Doing good versus doing well

There was both good and bad news at the close of the 2024 annual conference of the International Society for Quality of Life Studies (isqols.org), last June 25-28 in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia. The good news was the announcement of the winner of the ISQOLS Award for the Betterment of the Human Condition, which is for significant accomplishment by an organization, in either the private or public sector, in the development and use of QOL measures in serving its constituency.

The winner of the 2024 Betterment Award is the non-profit United Kingdom institute, What Works Centre for Wellbeing (whatworkswellbeing.org)—called WWWb in this column—founded in 2014, to understand what governments, businesses, and communities can do to improve well-being.

WWWb became known for data-based research for public policy, using evidence beyond GDP and life-expectancy: “There is a significant volume of statistics that are relevant to the public good but which are not official statistics.”

Measurement of well-being has gone far beyond the Human Development Index (HDI), a simple combination of life-expectancy at birth, average years of schooling, and gross national income per capita.

The QOL or quality of life jargon now includes: a. HALYs or Health-Adjusted Life Years, which takes account of both mortality and morbidity, b. DALYs or Disability-Adjusted Life Years, and c. WELBYs, or Well-Being-Adjusted Life Years.

The Betterment Award is ISQOLS’s only award for an institution. Social Weather Stations (SWS) is proud to have been the 2019 Betterment awardee. Some previous awardees are the United Nations Development Programme (2000) for the HDI, Transparency International (2010) for its Corruption Perceptions Index, the World Happiness Report or WHR (2014), the Gallup Organization (2017) which furnishes data to the WHR, and the World Database of Happiness (2021).

However, together with the Betterment announcement came the bad news that WWWb had to close last April 30, 2024, because of the exhaustion and nonreplenishment of its original core funding. Despite doing so much good, it did not do well enough to stay financially afloat. The ISQOLS board knew about the closure, but awarded WWWb the Betterment prize anyway. For many of us at the conference, it felt as though we were listening to a posthumous award.

WWWb has a legacy of concepts for survey research. It believed in measuring eudaimonia, or the feeling of doing well on account of doing good. It pointed out that subjective well-being includes the feelings of being safe, being loved, and being fulfilled. Its life-course approach includes not only Living Well but also Dying Well. There are statistics, in principle, for all of these.

Survey questionnaires on the family should include parenting: Is it complete or broken? They should include the mental health of the children, the parents, and other adults. The well-being of children includes intellectual health, behavioral health, and emotional health. The well-being of adults includes both physical and mental health.

The findings of WWWb research on happiness are valuable. Happiness at work is important: Happy workers are more productive. Happy places have a smaller number of unhappy people rather than a larger number of extraordinarily happy people. Happiness is contagious; it fights loneliness.

Financial security is essential for institutions to survive. I suspect that the demise of WWWb has a long backstory. It reminds me of the shut-down of the United States government’s social indicators publications by the Reagan administration, despite the value of the hefty 1970 and 1975 volumes to the general public. The director of these publications, my personal friend, told me of constant accusations by politicians and bureaucrats of fueling protest movements against them.

In the UK, the Conservative Party was in power for over a decade before losing the 2024 election. As the UK counterpart of the US Republican party in being “the party of the rich,” it may not have been too friendly with well-being researchers.Every nonprofit needs a viable business model. When SWS started in 1985, we did not know if we could last longer than the two years set for the initial work funded by a foundation grant. Somehow, we got funded for surveys in 1988-91; by 1992 we began to do quarterly national surveys, to generate the data regularly published even though unsponsored. What pays for the costs of these four rounds are numerous other survey projects, done for both private and government sponsors, domestic and foreign. The findings of commissioned projects may be embargoed for three years after project completion. The original data are not the property of sponsors, but are permanently archived by SWS, and open for further research after expiration of the embargo, subject to standard academic rules.

If SWS does not publish as much material as in the past, it is due to a decline in sponsorship from mass media themselves, who will naturally have first, if not exclusive, right to broadcast or print their commissioned items. SWS is pleased to share the findings from its own account surveys with the public through the mass media and the normal academic channels.

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