It was noticeable that the happiest people in the country tended to be those who lived furthest away from the Westminster/Whitehall zoo. The lesson is clear move the zoo to the Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno Islands in the middle of the Pacific and they can lord it over us from a distance. Increase in happiness for us and only a decrease for the population of 67 who live in the aforementioned islands.

Boy do I miss work, I miss the social aspect of going into work and then speaking to people doing something I enjoyed and then going home, it was part of my life.

Since being ill and disabled my life has very little meaning.

And boy have I tried to get back to work, even offering to do the job for nothing to see if I could do it good enough for the employer.

This post deserves criticism for data overload and underload.

The aggregate data provided by the OP is meaningless. If the base data is relevant, it should be here in place of the charts up top.

The thing about unemployed people is that they are all so different. There are perpetual slackers, lots between, and agitated non-workers, placed in the same classification.

If the OP is about *whatever behaviour* in a social group, the OP should provide more pertinent data about *whatever behaviour* and define the social group more smartly (to avoid offence). My guess is that more data is available from the original source.

‘Affluenza’ has a lot to answer for
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/academic/oswald/affluenzajan07.pdf

The thing is, unemployed people are more likely (one assumes) to have bad or very bad health.

So I’d like to see what the happiness levels are like for employed and unemployed people with good health/bad health/very bad health.

“For years now we’ve been bombarded with stories about unemployed people having an easy life on benefits or that benefits are too high and discourage work.

But the government’s new data on Wellbeing in the UK undermines this view”

No it doesn’t.

No one has ever AFAIK asserted that ALL unemployed people are swinging the lead. As Robert #2 points out, for most of us work gives socialisation, self-respect and cash at a minimum.

“A man from Birkenhead in his early thirties who had worked steadily from the time he left school until 1979, when he lost his job as an assembly-line worker, recalled how the humiliation and desperation to work remained even as his unemployment stretched from months into years. He – and the others in their thirties and forties and fifties – were the ones showing up at six in the morning when jobs were advertised. They were the ones who sought jobs even if they paid less than the benefit rate.”

But we all know some people who don’t feel that way at all (and if you don’t, what bubble do you live in?).

Those figures show what you’d expect, even if a large minority of the unemployed were to be quite content with a life on benefits.

After all, as many unemployed report high life satisfaction (the highest) as report very low (the lowest) – though I suspect those high-raters may be young, when other distractions intervene. I was pretty happy as an unemployed 20 year old, even without much money. But there were other things in life …

Its because the unemployed are liars, obviously.

I lived on the £61 rate years ago for 5 months.
By the end of that 5
months I was a stone and a half under weight and £200 in debt to a mate
who helped me out when I needed it.
If it wasn’t for the reductions fridge in my local supermarket I would have starved.

That’s the reality of life on benefits in the UK.

Laban: “No one has ever AFAIK asserted that ALL unemployed people are swinging the lead.”

But numerous people do behave – and make policy suggestions – as if they believe that, or at least as if they believe only an insignificant minority aren’t “swinging the lead” as you put it. Many of the punitive policies on benefits, like these work-for-your-benefit schemes, the cutting of benefits to large families, or the slashing of housing benefit to levels which will obviously result in insanitary overcrowding, are routinely justified prescisely on those grounds.

If people espousing such policies *don’t* hold that view, they must at least see those unemployed who really want to work as acceptable collateral damage in their war on fecklessness.

Or they just don’t give a crap what happens to weak losers so long as their taxes are low.

All Tories are bastards (ATAB)

Agreed with the above – there are plenty of negative life circumstance associated with unemployment that could account for this even if all slackers were filled with evil smugness.

Even if we were to find that most slackers are unhappy, that could be explained by the fact that the concept of “what I want” is a tricky one. Most especially because people prioritise short-term desires over long-term desires. See me not giving up smoking. A lot of people who simply lack the gumption to find work would probably be a lot happier if they did find work. I suppose this would vaguely agree with the point behind the headline.

Finally, I agree that Cameron’s involvement is a reason to be suspicious of measuring subjective happiness, but it’s not the only one. There’s also that word “subjective”. I wouldn’t be surprised if unhappy people more often report being happy than happy people, because the former see happiness as something to be proud of, whereas the latter like to whinge about stuff so they don’t feel too privileged.

For the same reason, I’m always suspicious of rating countries for things like corruption based on resident perceptions. People living in a shithole might express positive views about a country because conditions have improved recently, while people in the UK have been known to claim that we live in a deeply corrupt hellhole because of MPs’ expenses.

Richard

> Not unless large numbers are choosing to be unhappy, anxious and disatisfied with their lives.

The example Chaise gave was spot on regards his smoking habit and the short-term / long term trade-off.

It is a fundamental reality of human behaviour, that we do things now, knowing they are not the best choice.

Smokers, the overweight, work-aholics and so on.

I guess it’s a reality that liberals find uncomfortable, because we place so much emphasis on letting individuals make their own choices – so we somehow turn that into a law that individuals will make the best choice.

@ 12 JV

“I guess it’s a reality that liberals find uncomfortable, because we place so much emphasis on letting individuals make their own choices – so we somehow turn that into a law that individuals will make the best choice.”

You’re probably right. It’s a rationalisation, isn’t it? Rather than admit that our preferred system is not perfect, we talk the flaws away.

Apparently there’s a bias in human cognition that means we systemically underweight consequences that are a long way off in decision-making.