David Willetts

In a speech to the Built to Last Roadshow in Southampton, David Willetts discusses General Well-Being (GWB) in general, addresses some of the claims advanced by Lord Layard and explains what it means for education policy.
“One of the most striking features of David Cameron’s leadership of our Party is way in which he has put general well-being, GWB, up there alongside GDP as one of the big things politicians should focus on. Oscar Wilde famously defined a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Perhaps one reason for the widespread cynicism about politics is that people believe that is how politicians think too. David Cameron is absolutely right to remind us of values as well as prices – and he does so at a time when economists themselves are realising that their old models were not good enough. This new approach is apparent in every field, and especially education.

Our challenge is to think in fresh ways about the problems facing Britain and how they should be tackled. That is what these Built to Last Roadshows are all about. It is why David in his recent series of speeches has focused on work-life balance, raising children in Britain today, and strengthening our sense of community in a mobile society. These are the issues that modern politics must address and it is right that we should put them at the centre of the Party’s thinking.

What David Cameron is doing is supported by big advances in economic ideas. Economists are at last beginning to learn from psychology and are recognising that people don’t always behave in the tidy ways their theories assumed. We are seeing the development of so-called behavioural economics, resting on empirical evidence about how people behave in reality rather than in theory. Indeed, the Nobel Prize for economics was awarded in 2002 to the behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman, whose paper on so-called ‘Prospect Theory’ is the most referenced economics paper in the world at the moment. It reveals how people are not rational in significant ways. For example, we assess risks entirely differently if we are thinking about insuring our family home or betting on a horse – before behavioural economics, this important distinction was not recognised.

Behavioural economics shows that what you choose is heavily influenced by the way in which the choice is framed. This is particularly important for Conservatives who rightly put personal choice at the heart of much of our policy making. Cass Sunstein, Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman’s work demonstrates how we design mechanisms for choosing so as to make choice most effective – with greatest impact but also reducing stress and long-run difficulties. This has serious implications for the design of school choice schemes. It has already influenced Adair Turner’s proposals for auto-enrolment in company pension schemes - telling people that they are opted in unless they choose to opt out leads to very different results from telling people they are opted out unless they choose to opt in.

However, one of the most significant aspect of behavioural economics is that economists have discovered happiness. Like teenagers discovering sex this has had a dramatic impact on the rather staid world of economics. British economists such as Andrew Oswald, Richard Layard and Avner Offer have all made really important contributions to thinking about happiness, personal fulfilment, and what this means for public policy. The results are very chastening. Although the statistics show that we are getting richer this doesn’t mean that the quality of our lives is getting any better and it certainly doesn’t mean that overall we are getting any happier. There is a striking contrast between the improvements in our material well-being and the almost complete absence of any improvement in our psychological well-being. Indeed if anything we seem to be more stressed, more pressured, more prone to mental illness, more worried than ever before. We seem to have to work harder and harder to achieve any given level of satisfaction. We are, as they say, trapped on a ‘hedonic treadmill.’ We are happier than some countries, but less happy than others. And happiness levels change. Denmark has got a lot happier, whilst Belgium has got rather depressed. A society that is generating economic growth but doesn’t seem to be making any progress at all and might even be going backwards, is on the wrong track. We all ought to be thinking about how we can raise our kids better, enjoy a greater sense of community or get a better balance between work and life. These big questions are at the heart of our Party’s Policy Review.

These challenges raise awkward, uncomfortable questions for both Parties. We can all see a ghastly nightmare of how politicians could make a comprehensive mess of this precious and important subject. We know how Labour approach it. First they appoint a Happiness Czar - and believe it or not I saw Richard Layard described as just that only the other day. Then they set targets for how we are all supposed to become happier. Then we fail to reach the targets so there is an elaborate attempt at re-defining them. The Happiness Czar is sacked and replaced by a Happiness Lenin who promises tougher measures. He complains that the Happiness Czar’s policies were not fit for purpose. Then the media start putting down Freedom of Information requests to see the advice Ministers originally got on whether they were going to be able to improve happiness. Then all you need to finish the circle is to imagine that Lord Levy offered a peerage to a guy for making more Prozac. Nobody could bear it if the Conservative party started going down that route. We won’t. We are not New Labour.

We must do better than that. Perhaps I can give an example of a better approach. The work-life balance gets to the heart of one of the biggest problems people face nowadays – the battle for time. One explanation of the paradox that we are no happier despite being better off, is that we are income rich but time poor. We all seem to have to work harder and harder for longer and longer hours. These pressures have particularly hit women who have moved into the workforce without being able to shed many household tasks to new men either (no man can contemplate without feeling deeply uncomfortable the evidence on the different amounts of time that women and men devote to housework even when both are employed). This problem of long hours is one of the big threats to the quality of life in Britain today.

There is always going to have to be hard work and we should not stop aiming to grow but as Bertrand Russell said, “success [in the workplace] can only be one ingredient in happiness, and it is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it”.

Other countries, as prosperous as our own, seem to manage without the same time pressures. Part of the explanation is really very straightforward and gets to the heart of the failure of Gordon Brown’s economic policies. We don’t work very productively. And incidentally it takes us longer to get to work too. One reason why our productivity is low is that business investment is close to a record low as a percentage of GDP. When it comes to delivering economic growth Gordon Brown is like a First World War general, throwing more and more troops into the battle rather than giving them the equipment to do the job effectively. The problem of the work-life balance tells us something about the way in which our economy is run. We should not forget, the most simple and literal meaning of our Built to Last programme. We really do need an environment which encourages investment.

There are even more uncomfortable explanations which are much more uncomfortable, of the ‘hedonic treadmill.’ There is evidence that it is relativities that matter, not absolutes. The reason we are not satisfied is that we are endlessly comparing ourselves with our neighbours. One social science experiment offered Harvard students two options. In the first option they would earn $100,000 a year and everyone else would earn $125,000 a year. In the second option they would earn $75,000 year but everyone else would earn $50,000 a year. By a very large majority they opted for $75,000 a year, putting themselves ahead of everyone else. This is uncomfortable evidence that it is not just your absolute income that matters to you but where you are relative to other people. Moreover, these relative measures have real results. An Oscar winner lives on four years longer than an Oscar nominee who didn’t win.

The Government’s Happiness adviser Richard Layard analyses the evidence on happiness and relative incomes and uses it to argue for reducing the differences between us through increased redistribution and higher levels of taxation. We certainly do need to do much better than we have at helping the poorest members of society. But the trouble with his approach is that like so many attempts to use government, it misses the target. As David Hume, a keen observer of people, said “it is not a great disproportion between ourselves and others which produces envy, but on the contrary, a proximity. A common which bears no envy for his general compared to what he will feel for his sergeant or corporal…”. If people are unhappy about their lot, it is not because they are trying to keep up with the Windsors, it is because they are trying to keep up with the Joneses. The differences in income and status that trouble people are not the enormous gaps that separate us from plutocrats, it is all those breathtakingly trivial preoccupations about whether the neighbours have got a newer car or a better garden. It is hard to see how public policy can tackle those long-standing and deeply unappealing human obsessions. We can, however, console that our work is not all in vain. We gain much self-esteem and happiness from the process of working and looking after our families.

This whole approach is relevant to education. Politicians and commentators are guilty of focussing too much on the utilitarian case for education. Although it is clearly good for raising individuals’ incomes, good for making the nation prosperous and can raise social mobility, one of the key benefits of education is education itself. Mastering a body of knowledge, making sense of things, developing and exercising the mind, mastering a skill, responding to great art or science – these are what make education worthwhile. This is why, when we have talked about education exclusively in terms of league tables and targets, we have separated ourselves from parents and teachers who feel that there is something missing. Much of what is valuable in education cannot be measured in tests and league tables, just as the value of life is not only about prices and markets.

Over the past weeks I have been holding a series of meetings with teachers and other experts to assess the strength of real subjects in British schools today. So far we have looked at history, maths and science. After the Summer Recess we will carry on with modern languages, citizenship etc. The most exciting thing is still the sheer passion that many of our teachers have for their subject and their desire to convey some of that to their students. But what is most worrying is their feeling that it has become harder and harder to convey the intellectual excitement of their subject to generations of students. Of course students work hard and many still have a real passion for learning but there are far too many school students that we are failing to catch.

All too many teachers now find themselves under enormous pressures not to teach their subject but to teach to the test. For weeks on end all through the spring and summer children were coming in to school and doing practice test after practice test so as to boost their scores in whatever summer exams they were sitting. Between the ages of 4 and 19, the average pupil now sits a total of 105 tests and is externally assessed in four out of five years from 13 to 18. If we consider that an entire term might be given over to preparing pupils for Key Stage 1,2,3 SATS, GCSEs, A/S levels and finally A2 levels, the full impact of testing upon a pupil’s education and general well being is revealed: two years being taught about the examination papers and not actually learning anything worthwhile. One survey of primary head teachers has revealed that 58% admitted reducing the scope of the curriculum taught in year 6 in order to focus on preparing for SATs.

We have always had practice exams and revision. But I fear that we are focusing more and more on what can be measured in tests. This is the exact equivalent of David Cameron’s warning that we are focusing on GDP that we can measure and not general well-being that we can’t. We are focusing on test results that we can measure and not education which we can’t. The curriculum has been slimmed down but it has been replaced by very precise guidance from Exam Boards on what they will be testing. It takes a real spirit of enterprise and self-confidence for a teacher to break free of the exam module and convey the excitement of what really brought them to the subject.

So many parents say that above all they want their child to be happy at school, and I understand what they mean. They don’t want children who are miserable, stressed, and come to hate learning. But it doesn’t mean education should decline into edutainment interspersed by tests. Education must be a route to deeper happiness – the real fulfilment that comes from mastering an idea, mastering a skill, mastering a subject. There is the fulfilment that comes from rising to a challenge, doing something difficult, pushing yourself harder.

We are reviewing the whole system to see what we can do to provide a better, deeper, richer education which will inspire learning beyond the school gates. We need to break free from the appalling conformism of teaching to the test. But there can be no going back to the world before 1988, before SATS tests and the National Curriculum. It is just the same as David Cameron’s point on the economy. We don’t want to go back to the world before the economic reforms of the 1980’s. But the challenge is to complement them with a broader understanding of what a strong economy or a good education is for.

Tony Blair declared his most important goal was ‘education, education, education’, instead he’s turned into a sound engineer; it’s ‘testing, testing, testing’. But tests should only be a means to an end; that end is an education based on a mastery of real subjects. If we can get that right, education will serve its real purpose to enable people to live more fulfilled lives. “