Last month, the What Works Centre for Wellbeing released a report suggesting that when we talk about wellbeing, we should consider not only the average wellbeing in a population but also how that wellbeing is distributed. We strongly support this suggestion but note that choosing a metric for wellbeing inequality shares the same shortcomings as reporting only average well-being: it makes implicit value judgments about what information is important. Seeing as early measures often become widely adopted (e.g. GDP), we believe we have a chance to build a new norm of presenting full wellbeing distributions alongside familiar measures, allowing for individuals and their representatives in government to self-determine what qualities of the wellbeing distribution matter to them.
