How’s Life? 2024 — SDGCounting Document Briefs

Publisher: OECD, prepared by the Centre on Well-being, Inclusion, Sustainability and Equal Opportunity (WISE); lead author Lara Fleischer
Edition: 6th edition, launched at the 7th OECD World Forum on Well-being (Rome); first regular report in the series since How’s Life? 2020
Focus: How well-being across the OECD has held up through the COVID-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis, measured against the OECD Well-being Framework
Related: Valuing What Counts, the UN framework for measuring progress beyond GDP

How’s Life? 2024 is the OECD’s sixth edition of its flagship well-being report, built on the OECD Well-being Framework of over 80 indicators spanning 11 dimensions of current well-being and four capitals for the future. Its central finding: government interventions kept incomes and employment resilient through the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis, but housing costs, self-reported financial insecurity and several non-material aspects of life have stagnated or worsened since 2019.

The headline

The report separates current well-being from the resources that sustain it, and reads the two against each other. Average disposable household incomes did not fall significantly below pre-COVID levels in any OECD country, and employment rates reached historic highs by early 2024. But the cost-of-living crisis surfaces elsewhere: life expectancy fell by almost half a year during COVID-19, the long decline in deaths of despair halted, physical pain, worry and sadness rose, and social and civic capital show strain. The OECD’s argument is that no single metric, GDP included, can capture this mixed picture.

Romina Boarini, Director, OECD WISE Centre: “For governments and for citizens, there is an urgent and shared need to rebuild economies on bases that are more inclusive and that respect planetary boundaries.”

The numbers

Financial difficulty. The share of people reporting difficulty making ends meet fell from 30% to 19% in the decade before the pandemic, then stalled; almost 1 in 5 still reported financial difficulties in 2023.
Energy poverty. By 2023, 1 in 11 people in European OECD countries could not afford to keep their home adequately warm, up from 1 in 14 in 2019.
Life expectancy. A newborn in 2022 could expect to live 80.7 years on average across the OECD; COVID-19 excess deaths cut the OECD average by almost half a year.
Deaths of despair. Fatalities from suicide, acute alcohol abuse and drug overdose averaged 23.6 per 100 000 in 2021, more than sixfold the average homicide rate of 3.5 per 100 000.
Pain and loneliness. Almost 30% of people experienced a lot of physical pain in 2023; the share feeling lonely ranged from 4% to 14% across OECD countries.
Inequality. In 2022 the top 20% of the income distribution earned on average 5.6 times more than the bottom 20%, and the wealthiest 10% of households own half of all household wealth.
Trust and climate. On average 48% of people trusted their national government in 2023, above pre-pandemic levels but down from the COVID-era peak, while nearly 15% of the OECD population was exposed to extreme heat, up from 13% in the 2010s.

The counting angle

This is a “beyond GDP” dashboard that has actually matured. The Well-being Framework has run since 2011, its indicators carry time series back to 2004, and more than two-thirds of OECD countries now maintain their own well-being initiatives, so the measurement infrastructure exists and is used. The report is also candid about where it cannot yet see clearly. Community-relationship indicators lean on time-use surveys that are conducted so infrequently that the latest available time-use data span 2006 to 2022, with only a few countries updated after 2021, which means the relational side of life is measured least often and least recently. Accession and partner countries are not yet systematically covered. The dashboard’s value is precisely that it refuses to collapse to one number.

Our read: The OECD has delivered what beyond-GDP advocates keep asking for, a standing, multidimensional measure of progress that governments consult rather than a one-off study. The honest caveat is that recent crises register fastest in the material and economic indicators, while trust, connection and time use are the hardest to count and the slowest to update.

Watch & read

How’s Life? 2024, the full report (OECD Publishing).
Valuing What Counts, the companion UN framework for measuring progress beyond GDP.

Figures are as reported by the OECD from the How’s Life? Well-being Database. Averages are simple OECD means unless noted, and reference years differ by indicator because data collection cadence varies across the dashboard.