The Wellbeing of Nations: Meaning, Motive and Measurement

4 Measuring individual wellbeing

Atoms of pleasure are not easy to distinguish and discern; more continuous than sand, more discrete than liquid.

Edgeworth (1881, p. 8)

There have been fluctuations over time in the relative importance accorded to broad societal wellbeing on the one hand and individual wellbeing on the other. Wilkinson and Pickett comment: ‘Politics was once seen as a way of improving people's social and emotional wellbeing by changing their economic circumstances. But over the last few decades the bigger picture has been lost. People are now more likely to see psychosocial wellbeing as dependent on what can be done at the individual level, using cognitive behavioural therapy – one person at a time – or on providing support in early childhood, or on the reassertion of religious or ‘‘family’' values.' (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010, p. 238). The growing worldwide interest in wellbeing as an alternative to merely relying on economic measures such as GDP is indicative of a swing back towards higher level measures. However, even if the pendulum may be swinging back towards higher level ‘population’ notions of wellbeing, such measures are inevitably based on low-level notions of individual wellbeing, which can then be combined to produce or at least contribute to the aggregate measure. Individual wellbeing lies at the heart of societal wellbeing, and in Chapters 5 and 6, we will explore whether the latter is more than the sum of the individual wellbeing ‘scores’ of ...