What Works Wellbeing operated from 2014 to 2024. This website is a static repository of all assets captured at closure on 30 April. It will remain publicly accessible but will not be updated.  Read more
You may also wish to Read the blog article on this document.
June 2017

Measuring Wellbeing and cost-effectiveness analysis: discussion paper 1

Downloads
Measuring Wellbeing and cost-effectiveness analysis: discussion paper 1
In partnership with

Using Subjective Wellbeing (Discussion paper 1)

A central problem for decision-makers is how to allocate resources between different activities. When the outcomes of these activities are measured using different units, comparisons are extremely difficult – for example how does one compare a 5% reduction in the rate of burglaries, with a 1% decrease in unemployment rate?

Being able to convert these impacts into the same units allows outcomes to be compared. For this purpose, we propose to use “life-satisfaction” as the common currency.

This paper proposes a set of exchange rates for converting other measures of wellbeing into equivalent levels of life-satisfaction (section 2); discusses how we could give greater weight to the reduction of misery (section 3); and discusses how policies could be assessed by the wellbeing benefits they bring relative to the net expenditure they involve (section 4).

For all these purposes, what is always needed is information about magnitudes (preferably with confidence intervals). Knowing that something has a significant influence on wellbeing is of little help, unless we also know the size of the influence.

Close Using Subjective Wellbeing (Discussion paper 1)

About our Measuring Wellbeing Series

Downloads

You may also wish to read the blog article on this document.

[gravityform id=1 title=true description=true ajax=true tabindex=49]