ABSTRACT
The UK’s National Wellbeing Programme was launched on 25 November 2010 by Prime Minister David Cameron. Since April 2011, a series of public consultations have set out to measure “our progress as a country, not just by how our economy is growing, but by how our lives are improving; not just by our standard of living, but by our quality of life” (Cameron). Following a national debate about the desirability (and impossibility) of taking a nation’s temperature by calibrating the happiness of its citizens, a “wellbeing measurement framework” was finally agreed upon. Known to skeptics as the Happiness Index, the framework attempts to tap into people’s experiences of satisfaction, joy and pride through a series of questions about health, environment, employment, family life, and community. The results comprise the country’s official repository of feelings, and are invaluable-we are assured-as a tool for planning improvements in public health (Randall, Corp, and Self ). Strikingly, in the context of the present volume, Britons’ happiness is today imagined to follow a straightforwardly upward trajectory, for the Index was established (according to its own forthright rubric) to record “how well [we] are growing and changing, in the right direction” (United Kingdom, ONS, “Measuring What Matters” 2). Its aim is to measure not how well we are, in other words, but rather how well we are progressing incrementally towards an imagined ideal future state of health, prosperity, and connectedness. To assess the extent to which we are all moving in the “right direction,” we are invited to consult the colourful Wheel of Wellbeing whose segments each speak to one strand of our “real yearning to belong to something bigger than ourselves” (Cameron). Although the framework was established in order to measure the emotional lives of individuals, its real aim is to bring citizens together in the service of Cameron’s Big Society where each subject’s identity is valued insofar as it is sorted and shared amongst others. Properly matched up, the segments of the wheel represent responsible civic life as a form of habitual epiphany.
