Our book

Well-being in Belgium

Beyond Happiness and Income

Springer

You can find here a summary in Dutch of our book.

Article in De Standaard 27/10/2018 sequel

Article in De Morgen 30/10/2018

We wrote this book with two objectives in mind. The first objective was to give an overview of the well-being of Belgian population. To this aim, we designed a large-scale survey named MEqIn with the help of Federal Public Planning Service Science Policy (BELSPO). 3404 adults in 2098 randomly selected families throughout Belgium participated in the survey. This innovative survey covers a wide variety of information on these individuals on different life dimensions, such as health, individual expenditures, time use and living environment. This information allowed us to compile a multidimensional picture of Belgians’ well-being. Interviewing all adult members of the selected families about their individual expenditures and time use provided us a unique insight into well-being and power distribution within these families. Another novelty of our research is that we asked all these individuals about the relative importance they attach to the different life dimensions. This information brought new perspectives on the recipe of a good life according to our compatriots and the diversity of the recipe.

In this conclusion, we will further investigate the second objective of this book. We did not only wish to give a precise picture of well-being in Belgium as a descriptive exercise. We also wanted to test how such an exercise can be useful for the design and evaluation of social policies. We asked ourselves how we could use this wealth of information on the Belgians’ well-being to identify to main needs of our fellow citizens and to shape policy. From this exercise, we can derive four main lessons.

1. Only looking at averages can be misleading

The first main lesson to draw is that averages may be particularly misleading. We are convinced that social policies should give priority to the most disadvantaged people. Averages hide these people. An example was provided when we compared men and women’s expenditures and time use in Chapter 16. If Belgium seems to be – on average – a country with low gender inequality, looking beyond averages taught us that huge inequalities between partners still prevail. Some men (and women) have very high individual expenditures while their partners have very low individual expenditures. This latter group is hidden behind the average. Yet it’s precisely this group, with low expenditures and lack of free time, that is a key target for social policy.

It’s therefore important to look beyond averages or other simple statistics and to attempt to map the whole well-being distribution. To that end, we need an operational measure of well-being. The question now is: how can we measure well-being?

2. Incomes are not a good measure of well-being

Sticking to a monetary measure, such as incomes or capital, to measure well-being and to define the priorities of social policy is not a good idea. As we have abundantly seen in the first part of this book, there are needs and inequalities in many other non-monetary dimensions, such as health, jobs, housing quality and environment. By setting social policy priorities on the basis of a monetary measure alone, we sort of deny all non-monetary inequalities.

In addition, Belgians consider these non-monetary dimensions as important for their well-being. Health in particular seems to play an major role for many citizens. Of course, a high income does not guarantee a good life. However, we saw in several chapters of this book that too low incomes stand often in the way of a good life. Monetary indicators such as monetary poverty or income inequality that we saw in Chapters 4 and 5 are certainly not useless, but should be combined with other indicators in order to avoid providing a partial picture of well-being and its distribution.

3. Happiness is not a good measure of well-being

Many observers have recently been tempted to use happiness or satisfaction data to measure well-being and to set the priorities of social policies. It is true that subjective well-being measures have several advantages: they are easy to collect and when people report their satisfaction levels, they take non-monetary dimension into account. Nevertheless, we do not deem it appropriate to use subjective measures of well-being to set policy priorities for two reasons.

First, subjective well-being measures are relatively insensitive to the situation of the individuals. Indeed, people seem to demonstrate an incredible ability to adapt to their situation. In Chapter 21 for example, we noticed that there are no notable difference in the average life satisfaction levels between men and women. From this observation, there seems to be no reason to pay particular attention to women’s situation. However, we noticed in Chapter 20 that women are overrepresented in the group of people suffering from cumulative deprivation in different life aspects. This is partly related to the fact that household heads of one-parent families are much more often women than men and these families often suffer from multiple deprivation.

Secondly, subjective well-being measures are also influenced by expectations and aspirations. A striking example was given in Chapter 22. We asked MEqIn survey participants to evaluate the satisfaction associated to hypothetical situations. We noticed that those with a higher education level reported a lower life satisfaction for a given imaginary situation. Perhaps higher educated people have higher expectations and thus report a lower life satisfaction in a given hypothetical situation. This shows that using satisfaction to determine priorities of social policies would favor people with higher education (and associated income), which is hard to justify from an ethical point of view.

4. Well-being is best measured in a multidimensional way

We argued in this book that we need to collate the information on the different dimensions in life to measure well-being in an attractive way. Income and happiness may be two of these dimensions, but others, such as health, social interactions, jobs and housing quality are also essential.

A first step towards a more comprehensive view of well-being could be to study each dimension separately. We did so in the first part of the book, which provided some interesting insights. We argued in this book that these different dimensions can (and should) be studied together and not separately. We saw a first reason why in Chapter 20. As a matter of fact, a remarkably high proportion of Belgians suffers from cumulative deprivation : they not only have a low income, they also belong to the group with the poorest health status and to the one with the worst housing conditions. A separate analysis of life dimensions can never detect such cumulative deprivation. Consequently, policy makers cannot give priority to the fellow-citizens who score extremely low in different dimensions at the same time. The second reason is that not all life dimensions are viewed as equally important among Belgians. Health turned out to be more important to many compatriots than housing quality for instance. In order to take into account what Belgians value in their conception of the good life, a multidimensional measure of well-being is necessary. This well-being measure can give a larger weight to the life aspects that are more important for the Belgians. In Chapters 23 and 24, we showed that it is possible to measure well-being in a way that takes into account what people find important in life. In this regard, we consider the “equivalent income” as a promising new measure. This criterion corrects the individual’s income or material well-being in function of his or her situation in other dimensions, such as health or quality of housing. What is attractive about this criterion is that the correction depends on the value individuals themselves attach to the other dimensions. Those for whom housing is more important than a good health, a worse housing situation will weigh more than a poorer health in the income correction. In this way, researchers and policymakers avoid adopting a paternalistic attitude and making interpersonal comparisons of well-being based on their own view of what is important in life. We saw in Chapter 24 that especially unhealthy and income poor people are the least fortunate according to this equivalent income measure. They deserve, in our opinion, the priority of social policies. Implementing equivalent incomes requires a rich dataset and the methodology to compute them can certainly be improved. Nevertheless, at the end of this book, we are optimistic about the possibility of having social policies in our country based on this kind of precise and rigorous measure of individual well-being. We therefore hope that this book can be the starting point of a scientific debate on a topic that affects every individual in the society.