A century later, we still don’t know the full, stomach-churning extent of the Osage murders.
The neighborhood dogs had all begun to die, and that was why Rita Smith’s husband was sure they’d be next.
Rita was one of the few remaining members of the Osage Nation following nearly a century of brutal displacement. Throughout the 19th century, the government repeatedly forced the Osage to relocate from their current lands in Kansas to, finally, a much smaller, desolate reservation in northern Oklahoma. With the discovery of oil on Osage land in the late 1890s, however, the 2,229 tribe members who were left suddenly came into tremendous amounts of personal wealth, and prosperity finally seemed to be once more within the community’s grasp. But now, a ring of unknown murderers had begun to target members of the tribe — including Rita’s family.
Between 1921 and 1923, Rita’s sister Anna Brown, her cousin, and possibly even her mother, Lizzie Kyle, had all died suspiciously alongside a string of other deaths — at least 24 Osage Nation members and several of their allies. Some, like Anna, had been killed with a bullet to the back of the head; others, like Lizzie, had apparently died from strychnine or other more obscure poisons. There were even rumors that Rita’s white husband, Bill, had killed his first wife, Rita’s sister Minnie, a few years earlier. He had married Rita shortly after. Rita’s other sister, Mollie, had also married a white man, Ernest Burkhart, the nephew of a rich and influential rancher, William Hale. Under Hale’s patronage, the family had prospered — but now they were dying, one by one.
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Rita and Bill had become so spooked by the possibility that they were next on the list of vigilante killings that after hearing intruders on their property, they’d moved to a safer part of town. Not long after they settled in, however, the neighborhood’s ever-vigilant dogs began to die, and Bill grew increasingly paranoid. He saw their silencing as akin to disabling an alarm system — and a sign that despite their best efforts, the anonymous death-dealers were inching closer to them.
He was right.
In the early morning hours of March 10, 1923, Bill, Rita, and their housekeeper Nettie Brookshire all died when a bomb that had been planted beneath their house exploded — yet another tragedy of what became known as the Osage Reign of Terror.
All of these events, and the harrowing FBI investigation that followed, form the subject of Killers of the Flower Moon, journalist David Grann’s meticulously researched 2017 book about the murders, as well as its highly anticipated upcoming film adaptation by Martin Scorsese. The film boasts many Indigenous actors, including breakout star Lily Gladstone, alongside an A-list ensemble including familiar Scorsese collaborators like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro — and a somewhat quizzical range of famous singer-songwriters. The formidable cast size reflects just how far-reaching and convoluted the real murders and the efforts to solve them were.
As with all true crime, the ethics of discussing Killers of the Flower Moon as a narrative are tricky. Grann constructs his nonfiction account like a classic murder mystery, with a series of grim “twists” that may or may not be genuinely shocking, depending on how cynical you are. As the trailers make clear, Scorsese upends this narrative, with the “who” behind the Osage murders being not nearly as compelling as the why and the how. Still, if you’d like to avoid spoilers, proceed with caution (and maybe tap out before the last section).
While Scorsese takes the “who” as a given, the deep irony remains that the only reason the “why” might still shock viewers is that the Osage Reign of Terror simply isn’t well enough known. The systematic murders of an Indigenous community — the rare case to warrant a federal investigation from the then-nascent bureau that would become the FBI — may have been an undeniable media sensation in their day. Yet nearly 100 years later, the Osage murders wound up being little more than a 20th-century history footnote. (A date-stamped search for the murders returns less than 100 results on Google prior to 2016, the year before Flower Moon was published.)
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Erased alongside the murders, arguably a 20th-century genocide on American soil, were the appalling circumstances that enabled them. Not only were the investigations into the murders hampered by systemic indifference, but the murders could arguably only have happened because of decades of blatant system-wide racism that forced the Osage people to fight for their autonomy. At the time the murders began, they were even fighting for control of their own finances and assets, thanks to a Britney-style conservatorship that robbed them of access to their newfound oil wealth amid an environment of galling corruption. This story, the true American horror story of a community enduring a death wave for over a decade, makes for harrowing drama.
But the full truth of the Osage murders, and the dehumanization at their root, makes it almost more unbelievable that they were ever solved at all — if, indeed, they actually were.
How the Osage got unfathomably rich — and the exploitative conservatorships that came with that money
For thousands of years, the Osage Nation resided on a vast stretch of territory that extended from the Ohio River across the Mississippi and into Oklahoma and across southern Kansas. In the 19th century, however, as white settlers encroached on their territory and anti-Indigenous sentiment flourished, the US government began a series of forced relocations, resettling the Osage repeatedly until finally, by the 1870s, the government forced the Osage to relocate to northern Oklahoma. The government had intentionally resettled the Osage to some of the worst farmland in Oklahoma — only to accidentally relocate them to the richest oil deposits in the country. In the late 1890s, the oil reserves were discovered, and the Osage people suddenly came into possession of confounding amounts of wealth, abruptly becoming the richest community on the planet.
And then, as they had so often before, the vultures began circling.
The massive land rush that followed the discovery of the oil swelled the prairie with grifters, grafters, scammers, and quick-buck seekers, all of whom arrived with the goal of exploiting the Indigenous people and their newfound wealth. Tribal allotments established between 1905 and 1907 meant that all of the existing Osage land was legally reserved to the remaining tribal members. But outsiders could still obtain leases to mine and drill the land in exchange for a share of the profits. At the peak of the oil rush in the 1920s, auctions for oil leases regularly generated millions of dollars. Outsiders could also marry into Osage families, which would allow them to access Osage money.
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Courtesy of the Bartlesville Area History Museum
As white fortune hunters flocked to the countryside hoping to secure deals and access to the land, the government, via the Bureau of Indian Affairs, mandated that nearly all members of the Osage be appointed a white “guardian” who would manage (control) their money for them. Members of the tribe had to get permission to access their own bank accounts, have their purchases approved, withdraw their own money — nearly always with entirely racist assumptions embedded in the judgments about which Osage “deserved” to have access to their own money. It was in effect exactly like a modern-day conservatorship, with all of the built-in potential for exploitation that has given the legal structure its still-terrible reputation. The system often resulted in guardians simply withholding or stealing the money completely from the Osage, who rarely had a means of redress within the US legal system because of the conscious indifference or racism of local, state, and federal authorities.
“I have a diploma from Lawrence, and they’ve put a guardian over me,” an Osage tribe member named John Goodskin told Harper’s Monthly in November 1920. “I fought in France for this country, and yet I am not allowed even to sign my own checks … I’m a prisoner in this place.”
To understand how the eventual string of murders could have gone unchecked for so long, it’s vital to understand both how exploitative the guardianship system was and how the community revolved around it. White community members sought oil leases and then through guardianship gained further control over the Osage. In order to make this system work, you needed people who were willing to exploit the Osage as their guardians and people who were willing to look the other way while they did it, often in exchange for bribes or access of their own. This meant you needed people within every part of the social and legal system. “They have all the law and all the machinery on their side,” Goodskin told Harper’s.
Thus an entire ecosystem of greed and graft quickly arose around the Osage capital of Pawhuska and neighboring Osage city of Fairfax, keeping the money flowing and keeping the white locals, including the newcomers, in control of it. “Many of the county courts are influenced by political considerations, and … Indian guardianships are the plums to be distributed to the faithful friends of the judges as a reward for their support at the polls,” wrote Indigenous activist Zitkala-S̈a in 1924. Once established, the entire white community became incentivized to participate in this system of greed. And once the Osage citizens began dying, it was in the white locals’ best economic interests to let them keep dying.
That’s because of how the law concerning the Osage Nation’s shares in the oil fields, known as their headrights, worked. It was illegal for the headrights, the Osages’ most valuable asset, to be sold or given away. But if any member of the Osage Nation died, their headright would pass to their legal heir. This person might be their white spouse, who was often conveniently also their guardian. Or the headright might go to a relative or heir whose guardian already had complete control over their accounts — so that the money would effectively go straight to them.
In other words, marrying an Osage who then died, or being appointed guardian over an Osage who suddenly came into an inheritance after someone else died, was the only way for a white man to gain more access to the profits from all that oil. The law concerning the inviolability of Osage headrights, intended to make them less vulnerable to exploitation, instead meant that to their corrupt guardians, the Osage were more valuable dead than alive.
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And thanks to the lure of the oil fields, corruption was everywhere. It ran so rampant in the region that, according to FBI records accessed by Grann in Flower Moon, when one of the killers was finally apprehended, he referred to the murders as simply “the state of the game.”
It became so unchecked that in 1923, the Osage Nation formally requested that the federal government take over the investigation into the Reign of Terror because there seemed to be no hope for justice from anywhere else.
The Osage murders became so prolific that the nation’s first federal investigative agency had to get involved
Until that point, the state’s attempts to investigate had gone completely off the rails. Local law enforcement had been, at best, thoroughly intimidated into totally halting their investigations. The best efforts at solving the crimes had been waged by cadres of private investigators working for the families of the victims. Thus far, however, leads had gone nowhere, evidence had mysteriously vanished, plausible theories turned out to be rumors without substance, the region’s unbridled corruption tainted the available case information, witnesses abruptly vanished or stopped talking, and everyone who seemed to be getting somewhere turned up dead.
As alarm and hysteria about the deaths spread, a white man named Barney McBride traveled to Washington, DC, to seek federal help in solving the murders. While there, he was attacked, beaten, and fatally stabbed more than 20 times. Three other investigators similarly died by foul play just as they seemed to be getting close to the truth: One was drugged and pushed down a flight of stairs; another was gunned down; the third, a local prosecutor, was thrown from a train while reportedly on his way to reveal the killers’ identities.
The bombing of the Smith house, however, brought about a turning point in the murder investigation. The high death toll, as well as the sheer menace involved in a triple-homicide house bombing, finally garnered the attention of national media and prompted the intervention of the federal government and the Bureau of Investigation, the fledgling organization that would ultimately become the FBI.
The bureau detectives, led by Tom White, a former Texas Ranger turned bureau veteran, had the herculean task of sorting through a landscape of rumors and misinformation and finding people — anyone — who was a) willing to tell the truth and b) not already dead. No sooner would one lead appear than it would turn out that the lead had already been killed, often under awfully convenient circumstances. Yet working mostly undercover, White and his detectives quickly gained a hypothesis of the murders — a truly chilling conspiracy to kill that led back to the family at the heart of it all.
Note: From here on, we will discuss the real-life criminals behind the Osage murders, whose identities constitute major spoilers for both the book and the film Killers of the Flower Moon. If you want to remain unspoiled for either, you should stop reading now.
The “who” of this whodunnit is almost as shocking as the “why”
It’s a testament to how unproductive the local justice system had been in its efforts to bring the Osage killers to rights that when the FBI took over in the summer of 1925, it only took White and his men three months to find real answers. Those three months, however, were spent unearthing a devastatingly large community plot to orchestrate the murders of Osage tribe members. This plot was either enacted, enabled, or silently complied with by apparently dozens of members of Fairfax’s white society — everyone from judges to pastors to coroners to private detectives to a range of henchmen.
At the center of all of it was a single man: William K. Hale, a self-made Fairfax cattle rancher who spent decades steadily amassing power and land in a There Will Be Blood-style saga of bribes, intimidation, murder, and ruthlessness. Hale did all of this while cloaking himself in a public disguise of gentility and charity; he called himself “the Reverend” and was known for lavishly donating to charity and constantly working on behalf of the Osage people.
But Hale also steadily took control over nearly every part of the social and legal systems of the region: He gained an appointment as a deputy sheriff, which meant he could come and go in jails at will and could easily manipulate criminals to work for him from behind bars. He had local officials in his pocket, openly terrified to disobey him. Even doctors in the area apparently aided him in discreetly poisoning their patients on his behalf. Hale “had everything fixed from the road-overseer to the governor,” Hale’s nephew stated in a deposition.
His ultimate goal, carried out via a string of brazen insurance scams, murder plots, for-hire killings, and fraud, was to amass his fortune by taking it from the Osage people. (This revelation comes as a shock in Grann’s retelling of the murder investigation; one might argue that Scorsese’s choice to cast Robert DeNiro as Hale in the film adaptation gives away the game upfront.)
What Tom White and his agents were able to prove centers around the Osage family that Bill Smith married into, which is also the family that Hale’s nephew, Ernest Burkhart, married into. It’s unclear how early Hale’s grand design took form, but what it ultimately coalesced into was this: systematically killing off all of Burkhart’s in-laws until all of their inheritances had passed on to Burkhart’s wife, Mollie. (In Scorsese’s film, Mollie is played by breakout star Gladstone, with DiCaprio in the role of Ernest.)
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Mollie had outlived her three sisters, several cousins, and her mother. By the time White finally arrested Hale, she was being slowly poisoned — allegedly via injections directly from her doctor under the guise of administering insulin — with the apparent expectation that when she died, her family’s entire fortune would pass to Ernest Burkhart. Burkhart was fully aware of and assisted in the plot to kill his in-laws, including helping facilitate the bombing of the Smiths.
It’s unclear when Burkhart learned about his uncle’s plot. It’s a horrifying possibility that he married Mollie with the intent to orchestrate her murder. It’s also possible he learned of the plot to kill Mollie afterward and went along with it, or perhaps learned of it but then proved reluctant to carry it out; after all, this was a woman he’d been married to for decades and had three children with. The possibility he had no knowledge she was being poisoned seems remote. In the final chapters of Flower Moon, Grann offers the chilling possibility that Burkhart not only had full complicity, but had even intended for his wife Mollie and two of their children to die alongside her sister Rita in the bombing of the Smith house.
Equally unclear is whether Hale’s plot stopped with Mollie or ultimately included killing off Burkhart as well. Burkhart seemed genuinely remorseful and pleaded guilty to his role in the killing of Mollie’s sister Rita Smith, her husband Bill Smith, and their servant Nettie Brookshire. (The man who allegedly planted the bomb had died under suspicious circumstances that implicated Hale as the mastermind.) After this, Hale allegedly attempted to get one witness to kidnap and kill his nephew before Burkhart could testify against him.
Ultimately, despite multiple hung juries (whose members had been bribed by Hale’s attorney), Hale and another man, a career criminal named John Ramsey, were convicted of killing Mollie’s cousin Roan Horse, also known as Henry Roan, in an insurance scam. They were each given life imprisonment. Hale’s other nephew, Bryan Burkhart, helped facilitate the murder of Mollie’s other sister Anna Brown, but after his own trial resulted in a hung jury, he was given immunity in order to testify against the man who pulled the trigger. That man, Kelsie Morrison (whom Grann implicates in a similar plot to murder his wife and her entire family), was also convicted. Although Hale was implicated in dozens of deaths, he was only convicted for one. Both he and Burkhart were eventually paroled, and Burkhart applied for and received a pardon from the state of Oklahoma over the objections of outraged Osage.
For her part, Mollie initially supported her husband and believed in Ernest’s innocence, but after learning the full scope of his involvement in the murders, and comprehending just how much death he actively took part in, she divorced him. In 1931, she successfully sued for an end to her own guardianship and finally gained full control over the family fortune others had tried so hard to take.
It’s impossible to know the full range of crimes that Hale and his coconspirators committed. That’s due to a range of reasons. For one, records have been lost and might not have been kept well at the time. For another, Hale wasn’t the only white man in the area trying to attain access to Osage wealth via force, violence, coercion, and murder. For another, since at one point local law enforcement simply stopped investigating the murders, the total number of people murdered in the Osage Reign of Terror might never be known. In Flower Moon, Grann cites estimates in the hundreds of victims — and that’s just within the Osage community. Hale also seems to have ruthlessly orchestrated the murders of dozens of people who either investigated the murders, helped him commit them, or had knowledge of them.
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Courtesy of the Bartlesville Area History Museum
The specter of death seems to have been all but expected during this period. Even a cursory look into the murders leads immediately to unexpectedly dark places — like the time Hale somehow legally acquired the inheritance of a 12-year-old boy, Charles Bigheart, who suddenly passed away under unknown circumstances, just five years before his father George was suspiciously poisoned to death, allegedly by Hale. Grann, in researching his book, seemed unable to help but stumble across more murders committed by more people — one, a banker in league with Hale, was suspected by FBI agents but never prosecuted; another woman likely murdered her husband for his headright and later narrowly escaped being murdered herself. The earliest victim Grann encountered was bludgeoned to death in 1918 by friends who later posed as her family members in order to access her accounts. The most recent victim he learned about was allegedly poisoned in 1931.
Once Grann began looking at specific white men who had multiple guardianships entrusted to them, he realized that many of them seemed to be systematically offing their charges without an apparent second thought. Some simply denied their wards access to health care and let them die. One wealthy woman was held captive and tortured by her husband until the government interceded, as part of yet another alleged town conspiracy to take her wealth. Many guardians seemed to have no qualms about killing children in order to knock off potential obstacles to the prize. And countless members of white society were engaged in helping the guardians make such deaths appear nominally unsuspicious.
“Virtually every element of society was complicit in the murderous system,” Grann ultimately concludes after taking in the sheer scope of the killings, “a vast criminal operation that was reaping millions and millions of dollars.” The social system that had begun as an ecosystem of greed had evolved into an ecosystem of death, reaping tragedy and trauma that still haunts the Osage and their descendants. The laws around headrights have changed, but they are still fraught legal subjects, though the Osage wealth has long since dried up, literally, alongside the depleted oil fields. And although the deaths of Indigenous peoples living in the US may not be organized by the steady hand of a single man like William Hale, they still face far higher death rates with lower rates of criminal investigations and prosecutions than white Americans. Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women has become a grim acronym in the annals of criminal justice due to the need for increased awareness of such cases.
The Osage murders illustrate something profoundly dark about the lie of American identity. The trope is that anyone can find success and happiness — that there’s something mythic and magical about “American” ambition and success. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the government’s approach to Indigenous Americans was to mold them into docile citizens via forced boarding school attendance (Roan Horse, later killed by Hale, was forced to change his name at one such school), forced religious conversions, and the systematic destruction of Indigenous American cultures. The lie that Indigenous peoples were fed as they were forced to assimilate into white culture was that once they had done so successfully, they would be rewarded with greater freedom and autonomy; they would receive their chance to participate in the American dream.
Yet as Goodskin pointed out to Harper’s in 1920, that promise, always hollow, completely vanished as soon as actual independence and autonomy were within reach.
“In the old days, before we had money, it was easy enough,” he said, describing the plight of the Osage who had a guardian. “All you had to do was not get drunk. But now your good behavior has nothing at all to do with it. Your money draws ’em and you’re absolutely helpless.”
In other words, after having fully disenfranchised Indigenous Americans, there was never going to be a version of the “model” Indigenous American that white society could actually tolerate. The discovery of oil on Osage land is what the American dream is supposedly all about. It should have afforded the Osage power, freedom, and agency alongside all that cash.
Instead, at the very moment they should have attained everything they were promised, they had less control over their own lives — and deaths — than ever.
We finally have good data on what makes people happy. Why are we afraid to use it?
If I gave you $5,000 right now and asked you to spend it in whatever way would help people the most, what would you do?
That amount of money can buy 1,000 malaria-preventing bed nets that will, on average, end up saving one kid’s life. Or it can boost the income of five poor families by giving each $1,000. Or it can treat 30 people for depression by paying for a few months of group therapy that evidence suggests can have lasting effects.
Which is best?
Nobody knows for sure, and that’s a problem facing everyone, from regular people wanting to spend a few bucks on charity to governments with millions to invest in public policy. It’s hard to figure out which does the most good — saving one life, reducing poverty for a few, or treating mental illness for dozens — and even asking the question can feel morally icky. Yet we can’t escape it if we want our money to help people as much as possible.
Economists love things they can measure objectively, like the number of deaths in a village or the number of dollars in an account. So over the past century, they’ve focused on measuring health and wealth. The best policy programs for society are deemed to be the ones that save the most lives, say, or increase gross domestic product (GDP) by the widest margin.
And there’s a good rationale for using a metric like GDP as a shorthand for well-being: There is a very high correlation between a nation’s GDP per capita and its self-reported life satisfaction. Just look at this chart, showing the low levels of well-being among the world’s poorest nations.
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In other words, GDP is a very strong predictor of life satisfaction.
But a strong predictor is not a perfect predictor. As we’ve gathered more data on the happiness of different populations, it’s become clear that increasing wealth and health do not always go hand in hand with increasing happiness. By the economists’ objective measures, people in rich countries like the US should be doing great — and yet Americans are only becoming more miserable. And people in some higher-GDP European countries like Portugal and Italy report lower life satisfaction than people in lower-GDP Latin American countries.
What’s going on here? How do we explain the gaps in life satisfaction that objective metrics like GDP don’t explain?
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Nowadays, a growing chorus of experts argues that helping people is ultimately about making them happier — not just wealthier or healthier — and the best way to find out how happy people are is to just ask them directly. This camp says we should focus a lot more on subjective well-being: how happy people are, or how satisfied they are with their lives, based on what they say matters most to them — not just based on objective metrics like GDP. Subjective well-being can tell us things that objective metrics can’t.
It’s a revolution in thinking that’s gathering force in policy and charity circles alike, and it’s starting to upend conventional wisdom about the best ways to do good.
Here’s one eye-popping example from the charity world. The Happier Lives Institute, a research center aiming to identify evidence-based ways to improve happiness, wanted to find out which is better at boosting well-being: giving people cash or giving them therapy. So HLI ran a direct comparison — involving evidence from some 80 studies and 140,000 participants — between GiveDirectly, an organization that gives cash transfers, and StrongMinds, an organization that provides group therapy for people with depression. Both serve very poor people in sub-Saharan Africa.
Surprisingly, HLI found that the therapy was nine times more cost-effective than the cash at improving self-reported well-being. Some evaluators disagree with this finding, taking issue with, for example, how HLI’s analysis assumes that improving someone’s depression score by some amount is equivalent to improving their overall life satisfaction by that same amount; these evaluators argue StrongMinds is less cost-effective than HLI’s findings suggest. Nevertheless, the findings have served as a challenge to how empirically driven philanthropy allocates funding.
Changes are afoot in the policy world, too. At the international level, UN Secretary-General António Guterres made a push in May for nations to track progress beyond GDP. Governments from Scotland and Wales to Finland and Iceland have already begun to move well-being to the center of their policymaking.
In 2019, New Zealand became the first country to make well-being the organizing principle of its national budget. The budget required all new spending to go toward specific well-being goals, such as bolstering its population’s mental health. That prompted immediate results, like an influx of over $200 million into services for survivors of domestic and sexual violence, the nation’s largest-ever investment in that issue.
Around the world, a new focus on improving subjective well-being is causing a paradigm shift in how we try to do good. But the approach is beset with controversy. Some say it goes too far. And others say it’s not going far enough.
How subjective well-being went from hot to not — and back again
If you asked me, “What’s the ultimate purpose of life?” and I answered “wealth” or “health,” you might find that kind of weird. We value those things not in themselves, but because they tend to improve our well-being — how happy or satisfied we are with life. Well-being is the thing we really care about.
This perspective, common among philosophers for centuries, reached peak popularity in the 18th century. Early utilitarians like English philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued that happiness should be the single currency by which we compare the value of different goods, including wealth and health. Adam Smith pored over economic methods with the goal of fostering happiness for the people. And Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the life and happiness of the people is the first and only object of good government.”
But the 1920s saw a huge reversal, as behaviorism became fashionable among psychologists like Ivan Pavlov (yes, the dog guy) and economists like Lionel Robbins. The behaviorist school of thought argued that we can’t know what people are thinking or feeling inside, so trying to understand people’s subjective experiences is pointless.
“Basically, economists wanted to be more scientific,” explained Michael Plant, who leads the Happier Lives Institute. “They thought something only counts as science if it’s objectively measurable. Feelings aren’t objectively measurable, therefore they are not science.”
So economists turned away from squishy concepts like happiness and toward objective proxies for well-being, like GDP. In the postwar period, GDP became the go-to way for measuring well-being, even though the concept’s inventor, Simon Kuznets, warned that “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.”
Economists also embraced metrics used to assess the value of different health policies. One of these is the quality-adjusted life year (QALY). One QALY is equal to one year of life in fantastic health. So the more QALYs a policy secures for a population, the better it’s deemed to be.
Starting in the 1970s, though, the intellectual pendulum began to swing back toward subjective well-being, thanks to a few key developments.
First, economists started to rethink their assumptions about human behavior. They had long been assuming that people behave “rationally” — simply making the choices that will get them what they want. But in the 1970s, the behavioral economics researchers Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky argued that each of us is actually a pretty irrational mess, shot through with cognitive biases, often behaving in ways that don’t maximize our happiness because we’re not great at predicting what will make us happy. That means you can’t just look at people’s behavior to determine what makes them happy — you have to survey them about how happy they are and try to tease out the causes.
Second, economist Richard Easterlin showed in 1974 that richer doesn’t necessarily mean happier. Case in point: since World War II, Easterlin noted, the US had enjoyed a lot of economic growth, yet Americans’ level of well-being had barely budged. This became known as the Easterlin Paradox, and although it remains contested, it was pivotal in getting people to realize that it’s important to measure subjective well-being and not just GDP.
Partly as a result, in the 1970s, countries began collecting survey data on their populations. A typical survey question asked: “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?” For 50 years, the data trickled in.
Subjective well-being stages its comeback
With the exception of Bhutan, whose king asserted in the 1970s that “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product,” nobody made much noise about the well-being data until around 2009. Then the global financial crisis hit.
Amid all the suffering, economists realized they knew very little about how people adapt to crises and which policies would best mitigate negative impacts on well-being. So national happiness became the subject of policy conferences and college courses. France commissioned a study on it from economists Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, who concluded that an overemphasis on GDP had blinded policymakers to other aspects of societal well-being.
In 2011, the OECD released its first well-being report on its member countries, and in 2012, the UN began releasing its annual world happiness report. And individual countries began to collect data on well-being in more sophisticated ways.
First of all, they designed surveys carefully, to avoid priming respondents in ways that might bias their happiness scores. For example, asking someone to think about politics right before you ask them about their life satisfaction is a big no-no. Surveys were also better able to control for culture-specific reporting differences, like whether it’s socially acceptable to complain about life.
Another challenge with surveys, pointed out by Sen, was that a person’s self-reported well-being could simply adapt to whatever social environment someone has grown accustomed to, so it may not reflect real deprivations in that environment — especially ones that have been around long enough to be normalized.
“Just because somebody poor in Guatemala says they’re happy at a daily level, that doesn’t mean we should say they’re all fine, let’s not worry about them,” said Carol Graham, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland and a senior scientist at Gallup, who has written prolifically about how to measure subjective well-being.
This had been a serious problem with early surveys, in part because they only used a single, general measure of well-being. They didn’t make distinctions between a long-term measure like life satisfaction and a short-term, affective measure like contentment or stress. So researchers weren’t able to tease out the difference between enduring life satisfaction and a brief bout of cheerfulness.
Experts developed ways to deal with this. Take the UK, a global leader in measuring subjective well-being. About a decade ago, the government’s Office for National Statistics began including these four questions (dubbed the ONS4), each with a 0-10 score, in their annual population survey:
- Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
- Overall, to what extent do you feel that the things you do in your life are worthwhile?
- Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?
- On a scale where 0 is “not at all anxious” and 10 is “completely anxious,” overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?
The first question is designed to get a broad sense of people’s overall life satisfaction, which tends to be pretty stable over time. The second is about meaning or purpose in life. The third and fourth questions are more like a snapshot in time, intended to give a short-term measure of affect — happiness or contentment on one hand, and stress or anxiety on the other.
Now, the UK government gathers two types of well-being data: the subjective data based on the ONS4 questions above, and more objective data on things that are known to feed into societal well-being, from health and wealth, to the unemployment rate and crime rate, to time spent in nature and volunteering. The government uses both the subjective and objective measures — 52 in total — to guide public spending.
Other nations are also making policy based on a mix of subjective and objective measures of well-being. After New Zealand passed its groundbreaking well-being budget, for instance, its government began measuring progress using 61 well-being measures that track things like loneliness and trust in government institutions. It did not do away with GDP, but it went beyond it. As then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern noted, “GDP alone does not guarantee improvement to our living standards.”
Lingering skepticism about subjective well-being data — and how experts are tackling it
Lots of people are still skeptical of efforts to measure subjective well-being. That’s understandable — the word “subjective” is right there in the name.
Take Elie Hassenfeld, the co-founder and CEO of the charity evaluator GiveWell. He’s used to metrics like QALYs, and he’s definitely got doubts about measuring subjective well-being with questions like “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?”
“What are you measuring exactly when you ask this question? I don’t really know what it means for someone to say ‘I’m a 6 out of 10’ in the way that I know what it means for someone to not have a broken arm,” he told me.
“And to the extent that I could know what it means for someone, I wouldn’t know what it means for someone else,” he continued. In other words, does one person’s 6 correspond to another person’s 6? This is an open question that needs further research.
Hassenfeld also questions whether a measure of subjective well-being gets at the things we really care about, things that make life worthwhile. “My grandfather survived the Holocaust and came over and worked seven days a week, 18 hours a day, owning a diner for so many years,” he said. “And I don’t think that in any of those years, he would’ve given a high answer to a subjective well-being question. But he saved up enough money to send my mom and aunt to college, and there’s meaning there.”
What Hassenfeld is getting at is this: We don’t have to feel happy in the moment to feel that our lives are worth living. Part of our happiness rests not in the present, but in the meaning we derive from working toward our goals in the future — and in the hope we have that we’ll be able to actually achieve those goals.
It’s a critique that Graham takes seriously. “People in some poor countries tend to score higher than you’d think they’d score, and part of that is because they have hope for progress — they think things can get better,” she said. “Whereas in rich countries, where you have big sectors of the population that are declining relative to their peers, then they don’t have hope for the future.”
Graham’s most recent book, The Power of Hope: How the Science of Well-Being Can Save Us From Despair, argues that hope needs to be part of well-being metrics. She has already convinced one pretty important reader: the UK government, which recently expanded its battery of survey questions. “I’m really thrilled that hope is now a measure,” Graham told me.
Plant, of the Happier Lives Institute, agrees that how much meaning or hope you have in your life may affect how happy you are. But, he said, that’s probably already reflected in people’s answers to happiness questions. “Part of the virtue of the subjective approach is that people can bring whatever matters to them into their assessments. So, how much meaning you have in your life could be an input into that.”
And when he looks at a survey like the World Happiness Report, he feels confident that it’s capturing something pretty close to reality. The data makes sense. Many of the top 10 happiest countries, according to that survey’s 2020–2022 rankings, are the ones with strong social safety nets combined with high GDP per capita, especially the Nordic countries. By contrast, the bottom 10 countries are nations that have been wracked by poverty, violence, or both:
