There is growing interest in developing comprehensive measures of well-being to provide a more holistic understanding of social and economic conditions in the United States. While many agencies and organizations release indices of economic well-being in the U.S., few are based on a comprehensive conception of well-being that moves beyond income to include both objective and subjective components of well-being. Fewer are available at a frequency that allows observation of to-the-moment changes in well-being.
To address this gap, this paper outlines the development of a monthly indicator intended to capture changes across various domains of well-being. Specifically, the proposed indicator incorporates measures across five domains: financial hardship, resources, housing, life perception, and economic perception. The financial hardship domain includes economic measures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) to assess unemployment and the percent of credit card balances seriously delinquent. The resources domain utilizes data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the BLS to capture real weekly earnings and real consumption spending. Within the housing domain, we incorporate data from Zillow to include measures of house and apartment affordability. The life perception domain relies on perceived mental health measures from the Household Trends and Outlook Pulse Survey (HTOPS) and a life evaluation index released by Gallup. Finally, the economic perception domain uses data from HTOPS and the University of Michigan to measure difficulty paying expenses and consumer sentiment. Each measure is normalized and weighted by domain to calculate a monthly composite. The composite well-being indicator value is not intended to be interpreted as a single meaningful value, but rather a month-to-month gauge of changing conditions in the U.S. The indicator’s monthly periodicity will enable a better understanding of how policy changes and broader events coincide with changes in well-being.