U.S. Government Needlessly Reinventing the Wheel on Wellbeing

I just read on the front page of The Washington Post that the U.S. government is going to create measures of subjective wellbeing that “could become official statistics.” The article goes on to loosely define wellbeing as an emerging new science and lists key academics involved, including Daniel Kahneman, Alan Krueger, Carol Graham, Justin Wolfers, Angus Deaton, Arthur Stone, and Bob Groves. These names are to behavioral economics and wellbeing what Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle were to the Yankees and baseball.

Here is my concern today: This whole invention is already done. Gallup has already asked these exact same people for their guidance and advice on making it. And they gave it. Every one of these super scientist-academics listed above are today, or at one time have been, “senior scientists” at Gallup. Their purpose here was and is to work on the creation and advancement of this new science of wellbeing. (Note: A senior scientist at Gallup is not an employee, but a part-time, paid adviser.)

Over the past eight years, Gallup and Healthways have together spent $100 million creating and perfecting this wellbeing invention. We spent our own R&D to get this right with the very people listed in this article. Honest to God, this invention is done. Of course, it is never really done, but Wellbeing 1.0 is done and works. We track it every night in the United States with an annual sample of 365,000 completed interviews, and measure it every year in more than 130 other countries. With the help of these scientists and $100 million, we have this badly needed invention...done.

The article ends with a statement by U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis Director Steve Landefeld, “...my concern is how would you use it?”

The answer is that advanced metrics of wellbeing help predict and address workplace productivity, community job creation (too long to explain), healthcare costs...all the way to revolution. Because packed into wellbeing are the dimensions of suffering, struggling, and thriving. Gallup saw wellbeing rapidly decline in both Tunisia and Egypt -- a change other measures like GDP missed. Gallup saw the role these shifts in mindset were playing in the revolution before just about everyone else.

Since Gallup and Healthways have already spent $100 million building this with the best experts in the world, why doesn't the U.S. government just use it? And save a bunch of money.