• Television is America’s national pastime. Adults spend an average of nearly three hours in front of the tube daily, outpacing the next most common leisure-time activity by a factor of four.
• There is surprisingly robust evidence suggesting TV watching may contribute to poor physical and cognitive health; when it comes to happiness and life satisfaction, however, the verdict is still out.
• Are people consciously choosing TV over other activities? There’s not a lot of evidence one way or another, but it doesn’t seem like most adults who watch large amounts of TV are doing so reluctantly.
• The arts are not the (obvious) antidote. People who attend exhibits and performances are no more likely to report being satisfied with their lives than those who don’t.
• We value adults’ freedom to make their own choices, so will need to see clearer evidence for an opportunity to improve wellbeing before committing to a case for change.

* * *

TV Slave – photo by flickr user Manuele Carra

In 2014, First Lady Michelle Obama broke the internet with “Turnip for What,” a vine promo for her Let’s Move! campaign. She’s appeared on the Biggest Loser. She has her own viral dance sensation–the #GimmeFive, performed to Mark Ronson’s Uptown Funk. (You know it, right?) And she’s encouraging Americans to drink more water through fun social media stunts that appeal to our egos (hello, John Legend) and a line of chic accessories from the likes of J. Crew and Rebecca Minkoff. (Not to be outdone, POTUS and VPOTUS have been known to run around the White House and drink water, too.)

No, she’s not trying to be the next pop star. (Though we would totally buy her record.) She has a mission, and that’s to stem the obesity epidemic in the United States. The situation is, by all accounts, dire: 17% of children and almost 35% of adults are currently considered obese, and those numbers are worse among individuals with lower incomes and less education (so-called “low-SES” populations). Almost one in eleven adults has type 2 diabetes, and many more have prediabetes. Obesity is bad for our wallet: the US spends an estimated $147 billion in obesity-related healthcare expenses annually. It’s bad for the environment, too: cars are burning nearly a billion more gallons of gasoline a year than if passengers weighed what they did in 1960.

FLOTUS is but one character in the ongoing obesity saga. The Food and Drug Administration appeared in 2014 with new rules requiring establishments to post the calorie content of food on their menus. It went even further in 2015, when it required front-of-package labeling. Former Mayor Mike Bloomberg led a movement in New York to reduce soda consumption by limiting the sale of jumbo sugary drinks, which re-ignited the debate around the so-called sin tax. For more than a decade, public schools have battled youth junk food consumption with all sorts of methods: removing vending machines, imposing strict guidelines for school nutrition, and the Hail Mary move of banning birthday cupcakes.

Let’s Move Day – photo by flickr user Phil Roeder

The junk food hullabaloo raises interesting questions about choice, and whether individuals can or do make good choices for themselves. Here, the work of leading psychologists, economists and neuroscientists provides useful context: it is now widely accepted that most people make sense of the world by simplifying it, and the ways our brains are wired to simplify things can cause us to make judgments that are contrary to our best interests. There are a few reasons we might tend towards the simplify trap: hyperbolic discounting, which is our tendency to value immediate pleasure (or pain) over future consequences; loss aversion, or the fact that we dislike losing more than we like winning, which can make us risk-averse; or our tendency to focus only on what we know and what’s familiar. The combination of these factors makes low-risk, familiar propositions offering immediate satisfaction very hard to turn down. If we grew up with juice boxes and oreos as a school snack, and the closest grocer is a corner bodega stocked with chips and soda, and, well, sugar and salt and fat are so good, then of course we’d reach for cookies over carrots.

At this point, dear reader, you might be wondering why we have spent the first four paragraphs of an article about television and the arts talking about obesity. Well, as it turns out, TV (probably) makes you fat too.

TUNE IN, DROP OUT

Jamie K. is a 36-year-old from Fort Wayne, IN. She has a GED, and is unemployed. She likes to make jewelry and work on home improvement projects in her free time, which isn’t much, since she has three teenagers. She doesn’t go to arts events, because she doesn’t “have friends that are cultured, and it’s hard to go to things that [she] would find interesting by [herself].” She actively watches 10 hours of TV a day. Sonja B., a 57-year-old from Chicago, IL who is also unemployed, doesn’t attend arts events because they are usually in the evening, and she “wouldn’t want to go by [herself.]” She works out, and watches an average of 15 hours of TV, daily. Shantell T. is a 33-year-old administrative assistant from Washington DC. She watches 12 hours of TV on a typical day, and doesn’t consider herself to be a very “artsy” person.

In May of 2015, Createquity published Why Don’t They Come?, the first of many deep dives into the question of disparities of access to the benefits of the arts. The article looked closely at arts participation patterns among poor and less educated individuals, and considered obstacles to attendance including logistical reasons, such as cost and access to transportation or childcare, as well as other factors like feeling excluded and not having a friend to take along. (It is worth noting that many of the logistical reasons cited as obstacles to arts attendance are barriers to healthy eating as well. Cost and access in particular are blamed with the widening food gap between rich and poor.)

What we discovered in the course of our research surprised us. While the aforementioned obstacles were certainly barriers, a lack of explicit interest was far and away the dominant factor keeping low-SES populations away from arts events.

That’s What You Think – photo by flickr user Robert Couse-Baker

Of all these statistics, one in particular stood out to us. Virtually alone among the activities we studied, television attracted more participation from poor and less educated adults rather than less. And on top of that, our analysis of GSS data suggested that even within low-SES groups, adults who don’t attend arts events watch even more TV than those who do. It seems possible that, whatever sustenance people are seeking from live arts attendance, the folks who don’t go are getting it (at least in part) from the small screen.

Given the tendency to be distrustful of television, we were curious: are people going to be worse off on average watching TV instead of engaging in other, potentially more enriching, activities? Should this be an area of concern for our work here at Createquity? Is there an opportunity here to improve wellbeing through the arts?

SMALL SCREEN, BIG CONSEQUENCES

“It’s kind of a waste,” admits one of our interviewees. “I’m not really doing anything when I’m sitting and watching TV.”

As it turns out, sitting and not really doing anything when you’re watching TV doesn’t bode well for your physical wellbeing. There is compelling evidence that increased hours spent watching television is associated with obesity, in part because of the sedentary lifestyle it promotes by crowding out time that could be spent on exercise. SA Bowman looked at data from the USDA’s Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals (CSFII), and found that men and women across demographic groups, including race, income, and educational status, were more likely to be overweight as their average hours of television viewing per day increased. Women who watched more than two hours of TV per day were 41.4% more likely to be obese than women who watch less than one hour a day. For men, that figure was 90.29%. And it’s not just sitting that’s the problem: even among healthy Australian adults who exercise at least 2.5 hours per week, watching TV is straight up bad for the waistline, with more hours watching TV per day was associated with increased blood pressure, waistline, and cholesterol levels. (Note 2)

Research has indicated that TV affects physical health in other ways as well⏤even to the point of shortening your lifespan. One team’s analysis of the 2008 General Social Survey-National Death Index dataset reveals that each hour of TV watched per day is associated with a 4% increase in mortality risk, amounting to an overall reduction of 1.2 years in total life expectancy due to television viewing in the US. A 2010 paper found an increased likelihood of all causes of mortality with more than 2 hours of television watched per day. Yet a third paper finds that, compounding psychological factors aside, TV may lend itself to an increased likelihood of smoking (and we all know where the shoe drops there).

Watching Zoolander – photo by flickr user Vincent Diamante

Are you doing some math in your head? (Your Favorite TV Shows x Total Viewing Hours) / Hours Watched Daily = Life Expectancy Reduction and Loss of Cognition? We did some math too, because there’s more to the brain than cognition. We ran a regression analysis on television and wellbeing using data from the 2012 General Social Survey. After controlling for variables including health, income level, education level, gender, age, and the frequency with which people interact with their friends and relatives, we found that increased hours of watching television is negatively associated with overall life satisfaction for people in the top three income quartiles, albeit only by a little bit. (Interestingly, we did not an association between television viewing and happiness for people with household incomes less than $25,000 per year). With a small sample and effect size and no ability to infer the direction of causality, we have to be careful not to push these results too far. Still, this descriptive analysis doesn’t do the case for TV any favors.

Others have investigated the relationship between watching a lot of television and one’s overall satisfaction with life (sometimes framed or referred to by scientists as subjective wellbeing). In their analysis of individual responses to the World Values Survey, which includes data from 80 countries, researchers Luigino Bruni and Luca Stanca found that television “crowds out” other, more social, activities–such as volunteering or spending time with friends and family–that are associated with higher life satisfaction. In the same study, they also suggest that increased hours spent watching television causes people to want higher incomes, which in turn creates unhappiness and low life satisfaction. According to Bruni and Stanca, TV is a part of a “relational treadmill” that induces people to measure their increase in happiness against that of their neighbors, instead of against their own experiences. Television, they argue, makes people want to consume more, inspired by both advertising and program content; unfortunately, by this metric, individuals will never achieve a real increase in happiness that corresponds to their increase in buying power. Some take issue with the way Bruni and Stanca classified countries in their methodology (see here), and at least one set of researchers note that when considering heterogeneity within countries, people who watch television report higher levels of wellbeing than people who do not watch any television at all. Still, we likely can all point to an example of being sucked into the “relational treadmill” of consumption thanks to TV.

TV and your brain: Turin street art – photo by flickr user mermaid

THE TWIST

You would think with all this talk of obesity, mortality, and dissatisfaction with life, people would reach for the off button. The fact that they don’t suggests they must be getting something out of it.

Could it just be that people who watch large amounts of TV lack self-control? That could explain some of these findings; for example, there is research that indicates unhappy people in general tend to watch more TV, suggesting that depression might be the culprit in some cases. But that doesn’t seem to be the whole story. There is an emerging body of research on television and addiction, but people are still trying to understand it, how many people are affected, and how it relates to other addictions that might be more disruptive to daily life. We have not found evidence tying television addiction to income level, even though people with lower incomes tend to watch more TV.

TV Man in the Autumn – photo by flickr user sualk61

Then there’s the fact that, for many, watching television is a meaningful social experience. Kawanda C. lives in New Orleans, where she doesn’t have a car. She’s 31 and didn’t finish high school. She works as a cashier, and spends a lot of time getting to and from work. She watches on average eight hours of TV a day, and loves to watch with her kids. Sonja B. also opts for companionship when taking in her favorite shows: “It’s always fun to watch TV with someone else because they might have a different perspective.” Indeed, in contrast to to Bruni and Stanca’s findings about television crowding out social activity, researcher Nele Simons’s interviews with TV watchers show that they socialize around the television they watch. She even suggests that people watching television at different times can create new opportunities for TV and socializing. In Simons’s telling, the classic mid-century meme of a traditional family unit gathered around to watch I Love Lucy or the Ed Sullivan Show continues, only today it’s football at your uncle’s place, or Game of Thrones at your corner dive bar.

Family watching television. Evert F. Baumgardner, ca. 1958 – from the National Archives and Records Administration.

It does seem that qualitative methodologies tend to paint a more positive picture of the effects of television. A set of interviews with Dutch adults aged 65-92 published last year explored the question of whether their television viewing habits are more often part of a selection strategy–that is, a conscious choice made to maximize wellbeing–or a compensation strategy, a choice that is made to fill time or otherwise compensate for some kind of loss or diminishment. While there were certainly examples of compensation strategies among their interviewees, the researchers more often found that people were watching TV with no regrets.

But the TV-is-good-for-you case is more than anecdotal; there’s a small but growing body of quantitative research that paints a more positive side to the medium as well. Recall that our aforementioned analysis of the General Social Survey found that among the lowest income quartile, which is also the segment that watches the most TV, more television is not associated with lower life satisfaction. One hypothesis to explain this comes from a paper by Bruno S. Frey et al. analyzing data from the European Social Survey. Frey et al. found that people with a lower opportunity cost of free time, like unemployed people or those with very fixed working hours, were less likely to report decreased life satisfaction as their TV hours increase, while the opposite was true of individuals with a high opportunity cost of their free time. If people with lower incomes tend to have a lower opportunity cost of their free time, this might explain why television at the bottom income quartile does not seem to harm life satisfaction.

While we haven’t encountered research showing positive effects of television content on adult viewers, there are some success stories for children and teens. In one study, researchers Kearney and Levine looked at the MTV franchise 16 and Pregnant–a series of reality TV shows including the Teen Mom sequels–and determined that the shows ultimately led to a 5.7% reduction in teen births in the 18 months following their introduction, which is about one third of the reduction in teen births during that period. In a follow-up, Kearney and Levine found that preschoolers who lived in areas where they could watch Sesame Street were 14% less likely to fall behind when they got to elementary school, and that this effect was much more pronounced for kids who grew up in areas with higher levels of economic disadvantage.

TV time – photo by flickr user Blake Danger Bentley

I WILL CHOOSE FREE WILL?

TV makes us fat. It dumbs us down. Too much TV makes us unhappy. Not enough TV makes us unhappy. TV makes us laugh. It keeps us informed. It keeps us from more social activities. It’s an opportunity for family time. It’s dangerous: for our feeling of self worth, for our capacity to understand right from wrong. At the end of the day, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that TV is both good and bad for us, depending on who we are, how we define good and bad, and how we go about asking and answering the question.

To be sure, not all of this evidence is created equal. If we were to pit the “TV is good” and “TV is bad” hypotheses against each other in a contest of methodologies, bad would probably win out. But how bad is bad? What exactly is the threshold of evidence of harm that would warrant taking the position that TV requires an intervention?

Here, the case of junk food provides us with a useful comparison. The impact of junk food consumption on public health has generated enough concern among reasonably-minded policy wonks to motivate multiple attempts at intervention by the state. And yet even for junk food, that movement to change behaviors has not come without controversy. The FDA, under intense pressure from Congress (and the National Restaurant Association) was forced to delay nation-wide implementation of menu labeling requirements until after the upcoming Presidential elections. (NYC implemented these same rules in 2006, and it took a full two years for them to become reality.) This past November, NYC passed a law requiring restaurants to indicate highly salted dishes; it was challenged immediately. Bloomberg’s famous soda ban was struck down, suffering from a backlash from the very people it was intended to help. Richmond, CA took a different approach, introducing a soda tax rather than a size limit, but it, too, failed.

What’s more, many of these well-meaning attempts to regulate the health of Americans don’t seem to be working: menu labeling has not been shown to change eating habits (and at least one study suggests it leads to greater caloric intake.) Kids denied in-school vending machines often end up consuming extra junk food. One year after Berkeley, CA became the first city in the US to successfully pass a soda tax, a study of its effectiveness reveals that, as the price increase has been largely assumed by distributors, the intended effect on consumers is negligible.

The no free-will bus campaign – photo by flickr user Travis Morgan

While there are certainly aspects of the effect of TV on physical, cognitive and subjective wellbeing that are concerning and deserve further exploration, given how dicey it is to seek to intervene in adults’ choices, our instinct is to exercise caution. For us to move forward in pursuing a case for change with respect to TV, we would need to see clearer evidence for an opportunity to improve wellbeing.

For us, the question of wellbeing ultimately comes down to opportunity and choice. Our definition of a healthy arts ecosystem draws inspiration from the “capability approach,” a widely adopted philosophical framework developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum that defines wellbeing in terms of freedoms. According to the capability approach, whether or not people take advantage of the opportunities they have, their capability to make decisions about how they pursue their lives is vital to wellbeing, and having the capability to achieve various states is more important than whether or not one chooses to exercise that capability.

Frances T. talks about the impact of TV on her life

It seems like a whole lot of people are making the choice to reach for the remote. For some, this undoubtedly isn’t the best choice they could make. For others, maybe it is. And it’s really hard for us, or anyone else, to tell the difference. Tempting as it might be to judge people who spend eight hours a day in front of the TV, many of us spend that much time or more each day in front of a different sort of small screen. We can only hope that everyone who does so is as enthusiastic about it as Frances T., who confidently declared when we asked her whether TV affects her wellbeing, “it is my own wellbeing to watch TV.”

Liked this article? Two things. First, we’ll be hosting a #CreatequityAsks Twitter chat to discuss the implications of this work on Wednesday, March 9 from 4-5pm Eastern time. Second, we’re conducting a reader poll to help us determine what we should investigate next. Please take 5 minutes to share your opinions! Thanks so much.

• A large and emerging literature on the topic of wellbeing has a lot to teach us about the arts’ role in society.
• Wellbeing is a way of grouping the various components of individual and societal health under a single conceptual umbrella. This is important because it opens up the possibility of understanding the relative value or benefit of those components as part of an integrated whole instead of treating them as completely separate.
• A number of large-scale international economic and social policy initiatives are grounded in wellbeing, including much of the global development work undertaken by the United Nations.
• Most wellbeing definitions do not explicitly include culture, but some do. In particular, a variation of a wellbeing framework called the capability approach recognizes the capacity for imagination and play as critical components of human wellbeing.
• Describing the benefits and costs of arts ecosystem outcomes in the language of wellbeing could earn the field a proper seat at the table in conversations about human progress without downplaying the so-called “intrinsic” benefits of the arts.

* * *

Photo by Flickr user Tim Jordan. Creative Commons license.

Quick! What’s the most important issue in the arts? Is it declining audiences? The fact that it’s so hard to make a living as an artist? Changing demographics and cultural equity? Unsustainable business models? New technologies? Government funding? Arts education? Gentrification? Creative placemaking? Where I can go to figure out what the heck I’m doing this Friday night?

Spend any time reading up on arts policy and philanthropy or attending conferences in the arts, and you’ll see plenty of attention devoted to all of these topics and more. To be sure, all of them have implications for the future of arts and culture in the United States, not to mention the rest of the world. The challenge is, with so many issues to track, and no way of comparing them to each other, we can’t know how to prioritize our limited energies in the areas that are going to make the most difference. We can’t even be sure that the biggest problems or opportunities in the sector are on our collective radar at all. What if the most impactful thing we could do is something that no one’s talking about?

At Createquity, we are trying to tackle that conundrum head-on by framing our work in terms of the broad language of social good and human progress. In this way we sometimes think of ourselves as a cause-specific analogue to the effective altruism movement, which tries to identify the highest-leverage opportunities to do the most good with the resources available to us, whatever they might be. Accordingly, when we developed our definition of a healthy arts ecosystem, we declared that all of the conditions and outcomes named in that definition should be understood in the broader context of “improving people’s lives in concrete and meaningful ways.” While that names a single yardstick of “life improvement” to measure every success against, without further elaborating on what it actually means to improve someone’s life, the concept is not very useful in practice. Fortunately, many smart people have been grappling with the same problem and have made significant strides towards adding specificity around such terms in recent decades. Our investigation of their work has led us to an exciting and emerging literature on the topic of wellbeing, a literature with roots in multiple fields outside of the arts.

Logo of the World Health Organization by United States Mission Geneva. Creative Commons license.

WELLBEING 101

While no consensus definition of wellbeing exists, broadly speaking, it is a way of holistically grouping the many components of individual and societal health under a single conceptual umbrella. The intellectual origins of wellbeing date back more than half a century to 1948, when the World Health Organization framed its definition of health not only in terms of the absence of troublesome physical symptoms, but also in terms of the presence of certain attributes that suggested “physical, mental, and social well-being.” This was a departure from the prevalent medical conception of health at the time, which narrowly focused on the presence or absence of disease and categories of ailments in individuals.

Before long, this holistic perspective began to infiltrate the study of whole communities and societies. An early theoretical work on “social indicators” in the United States was undertaken by Harvard Business School professor Raymond Bauer in the mid-1960s and sponsored (surprisingly enough) by NASA. With a large and visible public investment to protect, the space agency asked Bauer to quantify its effects on American life, but the professor concluded that the effort would not get far without an established way to quantify improvements to social conditions. To bridge that gap, Bauer and his co-authors pioneered the idea and early methods of developing statistical measures of social values and goals.

Bauer’s work coincided with a growing backlash against the then-commonplace use of economic measures such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to measure social progress in the national and international policy arena. While GDP is a broadly accepted way to measure the size of an economy, it is at best a flawed proxy for the outcomes that really signify how well societies are faring. In one of the more remarkable developments in the history of political economy, the teenage King Jigme Wangchuk of the small nation of Bhutan coined the term “Gross National Happiness” as a replacement for GDP in 1972. (Decades later, a fleshed-out version of GNH is in active use in the country and enshrined in its Constitution.) Around the same time, Richard Easterlin’s research on happiness levels in post-war Europe in suggested that increased material abundance did not necessarily yield increased happiness, which helped launch the field of happiness economics. By 2008, when the French government brought together a star-studded international panel of economists led by Nobel Prize winners Joseph E. Stiglitz and Amartya Sen to try to move beyond GDP once and for all, wellbeing was rapidly establishing itself as the dominant theoretical foundation of the global policy arena. The resulting Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission report is considered a major watershed in the mainstreaming of wellbeing.

Today, a large and growing field of study is devoted to wellbeing and its measurement, with its own peer-reviewed journals, leading experts, and esoteric controversies. Given that wellbeing scholars operate at the intersection of a number of different fields, it’s not surprising that the lexicon can sometimes get messy, with terms such as quality of life, standard of living, and livability variously standing in for the idea of a holistic measure of individual and community health. One of the more notable debates has centered around objective vs. subjective ways of conceptualizing wellbeing. Historically, a Scandinavian school of thought relied on living conditions such as income and physical health that can be observed directly, while an American “quality of life” approach focused on “subjective wellbeing” (i.e., asking people about their happiness, agency, and satisfaction with life). Advocates of the latter argue that subjective wellbeing is the most direct measure of an individual’s lived experience. Defining wellbeing solely in subjective terms may not tell the whole story, however, since people’s expectations for their own wellbeing may be affected by their context and past experiences. For example, individuals in societies with relative deprivation may rate their subjective wellbeing higher because their basis for comparison is different than people in relatively well-off societies, or a drug addict might report being very happy in the moment despite not leading a healthy life overall. These days, there is widespread agreement that a mix of objective and subjective measures is likely to provide the best understanding of wellbeing.

THE CAPABILITY APPROACH AND THE RISE OF INDICATOR SYSTEMS

The insight that neither objective nor subjective measures fully describe wellbeing on their own raises an important question: how does one account for people’s differing abilities or desires to make use of the resources provided them? Beginning in the 1980s, economist Amartya Sen began addressing this dilemma in earnest. His capability approach, refined in subsequent decades with philosopher Martha Nussbaum, frames wellbeing through the lens of social justice, taking the unique circumstances and choices of individuals into account. Among other things, the capability approach notes that:

Amartya Sen. Photo by Flickr user Stefano Corso. Creative Commons license.

• Individuals draw varying levels of benefit from the same resources. As a result, assessing wellbeing is much more complex than considering whether and how resources are distributed. It’s one thing to say, for example, that food is available to a particular population; it’s quite another to consider whether that food can actually nourish and sustain a pregnant woman or someone who is allergic to some of its core ingredients. As a result, the capability approach pays more attention to specific states of being (e.g., being nourished) and activities (e.g., learning) than to external inputs.
• Having the freedom to make choices matters. Whether or not people take advantage of the opportunities they have, their ability to make decisions about how they pursue their lives is vital to wellbeing. The physical state of a person who is starving may be similar to that of someone who is fasting, but the right of the latter to choose his/her condition in an informed manner is crucial. Through this lens, all human beings must have the knowledge, skills, and opportunity to lead a meaningful life — beyond mere survival, a life “that they have reason to value.” Having the “capability” to achieve various states is therefore more significant than whether or not one actually achieves them.

Economists and international development scholars were quick to seize on Sen’s capability approach in their quest to break from an over-reliance on the GDP. As disillusioned as they were with standard macroeconomic measures, they knew that alternative metrics were needed in order for wellbeing to serve as a viable replacement. This gap led to a demand for new indicator systems that researchers and policymakers could use to translate quality of life into something that could be measured. Indicators, as they saw it, were necessary for wellbeing to move beyond a theoretical construct into something with practical significance. Beyond providing a means to count whether certain conditions are present, indicators could inform judgments about the success or failure of particular policy decisions, be used to hold people in power accountable to the impact of their work, and provide a common vocabulary by which nations, regions, or specific groups of people can track how they are faring.

In 1990, the United Nations Development Programme (UDNP), led by Pakistani scholar Mahbub ul Haq, began producing Human Development Reports meant to “shift the focus of development economics from national income accounting to people-centered policies.” In the process, they worked on a numerical index that could capture non-economic elements of wellbeing. Amartya Sen was involved; while he initially fretted that the capability approach was too complex to be boiled down to numbers, Haq and others eventually convinced him that policymakers would only take the capability approach seriously if a single index number was provided. Thus, the Human Development Index (HDI) was born.

The HDI is relatively simple. Its three dimensions are “a long and healthy life,” “being knowledgeable,” and a “decent standard of living.” The indicators are life expectancy at birth, mean years of schooling for adults over 25 and expected years of schooling for young children (calculated via a mix of UNESCO statistics and actual enrollment figures), and gross national income per capita. The geometric mean of numerical scores from these four indicators comprise the final HDI index score for any particular country.

The United States fares quite well under this system, ranking fifth out of 187 nations in 2012-13. UNDP’s Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI), however, tells a different story. It adjusts the HDI score based on the extent to which resources are more available to certain segments of the population than to others. (It uses a long list of surveys, including a few distributed by the World Bank and European Union, to do this.) A country with perfect equality would have identical HDI and IHDI scores. Across all countries in the survey, however, scores are adjusted by an average of 22%. Under IHDI, the United States’s ranking falls by more than twenty, while the remaining countries in the top five either hold their spots or shift by one or two.

The Human Development Index is just one example of a number of impressive, large-scale wellbeing indicator systems that have been developed in recent years. Below are a few of the more interesting and/or well-known efforts:

Gallup-Healthways Wellbeing Index

Claiming to be the “most proven, mature, and comprehensive measure of well-being in the world,” the Gallup-Healthways Wellbeing Index was unveiled in 2008 as a high-profile partnership between an international health care provider and arguably the best-known public opinion polling firm in the United States. Dubbed the “Dow Jones of health,” the index has a national and international version. The former measures life evaluation, physical health, emotional health, healthy behavior, work environment, and basic access via a 55-question survey distributed to 1,000 Americans per day. Its ultimate ambitions are to be “a daily measure determining the correlation between the places where people work and the communities in which they live, and how that and other factors impact their well-being.” The international edition is more modest, measuring five factors (purpose, social, financial, community, and physical) via ten specific questions included in Gallup’s World Poll, a monster survey that claims to represent 95% of the global population. Its reliance on self-reported perceptions of wellbeing sets it apart from other wellbeing indicators, and the impact of this difference in approach is notable: top Gallup-Healthways performers include a number of Latin American nations and territories such as Panama, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Belize, Chile, and Guatemala that don’t tend to rank highly in the other indices.

Social Progress Index
The Social Progress Imperative

Billed as a “holistic, 21st century assessment of the health of society,” the Social Progress Imperative was launched six years ago by the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Philanthropy and Social Investing with the goal of “spur[ring] competition between nations to improve the environment for social innovation in the way the [Global Competitiveness Index] has done for enablers of economic growth.” With seed funding from Fundación Avina and the Skoll Foundation, it launched its first research project, the Social Progress Index (SPI), in 2013. The SPI examines a whopping 54 environmental and and social indicators that fall under three broad dimensions: “basic human needs,” “foundations of wellbeing,” and “opportunity.” Unlike the HDI, the index does not take economic indicators like income into account, and also privileges outcomes (like the number of people who have access to clean water) over inputs (like policies aimed at increasing that access). Each dimension has four components that all have equal weight in determining the country’s overall score. Components include nutrition and medical care, access to knowledge, information, communications, and personal rights and freedoms. The Social Progress Imperative’s website breaks down each score with colors that indicate areas of relative strength and weakness when compared with other nations with similar GDP.

OECD Better Life Index
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

In contrast to the previous examples with their fixed metric definitions and weights, OECD’s Better Life Index allows website visitors to manipulate the data on the agency’s 34 member nations according to their own personal definition of wellbeing. The Better Life index was launched in 2011 to put decisions about the most important aspects of wellbeing into the hands of the public. It’s not an entire free-for-all; the Better Life Index has eleven discrete topics taken from OECD’s other work on wellbeing indicators, split between material living conditions (including housing, income, and jobs), and the more nebulous quality of life (which in this case includes measures of community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety and work/life balance). Each topic is measured in turn by anywhere from one to four indicators, which run the gamut of statistics from the chance of workers losing their jobs in the last year to self-reported life satisfaction. Wellbeing scores can be broken out by gender, and each user can save his/her personal index and compare it with those of others.

Other examples of wellbeing and quality of life indicator systems include the Mercer Quality of Living Survey and two products from the Economist Intelligence Unit: the Global Liveability Survey and the Where-to-be-Born Index. The last of these, which is based on life satisfaction, is notable for its use of regression analysis to determine the relative weights of the 11 factors that make up the index, in contrast to the equal or user-determined weighting seen elsewhere. The Mercer and Global Liveability surveys rank quality of life in individual cities rather than entire nations; Vienna and Melbourne, respectively, take the top spots.

DESPERATELY SEEKING CULTURE?

These and other wellbeing indicator systems typically break down the general concepts of wellbeing or quality of life into a number of discrete domains like economic prosperity, education, or health. The domains are most often developed by experts working from theoretical conceptions of wellbeing, though a few cases draw heavily from definitions generated by the population being studied. There are a number of variations in the details, but a review of more than 20 indicator systems by a group of researchers led by Michael R. Hagerty identified seven domains that are common across nearly all instances:

• relationships with family and friends
• emotional wellbeing
• material wellbeing
• health
• work and productive activity
• feeling a part of one’s local community
• personal safety

You’ll note the absence of arts and culture from this list. In part, that’s because different societies have dramatically different ideas about what those words mean, and internationally comparable data sources relevant to culture are all but nonexistent. Robert Prescott-Allen, who in 2001 published a book detailing his own indicator system with an emphasis on the environmental impact of countries, originally set out to include culture as a top-level domain. Ultimately, he abandoned the idea, finding he could not identify cultural indicators that were consistent across a majority of nations included in his project.

Prescott-Allen is not alone; most indicator systems and other initiatives rooted in wellbeing have historically overlooked the role of arts and culture, and continue to do so. A recent advocacy campaign to integrate an explicit goal of cultural sustainability into the next iteration of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals appears to have failed, despite support from UNESCO itself and significant investment on the part of that agency in an indicator system to track culture’s role in sustainable development. Despite not achieving its primary objective, the advocacy campaign has yielded a useful set of ways to think about culture’s indirect contribution to wellbeing through priorities such as poverty reduction, education, and good governance.

Even so, a handful of individual countries have developed indices of wellbeing that include culture as a top-level concern. The aforementioned Gross National Happiness index adopted by the government of Bhutan is one example. The “Cultural Diversity and Resilience” domain of the index includes measures such as fluency in one of the regional dialects of Bhutan, expertise in one of thirteen traditional Bhutanese crafts (e.g. weaving, embroidery, blacksmithing, bamboo works, paper making, etc.), and knowledge of DriglamNamzha (the “expected behaviour [of consuming, clothing, moving] especially in formal occasions and in formal spaces”). In North America, the Canadian Index of Wellbeing includes the broad category of culture and leisure, which includes measures of leisure time as well as participation in activities such as camping, sports, or performing arts.

Another notable exception comes from the capability approach, or at least one particular version of it. Although Amartya Sen refuses to endorse “one pre-determined canonical list of capabilities” for the capability approach, his partner in crime, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, has had no such compunctions — and her definition includes multiple nods to arts and culture. [1]

In 2000, Nussbaum published a list of “central human capabilities” as follows:

• Life
• Bodily Health
• Bodily Integrity
• Senses, Imagination, and Thought
• Emotions
• Practical Reason
• Affiliation
  • living with and towards others
  • social bases of self-respect and non-humiliation
• Other Species
• Play
• Control Over One’s Environment
  • Political
  • Material

In her explanation of this list, Nussbaum draws the clearest ties to arts and culture through the two principles of “Senses, Imagination, and Thought” and “Play.” The former includes “being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth,” and the latter refers to “being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities.”

“Imagination” by Flickr user Thomas Hawk. Creative Commons license.

PART OF Y/OUR WORLD

Examining the connection between wellbeing and the arts [2] promises to move Createquity’s work forward in two respects. First, it adds some clarity and definition to our rather vague notion of the “concrete and meaningful ways” in which the arts improve people’s lives. And second, it connects the ideas embedded in our healthy arts ecosystem definition to a rich and rapidly expanding body of literature, lending added legitimacy to our work and opening the door to a broader cross-sectoral dialogue. The former of these benefits comes into play whenever we find ourselves having to compare different problems, interventions, or opportunities within the arts ecosystem. Our previous framework of “improving lives in concrete and meaningful ways” was on the right track, but weak in that it left “improving” and “meaningful” undefined. While not completely solving that problem, jumping on the wellbeing bandwagon does allow us to hone in on a range of likely definitions for those terms. Put another way, this new lens clarifies that the conditions and outcomes generated by a healthy arts ecosystem must increase the net wellbeing of society in order to constitute meaningful improvement in people’s lives.

The second benefit is perhaps even more important than the first. Scholars, philanthropists, policymakers, and others have long struggled to articulate how arts and culture fit into a broader conception of public goods and charitable aims, with the result that social innovation initiatives frequently treat the arts by different standards or ignore them entirely. Newer philanthropic movements such as effective altruism have sometimes demonstrated outright hostility to the arts, associating them with headline-grabbing capital or endowment gifts to major universities and large museums. Naturally, that prompts angry and defensive responses from the arts world in turn. Crucially, this distrust and lack of understanding on both sides arises from the absence of a common language with which to judge the value and success of initiatives across sectors. If we can describe the benefits and costs of arts ecosystem outcomes using the language of wellbeing in a way that celebrates rather than subsumes the unique things that make the arts special, that would lay the groundwork for a dialogue about the role of arts and culture in human progress in which all sides have a genuine stake.

Overall, we find the capability approach to be the most effective bridge between our existing healthy ecosystem definition and the fast-growing scholarship on wellbeing. It is particularly worth noting that Martha Nussbaum’s take on the capability approach is the clearest example we’ve found of integrating what have been commonly understood as the “intrinsic” benefits of the arts, such as joy, captivation, etc., into a broader definition of wellbeing. [3] This approach allows us to think of the arts as influencing overall wellbeing both directly, through developing the capabilities of Play and Senses, Imagination, and Thought, and indirectly through, for example, their impact on the capability of Bodily Health. Such a framework improves on the traditional delineation of “intrinsic” and “instrumental” benefits of the arts by proposing a consistent way to value both.

The capability approach is particularly helpful for clarifying what we mean when when we say that human beings today and in the future have “opportunities” to engage in certain types of arts participation. (The same could be said for other efforts in the arts field to “improve access to” things like arts engagement or arts education.) Its emphasis on personal choice and freedoms rather than behaviors suggests that a narrow focus on things like participation rates in an arts class or attendance figures at a concert hall cannot tell us much about wellbeing. Choosing not to engage in a specific arts activity or a long-term aesthetic pursuit can be a well-informed decision that yields greater wellbeing than would otherwise be the case. Likewise, the capability approach reminds us that providing people with access to resources is not enough; they must have the necessary training, skills, and agency to make use of them. This latter insight is consistent with the position that proactive steps should be taken to provide basic arts education opportunities to all, even if not everyone will choose to engage with the arts throughout their whole lives. For all these reasons, although they have not been as widely adopted as the capability approach in general, Nussbaum’s central human capabilities arguably offer a more compelling theoretical rationale for arts and culture’s inclusion in wellbeing than simply slapping arts participation indicators on top of a wellbeing measurement index.

“Which way do we go?” by Flickr user yooperann. Creative Commons license.

WHERE WE GO FROM HERE

It’s important to remember that as much progress as wellbeing has made since 1948, this is very much a field that is still finding its way. Even the effective altruist community, with its self-assured rhetoric of doing “the most good possible,” is home to raging debates about what exactly that means in practice. So it should come as no surprise that as promising as we feel this direction to be for the arts, we have some thorny questions of our own:

• How does one weigh the benefits of art that is offensive to some people, but empowering to others? This is particularly tricky in cases when art is in direct dialogue — or conflict — with ideologies or belief systems that contribute to individuals’ subjective wellbeing. This push-pull appears particular to the field of arts and culture; it’s difficult to imagine how the health, social integration, or financial stability of one person could detract from that of another (beyond instances in which there aren’t enough resources to go around). In contrast, it’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which a culturally important but challenging artistic work has a negative (if short-lived) impact on the subjective wellbeing of the majority of a population. Yet that work may ultimately have a positive impact on future generations, which leads us to a second question:
• How does one account for changes in the value of arts and cultural products and experiences over time? This dilemma can play out both at the individual level, where cultural experiences that are not immediately pleasurable could nevertheless prove meaningful to the recipient later on; and at a societal level, where future generations may enjoy, appreciate, and/or use today’s cultural products in a very different way than their ancestors do. The latter situation is particularly vexing because there’s no defined time horizon for our definition of a healthy arts ecosystem, and thus a huge range of possibilities for how many people might be affected positively or negatively in the future by events taking place and decisions made in the present. Fortunately, that particular puzzle is mirrored in domains outside of the arts, and techniques such as discount rates have been established to deal with the issue, imperfect though they may be.
• How should different elements of wellbeing be weighed against each other? In theory, the only way to answer our opening question of which problems and interventions should receive top priority is to have a clear sense of how the holistic notion of wellbeing relates to its component parts. Yet the actual wellbeing indicator systems that have been put into practice largely seem to avoid this challenge, either declining to offer an overall wellbeing score entirely or weighing each component of the index equally — which, as many have pointed out, comes with its own set of problems. More interesting and intellectually defensible ways of determining weights exist, including expert judgments, crowdsourcing the personal opinions of members of the population under study, and statistical methods such as principal component analysis, two-stage factor analysis, or conjoint analysis. We aren’t in a position at this point to recommend a specific weighting scheme, but it seems like an important area for someone to explore going forward.

For all our never-ending debates about how and whether to measure the impact of the arts, our field may be well poised to contribute to this complex but fascinating dialogue that spans so many disciplines and decades. After all, if anyone is accustomed to making value judgments within an environment that resists quantification, it’s us! Committing to that conversation could open new doors as we contribute to a broader, shared understanding of human progress without having to downplay some of the arts’ more unique, intrinsic contributions. Entering those doors, however, will require leaving the arts cheerleading that many of us are accustomed to at the coat check. It will require contemplating what it looks like to offer the freedom to participate in arts and culture while simultaneously honoring those who decline the invitation.

Encounters between the arts and the capability approach have been both more recent and rare. The two examples we know of are Samuel Jones’s 2010 monograph Culture Shock for the British think tank Demos, which draws on the capability approach to reframe public policy goals relating to culture in England; and a more quantitative application of the capability approach to the arts undertaken by Mark Stern and Susan Seifert of the University of Pennsylvania’s Social Impact of the Arts Project. Stern and Seifert used a modified version of the capability approach as defined in the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission as a starting point for their investigation of cultural activity and social wellbeing in Philadelphia and other cities. Their analysis reveals some interesting–if not entirely conclusive–patterns of wellbeing and cultural participation in different parts of Philadelphia. They identify areas of concentrated disadvantage in multiple categories of wellbeing which coincide with racial and socioeconomic divides, and point to an increasing correlation over time between neighborhood economic prosperity and cultural access. Nevertheless, Stern and Seifert leave some of the most exciting theoretical implications of the capability approach for the arts unexplored. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, their analysis routinely measures the relationship between cultural activity and wellbeing as if they were separate concepts. This is partly explained by Stern and Seifert’s adaptation of the wellbeing domains from the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission, which do not include culture explicitly. By contrast, at Createquity we feel that there is greater potential to be drawn from Martha Nussbaum’s central human capabilities for reasons discussed in the main article.

[3] In our original definition of a healthy arts ecosystem, we had been drawn to the concept of as popularized by psychologist Abraham Maslow in his famous Hierarchy of Needs to serve this purpose. Our subsequent research, however, leads us to believe that while self-actualization still enjoys currency in American popular culture (particularly in the business world), in the social sciences it is seen as an increasingly dated and culturally-specific concept. Nussbaum’s central human capabilities may eventually fall prey to similar criticisms, but overall they seem to be a clear improvement over the framework initially proposed in our healthy arts ecosystem definition and a step towards both internal clarity and interoperability with other social innovation initiatives.

FULL BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agenda 21 for Culture. (n.d.). Culture as a goal in post-2015. Retrieved from http://www.agenda21culture.net/index.php/documents/culture-as-a-goal-in-post-2015

Agenda 21 for Culture. (2015). Recognizing the Role of Culture to Strengthen the UN Post-2015 Development Agenda. Retrieved from http://www.culture2015goal.net/images/yootheme/culture2015/def/Indicators_ENG.pdf

Alkire, S. (2008). The Capability Approach to the Quality of Life. Retrieved from http://www.commission-stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr/documents/capability_approach.pdf

All-Party Parliamentary Group on Wellbeing Economics. September 2014. “Wellbeing in Four Policy Areas. Retrieved from http://b.3cdn.net/nefoundation/ccdf9782b6d8700f7c_lcm6i2ed7.pdf

Alonso, G., & Medici, M. (2014). UNESCO Culture for Development Indicators: Methodology Manual. UNESCO. Retrieved from http://en.unesco.org/creativity/sites/creativity/files/digital-library/CDIS%20Methodology%20Manual_0.pdf

Arts Council England. (2014). The Value of Arts and Culture to People and Society: An Evidence Review. Retrieved from http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/media/uploads/pdf/The-value-of-arts-and-culture-to-people-and-society-An-evidence-review-TWO.pdf

Bauer, R. (Ed.). (1966). Social Indicators. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Canadian Index of Wellbeing. (2012). How are Canadians Really Doing? 2012 CIW Report. Waterloo, ON: Canadian Index of Wellbeing and University of Waterloo. Retrieved from https://uwaterloo.ca/canadian-index-wellbeing/sites/ca.canadian-index-wellbeing/files/uploads/files/CIW2012-HowAreCanadiansReallyDoing-23Oct2012_0.pdf

Carnwath, J. D. & Brown, A. S. (2014). Understanding the Value and Impacts of Cultural Experiences: A Literature Review. WolfBrown and Arts Council England. Retrieved from http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/media/uploads/pdf/Understanding_the_value_and_impacts_of_cultural_experiences.pdf

Chancel, L. (2014). Beyond GDP indicators: To what end? Retrieved from http://oecdinsights.org/2014/11/25/7388/

Cobb, C. & Rixford C. (1998). Lessons learned from the history of social indicators. San Francisco, CA: Redefining Progress.

Dodge, R., Daly, A. P., Huyton, J., & Sanders, L. D. (2012). The challenge of defining wellbeing. International Journal of Wellbeing, 2(3), 222–235.

Easterlin, R. (1974). Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence. In David, P. A. & Reder, M. W. (Eds.), Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honor of Moses Abramovitz. New York. Retrieved from http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/16/business/Easterlin1974.pdf

Fujiwara, D. (2013). Museum’s and Happiness: The Value of Participating in Museums and the Arts. Retrieved from http://www.happymuseumproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Museums_and_happiness_DFujiwara_April2013.pdf

Fujiwara, D., Kudrna, L., & Dolan, P. (2014). Quantifying and Valuing the Wellbeing Impacts of Culture and Sport. Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/304899/Quantifying_and_valuing_the_wellbeing_impacts_of_sport_and_culture.pdf

Fujiwara, D., Kudrna, L., & Dolan, P. (2014b). Quantifying the Social Impacts of Culture and Sport. Scotland Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/304896/Quantifying_the_Social_Impacts_of_Culture_and_Sport.pdf

Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.well-beingindex.com/

GDP: A Flawed Measure of Progress | New Economy Working Group. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.neweconomyworkinggroup.org/visions/living-wealth-indicators/gdp-flawed-measure-progress

Hagerty, M. R., Cummins, R., Ferriss, A. L., Land, K., Michalos, A. C., Peterson, M., … Vogel, J. (2001). Quality of Life Indexes for National Policy: Review and Agenda for Research. Bulletin de Methodologie Sociologique, 71(1), 58–78. Retrieved from http://doi.org/10.1177/075910630107100104

The Hangzhou Declaration: Placing Culture at the Heart of Sustainable Development Policies. (2013). Presented at the Hangzhou International Conference China. Retrieved from http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CLT/images/FinalHangzhouDeclaration20130517.pdf

Jackson, M.-R., & Herranz, J. (2002). Culture Counts in Communities: A Framework for Measurement (Research Report). The Urban Institute. Retrieved from http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/310834_culture_counts.pdf

Jackson, M.-R., Kabwasa-Green, F., & Herranz, J. (2006). Cultural Vitality in Communities: Interpretation and Indicators. The Urban Institute. Retrieved from http://www.urban.org/research/publication/cultural-vitality-communities-interpretation-and-indicators

Jones, S. (2010). Culture Shock. London: Demos. Retrieved from http://www.demos.co.uk/files/Culture_shock_-_web.pdf?1286815564

Langlois, A., & Anderson, D. E. (2002). Resolving the Quality of Life/Well-being Puzzle: Toward a New Model. Canadian Journal of Regional Science, 25(3), 501–512.

The Lottery of Life. (2012). The Economist. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/news/21566430-where-be-born-2013-lottery-life

The Lottery of Life Methodology. (2012). The Economist. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/news/21567049-how-we-calculated-life-satisfaction-lottery-life-methodology

Matarasso, F. (1997). Use or Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts. Comedia. Retrieved from http://www.feisean.org/downloads/Use-or-Ornament.pdf

McCarthy, K., Ondaatje, E., Zakaras, L., Brooks, A., & RAND. (2004). Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts. RAND. Retrieved from http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2005/RAND_MG218.pdf

Medvedeva, M., Novak-Leonard, J., Brown, A. (2011). Audience Impact Study: Literature Review. National Endowment for the Arts. Retrieved from http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/Audience-Impact-Study-Literature-Review.pdf

Michalos, A.C., Smale, B., Labonté, R., Muharjarine, N., Scott, K., Moore, K., … Hyman, I. (2011). The Canadian Index of Wellbeing. Technical Report 1.0. Waterloo, ON: Canadian Index of Wellbeing and University of Waterloo. Retrieved from http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/HQ/CLT/pdf/canadianindexofwellbeingtechnicalpaper.pdf

National Endowment for the Arts. (2012). How Art Works. Retrieved from http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/How-Art-Works_0.pdf

Noll, H. (2004). Social Indicators and Quality of Life Research: Background, Achievements and Current Trends. In N. Genov (Ed.), Advances in Sociological Knowledge (pp. 151–181). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

OECD. (2013). How’s Life? 2013. OECD Publishing. Retrieved from http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/how-s-life-2013_9789264201392-en

OECD. (2014). Society at a Glance 2014. OECD Publishing. Retrieved from http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/society-at-a-glance-2014_soc_glance-2014-en

OECD Better Life Index. (n.d.). Retrieved January 24, 2015, from http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/

Prescott-Allen, R. (2001). The Wellbeing of Nations: A Country-By-Country Index of Quality of Life and the Environment (1 edition). Washington, DC: Island Press.

Scottish Government, S. A. H. (2006). Quality of Life and Well-being: Measuring the Benefits of Culture and Sport: Literature Review and Thinkpiece [Research Publications]. Retrieved from http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2006/01/13110743/0

Sen, A. (2004). How does culture matter?. In V. Rao & M. Walton (Eds.), Culture and Public Action. Stanford UP. Retrieved from http://www.studentsofferingsupport.ca/portal/OutreachProjects/PreDepReadings/A1_How%20does%20culture%20matter_.pdf

Social Progress Index – Methodology. (2014). Retrieved January 22, 2015, from http://www.socialprogressimperative.org/data/spi/methodology

Stern, M. J., & Seifert, S.C. (2013). Cultural Ecology, Neighborhood Vitality, and Social Wellbeing – A Philadelphia Project. University of Pennsylvania Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP). Retrieved from http://arts.gov/exploring-our-town/sites/arts.gov.exploring-our-town/files/SIAP%20CULTUREBLOCKS%20REPORT%20DEC2013%20V1.pdf

Stiglitz, J. E., Sen, A., & Fitoussi, J.P. (2009). Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. Retrieved from http://www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr/documents/rapport_anglais.pdf

Stone, A. & Mackie, C., eds. Subjective Well-Being: Measuring Happiness, Suffering, and Other Dimensions of Experience. (2013). Retrieved from http://www.nap.edu/catalog/18548/subjective-well-being-measuring-happiness-suffering-and-other-dimensions-of

The Story of GNH | GNH Centre Bhutan. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.gnhcentrebhutan.org/what-is-gnh/the-story-of-gnh/

Tepper, S. (2014). Artful Living: Examining the Relationship Between Artistic Practice and Subjective Wellbeing Across Three National Surveys. The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University. Retrieved from http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/Research-Art-Works-Vanderbilt.pdf

Topos Partnership for the Fine Arts Fund. (2010). The Arts Ripple Effect: A Research-Based Strategy to Build Shared Responsibility for the Arts. Retrieved from http://www.theartswave.org/docs/default-source/Research-Reports/the-arts-ripple-effect-report-january-2010.pdf?sfvrsn=0

United Nations Development Programme. (n.d.). Human Development Index (HDI). Retrieved January 23, 2015, from http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi

United Nations Development Programme. (n.d.). Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI). Retrieved January 23, 2015, from http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/inequality-adjusted-human-development-index-ihdi

Ura, K., Alkire, S., Zangmo, T., Wangdi, K. (2012). A Short Guide to Gross National Happiness. (n.d.). Thimphu, Bhutan: Centre for Bhutan Studies. Retrieved January 23, 2015, from http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/

Urban Institute. (2014). The Validating Arts & Livability Indicators (VALI) Study: Results and Recommendations. Retrieved January 23, 2015, from http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/VALI-Report.pdf

Yang, L. (2014). An Inventory of Composite Measures of Human Progress | Human Development Reports. UNDP Human Development Report Office. Retrieved from http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/inventory-composite-measures-human-progress