They say it takes a village. This well-worn expression comes up again and again and its message is straightforward: our social connections and communities matter. They make us feel grounded and supported and, quite frankly, they make life both easier and better. Anyone who has moved somewhere new and has had to move a mattress up three flights of stairs without knowing anyone to call for help, knows how true this is. In other words, social connections make for a better life.

American author and explorer Dan Buettner studies what he calls “blue zones”. He coined the term to refer to regions in the world where people live the longest. Immortality, or at least longevity, has always been both an object of fascination and a popular objective. How to live longer? What to eat? What not to eat? Ikaria, a Greek island, is a blue zone. Buettner has closely studied the island’s population of nearly centenarians, what they eat, how much they drink and sleep and socialize. His findings further support the notion that community and social structure matter. He argues that in the United States people who are interested in improving their health focus on exercise and food; however, these two variables are only part of the lifestyle factors in the world’s blue zones. A much more important factor that Buettner identifies is social structure. None of these blue zones have discovered the fountain of youth; instead, they demonstrate the importance of having both a raison d’être and a community. In Ikaria, Buettner says,   even if someone is antisocial, they will never be alone. That person’s neighbors will always give a light push to get that neighbor out and to the local festival to get a share of the feast.

The story of Ikaria may seem to be the stuff of legends; nonetheless, it highlights the importance of social connections for a better life. The 2012 World Happiness Report, commissioned for the 2^nd United Nations Conference on Happiness, further confirms this. The report encourages government policy to pay more attention to happiness. The concept of community comes up frequently as well as the concept of social capital. Social capital is comparable to financial capital as people accumulate it over time. Furthermore, these social networks produce benefits and are an integrated part of personal happiness and, thus, criteria for a better life.

When you move to a different country, there are some things that you are able to fit into a suitcase, but what people leave behind inevitably outnumbers what they bring along. Even though we all repeat that old cliché “pack me in your suitcase,” it never happens. Expats always leave behind friends, family and communities and thus the majority of their social capital.  

The internet has become increasingly important in developing social capital and online expat communities, such as InterNations, are useful tools for people new to a city or country. Expats use online communities to seek tips on topics as diverse as health insurance, child care, renting an apartment, gym memberships, and restaurant recommendations. Furthermore, expats use online communities to acquire new social capital and to meet like-minded people, from finding a running buddy to even a new friend to help move that mattress. 

Rebuilding a social network in a foreign country and sometimes even in a new language can be tough; however, it is well worth the effort as it betters your experience wherever you are. The stronger your social network is somewhere, the deeper your roots to that place run. 

 About the author

Sasha Gora, editorial office, www.internations.org

This article is on “Education “, the third most popular topic in the Better Life Index.

Education is a cornerstone of a functioning society. As Benjamin Franklin put it: “An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.” But as education becomes longer and increasingly expensive, are we teaching our young people the right skills for the current market? With an outstanding student debt reaching $1 trillion last year in the US alone, and millions of graduates unable to find jobs in OECD countries, the question of return on investment has become a real economic priority.

In our technology-driven economies, knowledge is, more than ever, power. The OECD Skills Strategy is built around the notion that “Skills have become the global currency of 21^st century economies”. A recent article in the OECD Observer on the impact of knowledge on economic growth pointed out that iPod production in 2006 accounted for 14 000 jobs inside the United States and 27 000 jobs outside. Today, Information and communication technology (ICT)-intensive occupations represent more than 20% of all jobs in the OECD. In such a fast-changing economic landscape, the issue of skills shortages has become a global concern. According to a recent international survey of more than 2,700 employers by consulting firm McKinsey, some 40% of employers reported that they face difficulties when recruiting entry-level staff because the candidates have inadequate skills for the jobs available. Furthermore, almost 45% of young people said that their current jobs were not related to their studies. So we need to ask how much of our investment in education should deliver greater productivity and income for workers. 

Some countries factor this issue into their educational policies. Germany, which places high emphasis on vocational courses, apprenticeships and links with industry, has in a certain way addressed this challenge, bridging the gap between education and the labour market. In other countries, industries have taken initiatives to fill the void. Big firms such as Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard have started new training programs to cover their specific needs. The former plans to raise the number of apprenticeships and internships by 50% over the next 3 years, while Hewlett-Packard aims to train 500,000 IT-professionals globally by 2015. Others have taken a more radical approach to the issue. According to Silicon Valley billionaire and Facebook investor Peter Thiel, university does not necessarily provide young people with the skills needed to start a business or change society. He started a Thiel Fellowship program in 2010, offering $ 100,000 each to 24 ambitious young students to drop out of college to start technological and scientific start-ups. According to Jonathan Cain, president of the Thiel Foundation, the 2011 and 2012 fellows launched more than thirty companies and raised more than $34 million in outside funding.

So what, in our modern world, should education aim to accomplish? Should it serve to provide people with the right skills to match the job market rather than pursue the broader ideals of knowledge and enlightenment? But be careful — some of the ‘pointless’ skills you learn at school might prove to be surprisingly useful and profitable. In his 2005 Stanford Commencement address, Steve Jobs mentioned his calligraphy class, the only one he decided to continue with after dropping out from all his other university classes: “None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.”

Find out more:

OECD work on Education 

Skills.oecd

OECD Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry

Today’s article is on “Work-Life Balance”, the 4^th most popular topic in the Better Life Index.

How far would you go to get, or keep, a job? British reality sitcom “The work experience” tested that question on young job seekers. Naïve graduates are tricked into believing they are starting an internship in a prestigious public relations firm that could lead to a job. Little do they know they are surrounded by actors, paid to make their lives a misery. Although meant to be a comedy, some of the humiliating tasks asked of them might leave a bittersweet taste in the mouth of some young people, struggling to find work. Groups such as Intern Aware respond to a growing need to protect interns’ rights, as young graduates increasingly find themselves exploited without any prospect of a real job. Intern Aware director Ben Lyons notes that unpaid internships represent a third to a half of the US 1.5 million internships, and approximately half of European work placements.

So what happened to Generation Y, the generation of youngsters born between 1978 and 1995, also called the Millennials?  We were supposed to be the generation that would transform the work place and build a new type of work-life balance to suit our needs, not living for work but working to live. And then the economic crisis happened, turning Generation Y into what The Economist recently called “Generation Jobless”, with 75 million 15-24 year-olds worldwide out of work. In the OECD area one in six young people is jobless.

How does this employment void impact young people who are actually in the workplace and their work/life balance? The 2012 Stress in America workplace survey revealed that Millennials were particularly affected by stress: as 52% of Millennials have noted increased stress levels over the past 5 years compared with a 44% average for adults overall. Simply having a job does not outweigh all other concerns and youngsters still claim to be particularly concerned with the importance of balancing work and life: young people aged 25-34 creating their Better Life Index rated Work/Life balance their fourth priority on average, placing it before employment.

Whereas “Baby Boomers” fought to disconnect from work when they were not in the office, the technology savvy Millenials now work from their laptops, tablets and smartphones thus blurring the line between work and home. Even the expression “work-life balance” might become obsolete as it implies some kind of separation between the two. This has been a rewarding strategy for many companies and analyses of groups such as Best Buy, British Telecom, Dow Chemical and others have revealed that their teleworkers are 35% to 45% more productive than traditional office workers. But is our professional balance being eroded by the revolution in working habits created by new technologies? Are these new technologies a curse or a source of progress in the work environment? Recent measures such as Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s expansion of family leave benefits show that time off for employees can sometimes be the best way to attract and retain talent.

Other initiatives suggest it is possible to combine corporate problem-solving with staff well-being. Take call centre operator Moneypenny’s latest solution to provide its customers with 24-hour service. Instead of imposing unpopular overnight shifts at home, the UK company set up a new 6 month programme that allows for its employees to travel and work from a different time zone in Auckland, New Zealand. As a result, customer service is accessible 24/24 and the trial group of four staff currently in Auckland is reportedly happy to have swapped night shifts in Wales for day shifts in New-Zealand.

What do we mean when we talk about societal well-being? The concept of well-being changes between historical periods, places and cultures and cannot therefore be defined simply according to a theoretical format.

Moreover, scientific research in this field shows us that, at the moment, no single statistical indicator is capable of fully representing a society’s state of well-being, leaving us to refer to a range of measures to define it. This is why the choice of the main dimensions of well-being to which a society should refer, and therefore the indicators chosen to represent them, require the direct involvement of the various components of society. If well-organised, this process provides an important democratic legitimisation for the measures chosen to represent the concept of well-being, something which is essential if they are to be used to identify possible priorities for political action.

Taking these considerations into account as well as recommendations made at international level, a process was initiated in Italy to identify a shared measurement of well-being at the national level, to become a reference point for public debate and to be used to guide important democratic choices for the country’s future. In order to define the essential elements of well-being in Italy, the national council for economics and labour (CNEL) and the national statistics office (ISTAT)  set up a “Steering Committee for the measurement of progress in the Italian society” bringing together representatives of  the social partners and  civil society. Furthermore, Istat established a large and qualified Scientific Commission of experts from the various domains of societal well-being.

This organisational approach stemmed from the consideration that there are two essential elements for measuring progress: the first, strictly political, relates to the contents of the concept of well-being; the second, of a technical-scientific nature, concerns the measurement of the relevant concepts. As a result, Cnel, a constitutional body representing civil society whose members include representatives from social partners and not-for profit groups and Istat, an institution where experts deal with measuring various economic, social and environmental phenomena, have combined forces to reach a joint definition of a shared set of indicators to be used to define the situation and measure progress in Italy.

The concept chosen for this exercise was  “Equitable and Sustainable Well-being” and the project aimed at analysing the levels, time trends and distribution of its various components, in order to identify the strengths and weaknesses, as well as particular territorial imbalances or advantaged/disadvantaged social groups, considering them from an inter-generational point of view (sustainability). 

The result of this effort, which places Italy in the forefront of the international trend  for the development of well-being indicators going “beyond GDP”, is described in the Bes 2013 report, written in a language accessible to everyone. The synthesis of the report and the trends on wellbeing are also available in English. Moreover the website www.misuredelbenessere.it provides a platform for the analysis of the Bes indicators and the body of statistical and methodological information developed during the project.

However the set of indicators of Equitable and Sustainable Well-being used in this Report must not be seen as definitive: the experts consulted over these months have already suggested improvements aiming, for example, at providing a more accurate picture of economic, social and environmental sustainability of the country’s current development process. Finally, initiatives have been launched to extend the availability of indicators to both provincial and metropolitan levels. 

About the author

Adolfo Morrone, Senior Researcher at ISTAT

Did you know that 2013 is the International Year of Statistics?

Organisations worldwide are coming together to celebrate and recognise the contributions of statistical science. Through the combined energies of close to 2,000 organisations involved from virtually every country in the world, the International Year of Statistics aims to promote the importance of statistics with three main objectives:

• increase public awareness of the power and impact of statistics on all aspects of society;
• nurture statistics as a profession, especially among young people; and
• promote creativity and development in the sciences of probability and statistics.

The OECD is actively participating in these celebrations. On 5 April, the organisation held its annual OECD Statistics Day around the theme of increasing public awareness of the power and impact of statistics on all aspects of society. Under the banner “Making Statistics and Everyone Count”, the day was all about showing that statistics are about people. 

As OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría said: “Statistics have become essential in helping societies stay informed and make smart decisions, as voters, as consumers, as tax-payers, as parents. They increase transparency; they can hold governments accountable; and they allow citizens to better understand just how they, their families and their countries are doing in an increasingly complex world. This information is crucial for them to be active participants in democratic processes.” 

The OECD, recognised for the quality and diversity of its statistics, has always been at the forefront of new statistical developments which can help people better understand the world they are living in. Examples range from projects like the OECD Better Life Initiative, which gives insight into how countries compare in terms of well-being to the PISA programme which allows a comparison of education systems worldwide on the basis of 15-year-olds’ competencies in reading, math and science. The OECD is also one of the first organisations, in collaboration with the World Trade Organization, to look at the value added by each country in the production of goods and services that are consumed worldwide. This initiative provides new insights into the commercial relations between countries, but, it also has the potential to touch people’s lives. For example, by identifying where value is being added, it will be possible to pinpoint where income and jobs are created.

These are just a few of the innovative initiatives featured at OECD Statistics Day in April 2013 which can have a direct impact on someone’s everyday life. 

The OECD will also be publishing a “Stat of the week” throughout 2013 as part of the International Year of Statistics celebrations which you can see here:

http://www.oecd.org/statistics/statistics2013attheoecd.htm.

What makes for a better life? This is one of the most serious questions of our time. In fact it is one of the most serious questions of all time. Throughout history mankind has grappled with this question: from Plato questioning “the right way to conduct our lives” to Descartes’ grand proclamation of cogito ergo sum; to the American Constitution with its pursuit of happiness right through to Bobby Kennedy’s assertion that the way we count national success using economic growth “measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

For some people the key to happiness lies in the accumulation of material things. The desire to earn more money, to gain more power, to increase one’s  status brings with it the promise of a better life. But if history teaches us anything it is that as our possessions increase, so does our desire for even more.

Does money bring happiness? Academically speaking, the answer to this question has, for a long time, been no. The Easterlin paradox is the theory that economic growth in a country does not result in greater happiness for its citizens beyond a certain level of financial comfort. But the theory is being challenged. Two recent papers – the first by Sacks, Stevenson, & Wolfers, the second by Veenhoven and Vergunst – have argued that the wellbeing of citizens does, in fact, rise with absolute income and there is no cutoff point.

For a long time we have measured success purely in economic terms. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was born in the dark days of the Great Depression as the post-war world struggled to find its feet. GDP fast  became the tool for measuring the economic progress of nations. But today there is a growing consensus that GDP alone is too narrow to capture a country’s overall success. This position has become known as the “Beyond GDP” debate.

Followers of this area of scholarship will be familiar with the rise of happiness and wellbeing in the discussion about national success. Academics including the LSE’s Richard Layard, Princeton University’s Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, and the Brookings Institution’s Carol Graham have brought the study and examination of wellbeing into the mainstream. The latest addition to wellbeing studies is the Legatum Institute’s Commission on Wellbeing Policy, which will report in early 2014 on how to use wellbeing data in policy making decisions.

As yet, there is no consensus on what to include when we measure “beyond GDP”. Instead, we consider a range of indicators that include social factors, wellbeing, health, and more. However, in the absence of an agreed definition, the argument can be summarised as follows: national success and prosperity is about more than just money.

This is the starting point from which the Legatum Prosperity Index™ was created seven years ago. Economic growth is certainly an important part of a nation’s prosperity but so too is the freedom of its citizens, the quality of its education system, the availability of healthcare, and the presence of democratic institutions. By measuring both material and personal wellbeing, the Prosperity Index provides a complete picture of global prosperity.

The discussion that is currently taking place about moving “beyond GDP” is an important one. As Josef Stiglitz has said, “What we measure affects what we do. If we have the wrong metrics, we will strive for the wrong things.” And this is exactly why we must continue to strive for the right measurements of national prosperity because, not only will they allow us to track our progress and our development, but the simple act of measuring can itself change behaviours and outcomes.

And in the process of doing this, we must also recognise that there will always be limitations and constraints, particularly with regard to the data that is available to us. Sometimes that thing that we desperately want to measure may well be beyond our grasp.

Or to put it another way: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

 Nathan Gamester works for the Legatum Institute as the Programme Director for the Legatum Prosperity Index™

 (This post first appeared on the Wikiprogress ProgBlog) 

Relationships matter for individuals and society – but how can we measure their value?

Humans are social creatures. Beyond the immediate pleasure we get from being with others,  the quality of our social relationships is one of the most important factors shaping well-being outcomes throughout the life course.  Academic achievement, success on the labour market, mental and physical good health, not to mention overall life satisfaction, are all strongly influenced by our social networks and the support and opportunities they provide.

Analysis based on Better Life Index data, showed that our social connections are the single most important determinant of people’s level of life satisfaction, measured by whether we have someone to count on in a time of need.  Even the way we interact with people we don’t know personally can have an impact on well-being, at both the individual and community level. Communities where people are more socially engaged and trusting of others (including strangers), tend to be happier and healthier overall.  At the national level, measures of trust and civic engagement (such as volunteering rates) are even linked to higher levels of economic growth and government performance.

The fact that social networks, and the shared values and trust they generate, are seen to have productive value has led to a large field of research in recent years looking at the idea of ‘social capital’. Social capital has become one of those buzzwords that many people are familiar with, but which has no universally-accepted definition. Efforts to develop internationally comparable statistics on the topic have faltered in the past, as it is difficult to arrive at a consensus about exactly what we should be measuring.  Nonetheless, it continues to be important that we gain a better understanding of how social interaction can shape well-being across a number of domains.

 In response to this need, the OECD is currently undertaking a project on the measurement of different aspects of ‘social capital’, which will produce its final results in 2013.  So far, the project’s findings have underlined the fact that, rather than using ‘social capital’ as a unifying concept, we need to be much more specific about what we are concerned with measuring, depending on the policy context. Accordingly, the project has identified four specific areas of statistical measurement to focus on:

1. Social connections (the people you know and how you know them)
2. Individual resources (the support, information and opportunities provided by your social connections)
3. Civic Engagement (contribution to community life such as volunteering or other forms of social involvement)
4. Public resources (the shared values, attitudes and trust which facilitate collective action).

For more information on this project, please contact the author of this blog (katherine.scrivens@oecd.org).

Further Reading

Boarini et al. (2012), “What Makes for a Better Life? The Determinants of Subjective Well-Being in OECD Countries – Evidence from the Gallup World Poll”, OECD Statistics Working Paper  No. 2012/03.

“No man is an island entire of itself” – but what does this mean today, in the 21^st century, with our competitive economies and virtual reality societies?

We know that GDP is flawed as a measure of how happy people really are. Many of our societies tend to be unhappier today than they were 50 years ago, despite being richer. Richard Easterlin in 1974, was one of the first economists to suggest that greater wealth in a country does not automatically translate into greater well-being. He more recently focused on the question of well-being in China, where the level of income per head has been multiplied by four over the past two decades, but where levels of well-being haven’t changed.

How can we explain this paradox? This is one of the main questions that came out of economist Daniel Cohen’s presentation of his latest book Homo Economicus at the OECD. One explanation is our capacity to adapt. This could be a positive but it also means we get used to wealth and comfort and so the benefits and positive impact of wealth rapidly dissipate. Another part of the problem is that our sense of wealth is comparative and not absolute. To quote Karl Marx: “A house may be large or small; as long as the neighbouring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut.” We constantly compare ourselves to others: our friends, families or colleagues. Whereas the French tend to compare their own situation to that of their friends, people in the US generally focus on their work colleagues. As our reference group gets richer, we strive for additional wealth thus contributing to a more materialistic society.

Daniel Cohen goes on to compare today’s society to that of the Roman Empire of the 3^rd century, its loss of civic virtue and growing taste for ostentatious individual wealth rather than community spirit. Do we need to be part of a community to be happy? In Bowling alone political scientist Robert Putnam describes the demise of the American community as illustrated by the drop in the number of bowling leagues, despite a growing number of individual bowlers. This general decline in communal activities and social trust could, in turn, be responsible for an overall drop in well-being.

In his poem cited at the beginning of this article, John Donne (1572 – 1631), goes on to say “I am involved in mankind”. As are we all, of necessity. This is why “Community” is a key factor of the OECD’s Better Life Index. 

We all know that good health is important to a good life – and as the Roman poet Juvenal made clear some 2,000 years ago, that means physical and mental health. “Mens sana in corpora sano” (a healthy mind in a health body) was his recipe for a long and happy life. The importance of both aspects of health is just as true today. At any given moment, around 20% of the working-age population within the OECD suffers from a mental disorder – the most common being depression, anxiety or substance-use disorders.  

Mental health issues and physical poor health are also closely linked. According to a recent report, health-compromising behaviour such as binge drinking, smoking, illegal drug use, unhealthy diets or unsafe sex could be a way of coping with stress or anxiety. Young people are particularly vulnerable: a recent Australian study published by the British Medical Journal Open (BMJ Open) found that  one in 10 teenagers with mental health issues also drinks, smokes cigarettes and uses cannabis on a weekly basis. Teen years can be particularly challenging and 75% of all mental illnesses develop before the age of 24. This reveals the importance of dealing with mental illness at an early stage in life, to prevent school failure and later consequences on one’s professional and social life. 

In addition to the compelling human reasons for offering adequate care and treatment for those suffering from mental illness, there are also strong economic arguments for paying attention to this healthcare issue.  Mental ill-health is also at the heart of labour market policies, as it represents significant costs for individuals, employers and the economy. According to an estimate from the International Labour Organisation, the costs of mental ill-health represent around 3-4% of the European Union’s gross domestic product. People suffering from mental disorders tend to face greater difficulty in entering or staying in the workforce. Workers with severe mental disorders need sustainable help to reconnect with the labour market while others suffering from more common forms of mental disorders, struggle at their workplace. Beyond the loss of potential labour supply, mental disorders are associated with a higher incidence of sickness absence and a risk of reduced productivity at work.  

Although so many of us suffer from a mental disorder at some time in our lives, and while the importance of mental health and well-being at work is slowly being acknowledged, many people still feel uncomfortable about health issues. A 2009 survey in Britain showed, for instance, that people find it more difficult to admit to a mental health issue than a drink problem or to going bankrupt. Mental disorders still represent a taboo, which has been neglected for too long.

The OECD published a first report on mental health and work in December 2011. Building on this initiative, the first-ever review of mental health and work challenges in Belgium was recently published. Reports on Denmark (25/02), Norway (05/03) and Sweden (05/03) will shortly follow.