Where happiness varies: recalling Adam Smith to critically assess the UK government project Measuring National Well-Being

Summary

This paper provides a constructive critique of the work on the Office for National Statistic's Measuring National Well-being
project. Recalling Adam Smith's work on happiness highlights how the
work in this project, as well as most of the dominant work in the field
remains based on an economic utility model of well-being, failing to
distinguish between individual- and aggregate-based levels of analysis
and continuing to postulate well-being as a form of utility that
essentially is the outcome of market interactions only. Using data from
the first wave of Understanding Society, this paper will
investigate the appropriateness of the approach empirically. A breakdown
of the variation in life-satisfaction shows that ranking a split of the
UK into 36 regions has little meaning, as there is hardly any variation
of life-satisfaction at the regional level. Using multi-group
confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA), an alternative way of engaging
with the cross-regional analysis is presented.