Own Nothing & Be On Happy Pills? Liz & Mike Zeidler, Bristol Happy City & Centre For Thriving Places

Sam Downie on Liz & Mike Zeidler's Bristol Happy City, now Centre For Thriving Places DIALECT BCfm 93.2 - 28Jun2017

Is Bristol's 'Happy City' charity good value for the city's taxpayers?
Sam Downie gives us his personal view of the so-called leadership charity Common Purpose which acts as a self-selecting 'leaders factory'. Sam believes Bristol charity Happy City patronises the poor people, blaming them for not being cheerful enough. Are both charities giving value for money?
http://commonpurpose.org/united-kingdom/
http://www.happycity.org.uk/

What influences children’s emotional health
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/the-origins-of-happiness/

The final step in our book is the explanation of these child outcomes, using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), which has surveyed children born in and around the city of Bristol in 1991/92. This is shown in Table 5.

Academic performance is the outcome on which most existing research has focused, and it is profoundly affected by family income. But the emotional health of the child is the best measure of the wellbeing of the child, and it is also (as we have seen) the biggest determinant of the wellbeing of the future adult. It is affected to some extent also by family income but above all by the mother’s mental health. The same is true of the child’s behaviour – which also affects the wellbeing of so many other people.

Table 5. How child outcomes at 5, 11 and 16 (averaged) are affected by different factors
(ALSPAC data, partial correlation coefficients)
How child outcomes at 5, 11 and 16 (averaged) are affected by different factors
Image: VOX EU

What about the effect of schools? In the 1960s, the Coleman Report in the US told us that parents mattered more than schools. Since then the tide of opinion has turned. Our data strongly confirm the importance of the individual school and the individual teacher. This applies equally to the academic performance of the pupils and to their happiness.

So in Figure 3, we look at the emotional wellbeing of children at 16 and show how it is explained. The top bar shows the combined effect of all observed family factors (treated as a single weighted variable). The next bar shows the enduring effect of the primary school a child went to (again a single aggregate of dummy variables) and the last is the effect of secondary schools. Schools really matter.