of Well-Being. The key theme of the presentation was the different roles of different kinds of measures in providing both an overview of progress and describing a more detailed picture, and in their ability to link to policy and sensitivity to changes over time. The HPI’s lead author Saamah Abdallah also spoke at a plenary session on the question of whether good lives have to cost the Earth – the answer was “they needn’t”.
Following the academic conference, the OECD, in conjunction with ISQOLS and the Italian national statistics body hosted a meeting for government statisticians from around the world on measuring subjective well-being.
The OECD have been encouraging national statistics offices to take seriously the idea of measuring subjective well-being and this meeting was part of that process. Alongside chief statisticians from the US, Canada, Spain and several other countries, the director of the Gallup World Poll, which is the largest cross-national source of subjective well-being data, was present at the event. During the discussions, nef’s Juliet Michaelson called for statistics offices to collect more textured measures of well-being, which was echoed by Professor Felicia Huppert, director of the Well-Being Institute at the University of Cambridge.
