Measuring WellBeing: What Matters to You?

From NEF website below:

Measuring National Well-Being: What matters to you?
Wednesday, 23 March, 2011 - 18:00 - 19:30
Cambridge Judge Business School and the Well-Being Institute, University of Cambridge host a debate on the measurement of national well-being on behalf of the Office for National Statistics. Nic Marks, founder of the Centre for Well-being at nef, will be speaking.


The Office for National Statistics is developing a set of measures of national well-being to complement economic measures - such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) - that until now have underpinned evaluations of ‘how the UK is doing’. The argument is that national well-being cannot be understood by looking at economic measures alone. There is growing demand for wider measures of progress and a more complete picture of ‘how society is doing’.

The National Statistician has launched a nationwide debate with the aim of understanding the dimensions and key features of national well-being – or, more simply, determining what things matter to people. Although there are some existing objective measures that may help understand national well-being (for example around health, education, employment and crime), it seems equally important to understand subjective measures of well-being (how we experience our lives, e.g. how happy and fulfilled we are) – but there is no consensus, and very little available data on such measures. The national debate aims to identify and elaborate key themes that will help to develop credible, robust measures of individual and national well-being, for use in future surveys.

The Cambridge event will take the form of a ‘Question Time’ debate, chaired by the BBC’s Claudia Hammond. Panellists will be:

Jen Beaumont, Social Trends Branch Head, Office for National Statistics
Andrew Gamble, Professor of Politics, Head of Department of Politics and International Studies & Associate Fellow of the Centre for Science and Policy, University of Cambridge
David Halpern, Director, Behavioural Insights Team, Cabinet Office
Felicia Huppert, Professor of Psychology & Director of the Well-Being Institute, University of Cambridge
Simon Learmount, Director of the Executive MBA, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge
Nic Marks, Founder of the Centre for Well-Being, Fellow at the new economics foundation
This is a public event for which you can register at here. You are warmly encouraged to contribute your views and ideas as part of the national debate; you can either submit questions in advance when registering or raise issues from the floor. Please note there is very limited parking at the venue.

The debate and reception is being sponsored by the Cambridge Executive MBA programme.