Good data can prevent a wellbeing wafflefest
To measure it requires statistics, so Statistics Minister James Shaw took a big public step in putting such measures together when he launched Statistics New Zealand’s Indicators Aotearoa New Zealand project on Tuesday.
In doing so, he noted the push to measure wellbeing by more than economic measures dated back to the earliest days of the Values Party, a 1970s precursor to his own Green Party.
His excitement at taking a concrete step towards fulfilment of the Greens’ supply and confidence agreement was palpable.
Arguably, Statistics NZ is leaving it rather late to truly consult the public on up to 110 separate measures of wellbeing. Treasury papers published this week say these will be in place by the end of this year, with some 20 core indicators on a track for conversion to tier-one status, denoting a ‘‘most important statistic’’.
This can’t all be bedded down in the next four to five months, and both Robertson and Shaw willingly concede there will be a ‘‘journey’’ to measuring and making policy against a new set of wellbeing metrics.
On the other hand, wellbeing economics is hot right now, especially in research by the OECD rich economies’ club and the European Union.
Both Statistics NZ and the Treasury have plenty to draw on. These include the Conference of European Statistician’s recommendation that indicators should monitor ‘‘here and now’’, ‘‘later’’, and ‘‘elsewhere’’ to encompass impacts of decisions on the current generation, future generations, and other countries.
Also highly developed and widely used are the United Nations Sustainable Development (SDG) Goals – a set of 20-odd indicators of economic and environmental wellbeing. From them, the OECD has developed its version of a wellbeing reporting format, called ‘‘How’s Life?’’
It’s into this already fairly thick soup of new wellbeing economics jargon that the Treasury’s LSF swims. Papers published on the Treasury website this week map the SDG Goals to its LSF, finding plenty of overlap but also that the UN goals are more environmentally focused than the Treasury framework.
Perhaps worryingly, the LSF appears not to ‘‘map’’ well to two SDG goals that are political hot buttons: income inequality and gender equality.
Another paper has structured a range of risk and resilience factors across the four ‘‘capitals’’ ranging from the impacts of climate change to the fast-changing nature of work, faltering public trust in institutions and the destructive potential of both natural and financial disasters.
In a perfect world, the combined intellectual grunt of the Treasury and the trustworthiness of the government statistician would bring forth a great set of indicators that will help future governments govern with a more nuanced approach to what a successful society looks like.
At the very least, well-constructed statistics are vital to ensuring the impact of applying the LSF approach to policymaking doesn’t just produce a well-meaning wafflefest that changes nothing while reporting better on the status quo. BusinessDesk