VSE Professor Emeritus John F. Helliwell
Congratulations to VSE’s John F. Helliwell and his World Happiness Report co-editors Richard Layard (of the LSE) and Jeffrey Sachs (of Columbia University) on winning the 2014 ISQOLS Award for the Betterment of the Human Condition.
The award is given for a significant accomplishment by an organization (private or public sector organization) to the development and use of quality-of-life measures in serving its constituency. The 2014 award is to the World Happiness Report. The first World Happiness Report was prepared to support the April 2012 United Nations’ High-Level Meeting on Happiness and well-being, chaired by the Prime Minister of Bhutan. The World Happiness Report 2013 was released in September 2013, and the World Happiness Report 2015 will be launched in New York in April of next year, both under the auspices of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
The award is presented by the International Society for Quality of Life Studies, the largest international science association for quality-of-life research. Previous winners have included the United Nations Development Programme, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Government of Sweden (full list of previous winners). To win this accolade alongside such distinguished previous winners is a strong testament to the increasing importance being attached to systematic collection and analysis of data recording how people rate the quality of their own lives.
The 2013 report has been downloaded 1.3 million times as of Sept. 16, 2014, and the 2012 report nearly one million times. Since the report’s inception governments have started to take steps toward measuring the happiness of their populations.
John was a UBC undergrad who then studied and taught at Oxford before returning to the UBC Economics Department as an Associate Professor in 1967. He has been in the department ever since, with perhaps a dozen years spent in visiting appointment elsewhere, including several years as Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard. He is currently Professor Emeritus in the VSE, Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and co-director (with George Akerlof) of CIFAR’s program on “Social Interactions, Identity and Well-Being”. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Asked about the award, he said he was “both gratified and encouraged that the introduction of subjective well-being data into economic and policy analysis, first proposed forty years ago by Richard Easterlin, is now, in the 21st Century, starting to really catch hold, and to change the ways in which human progress is measured and policies are designed and assessed”.
