Indexing the Company

Broken Ground answer the questions that we've put to our audience to prove that we're all in this together. The Big Society works! It was probably not that great an idea to ask for other people to answer our questions before we'd even done it. We had a successful filmed improvisation session and thought it would be good to share some of the results.

We're now thinking that we should go to our audiences, maybe host some kind of one-on-one performance that integrates the questions, and use these intimate performances to inform a larger, traditional theatre-based performance.

We still welcome written replies.

Be good to each other.

Let Us Index YOUR Happiness

What is happiness indexing? How does it work? Why are you doing it?

Good questions, all of them, so, well done you.

The answer to the third question is that we don't know the answer to the first two questions.We learn by doing.

Fortunately, we're not the only ones. David Cameron announced late last year that the government will be carrying out a £2m project to measure national well-being, saying there is "more to life than money". He may be right.  Not sure on what personal experience he may be basing that statement (born into a financially privileged family, Eton, Oxford, yadda, yadda), but he still may be right. 

Anyway, spare a thought for the Office for National Statistics who've been given the responsibility for creating Cameron's ill-judged, poorly timed, woolly, impractical happiness index.  Actually it's not a 'happiness index', that's a dirty media term. No, the ONS are measuring national well-being. Only, they don't know what to measure.

So they're asking us.

As it turns out, some clever bods at the New Economics Foundation have already decided how to index happiness. And they've already indexed us. All of us.

  

UK:  43.3 (dark orange). 

We find this map fascinating, but then we have spent time on the website for the Office of National Statistics, so...

The map made us ask some questions:

How does the maths work?

Why are there bits missing?

Does the red represent communism?

How did communists get into America? 

So, who's happy then?

And why?

Turns out the maths is a combination of life expectancy (which we're doing well at), life satisfaction (ditto) and ecological footprint (horrifically, terrifyingly awful). 

The missing bits in grey? Five minutes with an atlas (we love an atlas) tells us that the big bit missing at the top of Africa is Libya. So that's where that is. The rest? Countries ravaged by civil war or ruled by oppressive regimes. Afghanistan. Turkmenistan. North Korea. Somalia.  And Greenland. What's going on in Greenland? No idea. Are they happy? If only we could speak to them somehow.

The red isn't communism. It's unhappiness. Americans (30.7) are less happy than Iraqis (42.6), Zimbabweans are unhappiest of all (16.6).  

The green is happiness. Can't see any green? There's a big strip of it down Central America and across the Caribbean (excluding Haiti). The Dominican Republic (71.8) is the happiest place in the world. Can you imagine being 71.8 happy? That's just about as happy as one could be.    

Which brings this all to a point, in a round about way.  We won't know if a person from Greenland is happy until we meet them and ask them. We don't know why Mexicans are so pleased with themselves unless they tell us. We have got a rough idea what's upsetting the Zimbabweans. We doubt it's the weather.

If you want to be part of our happiness index then please contact us. We only want a little bit of information and your permission for us to use it in our new show. By answering all, or some, of these five questions you can help us make our Happiness Index:

Where are you from?

How happy are you on a scale of 1-100?

How rich are you on a scale of 1-100?

What makes you happy, other than money?

What's going on in Greenland that they're not telling us about?

You can submit your answers in the comments section on this blog, join our Broken Ground Theatre group on facebook,  or email us via brokengroundhappinessindex@yahoo.co.uk

We thank you.