As the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) enter their final years, there is a desire to reflect on their societal impact. A study now compares changes in the SDG indicators with changes in how people feel about their lives and finds no detectable correlation between the two.
“The quality of our social connections is perhaps the single most underrated driver of our mental wellbeing, and yet they are absolutely critical for wellbeing across the life course,” Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, who was one of six editors of the World Happiness Report, though not involved in the publication of this paper, told Newsweek.
He said that these results “echo what we find each year in the World Happiness Report; levels of social support, trust, and having people to rely on are the factors which make a huge difference when explaining differences in wellbeing at both an individual and population level.”
Well-being is increasingly recognized as a more meaningful measure of societal progress than economic output, yet most international comparisons continue to emphasize economic indicators. This focus has reinforced the perception that Europe is lagging behind the United States, with the productivity gap shaping the European Commission’s recent competitiveness agenda. Here, we compare European and American development from 1990–2023 using an interdisciplinary well-being framework that integrates five scientific schools of thought. We find that while the US increasingly outperformed the EU on productivity and income, the EU caught up in terms of various well-being indicators, including life satisfaction and education, while increasingly outperforming the US in life expectancy and safety. Europe also exhibits more equitable well-being outcomes and achieves them at lower environmental cost. However, in both regions, the conditions underpinning future well-being are under increasing pressure. These results challenge the dominance of economic metrics in evaluating progress and emphasize the need for inclusive development strategies that place sustainable well-being at their core.
This chapter explores the multifaceted concept of adolescent wellbeing and its critical role in fostering inclusive schools and societies. Drawing from psychological, developmental and cross-cultural research, it examines how wellbeing is conceptualised and measured, highlighting both hedonic (life satisfaction and affect) and eudaimonic (meaning, purpose and growth) frameworks. It reviews widely used tools and emerging adolescent-specific instruments, discussing their developmental and cultural relevance. This chapter also highlights adolescents’ own perspectives, emphasising the importance of participatory and context-sensitive approaches. Key issues such as the ecological influences on wellbeing, the role of schools and families and the inclusion of marginalised youth are addressed. By integrating research, measurement and policy perspectives, this chapter argues for a holistic and inclusive approach to adolescent wellbeing which centres youth agency and cultural diversity in educational and societal settings.
The same dataset can be analysed in different justifiable ways to answer the same research question, potentially challenging the robustness of empirical science. In this crowd initiative, we investigated the degree to which research findings in the social and behavioural sciences are contingent on analysts’ choices. We examined a stratified random sample of 100 studies published between 2009 and 2018, in which, for one claim per study, at least five reanalysts independently reanalysed the original data. The statistical appropriateness of the reanalyses was assessed in peer evaluations, and the robustness indicators were inspected along a range of research characteristics and study designs. We found that 34% of the independent reanalyses yielded the same result (within a tolerance region of ±0.05 Cohen’s d) as the original report; with a four times broader tolerance region, this indicator increased to 57%. Of the reanalyses conducted, 74% reached the same conclusion as the original investigation, 24% yielded no effects or inconclusive results and 2% reported the opposite effect. This exploratory study indicates that the common single-path analyses in social and behavioural research should not be simply assumed to be robust to alternative analyses. Therefore, we recommend the development and use of practices to explore and communicate this neglected source of uncertainty.
“Wellbeing and happiness are ultimately – there is no way around it – in the eye of the beholder,” says De Neve, who is the co-founder of the World Wellbeing Movement; a charity which, for the past three years, has commissioned an annual UK Wellbeing Report which aims to assess the nation’s level of wellbeing by collating key UK data.
And, while there are many objective factors – such as physical and mental health, education, and income – that contribute to an individual’s wellbeing, the metric for assessing it couldn’t be simpler: asking people, on a scale of zero to 10, how satisfied they are with their life these days.
And earlier this year new research pushed back on the argument that once a country becomes rich enough, further economic growth doesn’t boost wellbeing. After adjusting for the way people change their frame of reference over time, focusing instead on whether they say they are doing better than in the past, the research found life satisfaction continued to climb alongside GDP per capita even in countries as rich as the US.
Dr Caspar Kaiser (Warwick) shared findings on the capacity for AI models to experience wellbeing at the latest of the Wellbeing Research Centre’s Seminar Series.
His research uses multiple practical experiments to test large language models (LLMs)’ sentience, and their capacity for wellbeing and decision-making.
Watch the full presentation on the Centre’s YouTube channel.
In this short article I try to provide a description of the first conference on the economics of happiness. It was held in 1993 at the London School of Economics. In the ensuing three decades, a huge literature has emerged in this field. I attempt to offer a view on why this has happened.
The World Happiness Report, published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, found that excessive use of social media negatively impacts our wellbeing.
“If you use social media for an hour a day, that’s great, you’re being connected,” says Michael Plant, Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre.
“But the report did show a correlation between, the more time you spend on social media the greater loss of wellbeing.”
