Informing Policy Priorities using Inference from Life Satisfaction Responses in a Large Community Survey

Self-reported, quantitative, subjective measures of well-being, such as satisfaction with life overall, are increasingly looked to as measures of public welfare. While this trend is visible at the international and national government levels, regional initiatives and local communities are particularly important in seeking meaningful measures of the quality of human experience and of the success of local policies. Unlike other approaches in which well-being or progress indices are constructed using arbitrary or expert-generated weights on various domains of life experience, subjective well-being can be used to evaluate empirically the relative importance of specific measurable conditions and experiences in supporting a good life. Using a new, large community well-being survey carried out across the U.S. state of Connecticut, we use this method to evaluate the relationship between life satisfaction and a range of other socioeconomic circumstances and conditions. In support of a broad existing literature, we find enormous effects of security and social engagement as compared with variations in income. We then proceed to consider the prevalence of different socioeconomic conditions, in addition to their relative importance to affected individuals, to make inferences about the benefit-costs of feasible state and local policies. There remain some conditions, like social trust and the perceived responsiveness of local government to the needs of residents, which appear very important to well-being but for which the relationship with targeted resource allocation requires further investigation or policy experimentation.