Andy Burnham has entered Downing Street having spent nine years arguing that the purpose of devolution was never simply to generate economic growth but to create places where people can live better lives. He now has a country rather than a city region to deliver.
He has consistently spoken about reducing inequalities. But precisely what inequalities should public policy be trying to reduce?
Public debate usually equates inequality with the gap between rich and poor. Income dominates headlines, political speeches, and policy targets. But a life lived well or badly does not only depend on income or wealth.
In their excellent recent book, Challenging Inequalities, Paul Johnson and his co-authors remind us that inequality is fundamentally multidimensional. Their concern extends well beyond income and wealth to encompass disparities in health, education, geography, political influence and opportunity. The book’s great achievement is to show how these inequalities accumulate across people’s lives and across generations, creating persistent differences in their chances of flourishing.
The intellectual roots of this approach lie in a question posed nearly half a century ago by Amartya Sen: Inequality of what?
Sen argued that debates about inequality had become trapped by an excessive focus on resources. Two people with identical incomes may have very different opportunities to live well. A person with a disability, for example, may require substantially more resources to achieve the same level of functioning as someone without one. What ultimately matters is what people are able to do, not simply what they earn or own. Sen’s capabilities approach shifted attention from resources to opportunities. Johnson’s book is deeply influenced by this tradition and, for the most part, all the better for it.
Yet there remains a further question that neither Sen’s framework nor Johnson’s book fully resolves. What if capabilities matter not in themselves but because they increase the likelihood that people will live better lives as they experience them? For me, wellbeing is best understood as people’s experiences of pleasure and purpose over time. Capabilities matter because they make those experiences more likely. Health matters because it enables us to enjoy life and pursue meaningful goals. Education matters because it opens opportunities for rewarding work, richer relationships and more fulfilling experiences. Political voice matters because it allows people greater influence over the communities in which they live. The inequalities that ultimately matter are inequalities in subjective wellbeing (SWB) itself.
This is not simply a philosophical argument. It has practical consequences for how we identify disadvantage. In recent work with Kate Laffan and Alina Velias, I argued that policymakers should focus less on average levels of SWB and much more on the people experiencing persistent misery. Looking across the ONS’s four measures of SWB, we found that misery is highly concentrated. A relatively small proportion of people account for a very large share of low SWB, and they typically face multiple, overlapping disadvantages, including poor mental health, weak social relationships, unemployment and financial insecurity.
Sen famously worried that people living under adverse conditions might report high levels of SWB because they had adapted their expectations. A sole focus on SWB, he argued, might therefore overlook injustice and constraint. This remains an important caution. But the fact is that much of the human condition is characterised by adaptation. People adapt surprisingly well to many changes in income and material circumstances. They adapt far less successfully to chronic pain, mental illness, unemployment, loneliness and the breakdown of close relationships. Good policy should pay particular attention to those conditions to which people do not adapt because these are the conditions that continue to make life worse as it is experienced.
In rejecting the narrowness of income-based measures, policymakers have increasingly embraced capabilities while continuing to neglect how people actually think and feel. Contemporary debates therefore focus heavily on inequalities in the determinants of SWB while paying much less attention to inequalities in SWB itself. Yet if improving human welfare is our objective, this seems an odd inversion of priorities. Poverty, poor health, educational inequalities etc., all matters because they make life go worse for people. Their moral importance ultimately depends upon their effects on SWB.
Once we adopt this perspective, one inequality begins to tower above the others. Across countries, cultures and generations, the strongest and most consistent predictor of SWB is the quality of our relationships. People embedded in supportive families, close friendships, trusted neighbourhoods and strong communities are happier, healthier and live longer. Conversely, social isolation is among the strongest predictors of sustained misery. The pleasure and purpose we experience from our lives are shaped more by who we share them with than by what we own. Relationships are not merely another item on a list of capabilities. They are the primary means through which people experience joy, meaning, and belonging,
Seen in this light, many of the inequalities described in Challenging Inequalities begin to look rather different. Geographic decline weakens communities and reduces opportunities for connection. Housing instability disrupts friendships and family life. Economic insecurity places enormous strain on relationships. Educational disadvantage limits access to valuable social networks. Poor mental health both damages and is damaged by social isolation. These inequalities all influence people’s capacity to build and sustain human connection.
This perspective also changes how success should be measured. If our ambition is genuinely to create better lives, then we should judge policies by whether the number of people living lives characterised by persistent misery has fallen. We should ask whether they strengthen trust, belonging and social connection. We should ask whether they reduce loneliness. We should ask whether they increase the opportunities for people to spend time with those they care about. And we should ask whether they narrow the gap between those whose lives are going well and those whose lives are marked by persistent misery.
This is where the new Prime Minister has an opportunity to lead. Greater Manchester already challenged the idea that success should be measured solely through economic output. He arrived in office promising to make politics work better for people who feel it has stopped working for them at all. The next step is to redefine what we mean by inequality itself. Instead of asking only whether differences in income, educational attainment, or employment have narrowed, his government could ask whether the people whose lives feel worst are living better lives than they were before.
He could – and should – make reducing wellbeing inequality the organising principle of public policy.
