Competitiveness and Well-Being

Gerard O'Neill points on his blog to a NCC report on competitiveness and well-being

http://www.competitiveness.ie/ncc/reports/ncc080723/Wellbeing_Competitiveness.pdf

The report flags the issue of well-being in the context of competitiveness. A few random points that i would raise in the analysis of well-being measures are as follows

- newer measures such as Day Reconstruction should be considered. These give detailed accounts of daily well-being and allow for the analysis of environmental and technological factors influencing well-being

- We need to start defining better the concept of well-being. What are the main reference groups that people use in Ireland? Do we compare ourselves to our neighborhood, our town, our county, nationally, to America, to our past? How are we now judging our well-being? What standards are we applying?

- Related to the above, it should not be assumed that people interpret well-being and life satisfaction questions the same way across groups. We need to know more about what these questions mean to different groups of people

-Also, to what extent are reports of well-being stable as opposed to being influenced by focusing peoples attention on negative aspects of their situation and the world? For example, if you focus people on how they are falling behind relative to some reference group (e.g. men's circumstances getting better at a slower rate than females) does this cause distress compared to focusing them on improvement (e.g. men now have higher living standards factually measured than at any point in human history).

- in relation to competitiveness, how does framing of economic competitiveness affect stress levels? Much of the current framing is practically telling people that if they dont engage in dehumanising grinding work they will become obsolete rather than simply framing continuous training as just a normal part of life.

- how will the transformation of Ireland's economy in areas such as biotechnology, ICT, pharma etc., effect well-being. Will people enjoy the new employment that this transformation will create?

- we need to understand why well-being measures in Ireland have remained relatively static over the last number of years and yet suicide rates increased hugely over the economic boom period. I am currently working on trying to explain this.

- we need to know more about regional factors and their impact on well-being. The wide variation in conditions at town level and how towns have progressed in the last fifteen years is absent from current knowledge about well-being in Ireland. Some papers have been released recently on spatial factors that affect well-being including work by the School of Geography in UCD.

- What are the most distressing aspects of government policy and law? Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer have written on distress caused by unfair treatment. It would be an interesting exercise to examine the extent to which institutions engagement with individuals can cause distress through perceived unfairness. In the context of competitiveness, the psychological impact of rapid sectoral change should be analysed. What are the main psychologically distressing features associated with job transitions? How could these be smoothed over?

- Also, the simple idea that greater competitiveness brings greater happiness through higher output should not be dismissed but its clearly not a full account. What cases exist where there is a trade-off between well-being and competitiveness? For example, carers do not provide "competitiveness" in the form of GDP increments but provide invaluable support to people who need them. We need to understand further how to conceptualise these trade-offs. The same applies for volunteerism and other aspects of the public and civic sphere.

- we definitley need more work on job satisfaction in Ireland. What jobs are dehumanising people? Could these aspects be changed? Both formal jobs and informal work such as caring should be looked at?

- we need more solid accounts of how well-being measures could influence policy. Kahneman and colleagues talk about national well-being accounts (see below). How would such accounts actually operate in a parliamentary context. Will, for example, there exist a situation where opposition parties berate the government for Ireland's happiness scores decreasing by 2 per cent since last year? Not likely but there is certainly a lot of information in these measures and we need to work out ways of communicating them that sound sensible in this cultural context.

http://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aecrev/v94y2004i2p429-434.html