Distribution of well-being: accumulation

• Accumulation of favourable outcomes is particularly concentrated for people with a high education level, as well as for people born in the Netherlands to parents who were also born there, and people in the age group aged 45 to 64 years. Men are slightly more often at the top of the distribution than women.
• Accumulation of unfavourable outcomes occurs mainly for low education levels, people born outside Europe, and 65- to 74-year-olds. At the bottom of the distribution, accumulation of unfavourable outcomes is equal for men and women.
• Taking into account correlations between the indicators, health appears to have the closest link to the number of favourable outcomes, followed by paid employment. Health and employment status are also the strongest determinants for the number of unfavourable outcomes, along with trust in other people.

Accumulation of favourable and unfavourable outcomes

The separate themes examined how well-being ‘here and now’ of various population groups in terms of sex, age, education level and migration background differs from that of the total population for individual indicators. If a population group scores below average on an indicator, however, this does not mean that everyone in that group has a low score for that indicator. For example, an average 84.2 percent of the population are satisfied with life, but in the 18- to 24-year-old age group this is 76.1 percent. Although this is lower than average, most of these young adults are still happy with their lives.

Moreover, not everyone who scores below average on one of the indicators will also do so on other indicators for which the group they belong to scores lower than average. However, sometimes it is the same people who have favourable or unfavourable outcomes for several individual indicators.

This raises the question of whether favourable and unfavourable outcomes are evenly distributed across everyone in a population group, or is it the same people who always score above and below average? In other words: do favourable or unfavourable outcomes accumulate? To find out if this is the case, we examine a selection of well-being ‘here and now’ indicators together for each individual person. If favourable or unfavourable outcomes stack up for particular persons, we look at the extent to which this occurs, and for whom: what are the characteristics of these individual people?

The data on how many favourable and unfavourable outcomes stack up at individual level are based on the CBS Social cohesion & Well-being survey 2023, together with figures from the Integrated Income and Wealth Statistics for the previous year. For each person, we determined how he or she ‘scores’ on various well-being indicators. The selected indicators are all included in the eight original well-being ‘here and now’ themes of the Monitor of Well-being and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Overall picture of distribution on well-being

On average in 2023, people had favourable outcomes for 5.1 of the nine indicators, neutral outcomes for 2.2 indicators and unfavourable outcomes for 1.4 indicators. For the purposes of the analysis, the group of people with favourable well-being outcomes for seven or more indicators constitutes the top end of the distribution. This group represents 23.3 percent of the population. The group of people with at least three unfavourable outcomes constitutes the bottom end of the distribution; 18.7 percent of the population belong to this group. The remainder (58.0 percent) make up the middle of the distribution.

As a result of changes in the indicator set and in the boundaries between the upper and lower ends of the distribution, accumulation figures in pre-2022 editions of the monitor are not directly comparable with the figures in this edition. If the new selection and boundaries are applied to 2019 data, the group of people for whom favourable outcomes converge is smaller (23.3 percent now, versus 24.7 percent in 2019). The group of people for whom unfavourable outcomes accumulate has also become smaller (18.7 percent now compared with 20.1 percent in 2019). The middle group – for whom neither favourable nor unfavourable outcomes stack up – has increased (from 55.2 percent in 2019 to 58.0 percent in 2023). Although the group at the top of the distribution is smaller than in 2019, in 2020 and 2021, the years affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, it was larger (27.5 and 25.7 percent respectively).

Situation of population groups in 2023

As the indicator analyses showed, both education level and origin/country of birth strongly correlate with above average or below average well-being. Differences between age categories are also substantial, while differences between men and women are relatively small. Below we describe the extent to which individual people in these population groups experience an accumulation of favourable or unfavourable outcomes.

Education level

There are major differences in the accumulation of favourable and unfavourable outcomes between education levels: the top of the distribution, with a high level of well-being, includes 38 percent of higher educated people, compared with 20 percent of people with medium levels and 8 percent with lower levels of education. People in the latter group are more likely to be at the bottom of the distribution; this is the case for 30 percent of this group. The proportions are significantly smaller for medium levels (18 percent) and high levels of education (10 percent). So the accumulation of favourable outcomes is strongly concentrated among the higher educated, while those with lower levels account for most of the accumulation of unfavourable outcomes. This picture is consistent with previous years. Lower educated people are relatively more likely to have unfavourable scores for paid work, trust in other people and health.

Origin/country of birth

The analysis of accumulation of favourable and unfavourable outcomes among people in the different origin/country-of-birth groups is by and large similar to the results from the 13 separate indicators, but slightly more nuanced.

People born in the Netherlands with parents born in the Netherlands are more likely to be in the top of the distribution, and relatively less likely at the bottom. People born outside Europe are more likely to be at the bottom of the distribution and less likely at the top. People born in the Netherlands with at least one parent born outside Europe, and those born elsewhere in Europe are slightly more likely to be in the top group and slightly less likely in the bottom group than people born outside Europe.

The group born outside Europe score relatively unfavourably with regard to income, wealth and trust in other people. Trust in institutions is relatively more favourable in this group, however.

Age

People aged 45 to 64 years are relatively likely to be at the top of the distribution. Favourable outcomes stack up for one in three of them; this is well above the average of 23 percent. Results were less positive for the over-65s: 19 percent of people aged between 65 and 74 years and 7 percent of the over-75s have an accumulation of favourable outcomes. In the latter group, unfavourable outcomes nevertheless also accumulate less than average: 11 percent versus an average of 19 percent. This means that a relatively large number of over-75s are in the middle group: 83 percent of them have fewer than three unfavourable outcomes, but also fewer than seven favourable ones. A stack of unfavourable outcomes is relatively common for 65- to 74-year-olds, however: 26 percent. So the accumulation picture for people in this age group differs from the picture for 65- to 74-year-olds on the basis of the 13 well-being indicators: there the group had more favourable than unfavourable outcomes.People aged 65 years and older are logically less likely to be in paid employment, and therefore relatively often score unfavourably on income, but they also score relatively unfavourably in terms of health. On the other hand, they are more likely to score favourably for wealth and satisfaction with leisure time.

Sex

Men are slightly more likely to be at the top of the distribution (26 percent) than women (21 percent). At the bottom, men and women are equally likely to have an accumulation of unfavourable outcomes (19 percent). This means that women are more likely than men to be in the middle group in which there is no accumulation of favourable or unfavourable outcomes. Women are less likely than men to score favourably for health, paid employment and income. The differences between men and women are smaller than the differences based on other characteristics.

The population characteristics described here correlate to some extent. For example, people born in the Netherlands with at least one parent born abroad are usually relatively young, and older people are more likely to have a low level of education compared with the total population. If we take these correlations into account, education level turns out to have the greatest influence on the number of indicators for which people have a favourable or an unfavourable outcome. This is followed by origin/country of birth and age. Country of birth outside Europe correlates slightly more with the number of unfavourable indicators, and (older) age with the number of favourable indicators. Sex is the least important.

As well as population characteristics, the indicators themselves also correlate to a certain degree. Income is linked to wealth, for example, but self-perceived health is also related to having/not having paid employment. If we take account of the correlations between indicators, we see that health is the main determinant of the number of favourable outcomes, followed by having a paid job. Health and paid work are the most significant indicators for the number of unfavourable outcomes, followed by trust in other people.

Within the various population groups, specific indicators are relatively more or less important than average in terms of the number of favourable or unfavourable outcomes they contribute to. For 45- to 64-year-olds, having a paid job correlates more strongly with the number of favourable outcomes than other indicators. For the over-75s wealth is a relatively stronger determinant. Satisfaction with the amount of leisure time contributes to the number of favourable outcomes for 18- to 54-year-olds, while this is less the case for older age groups.

While paid work, health and trust in other people are on average the main determinants for the number of unfavourable outcomes, for the over-75s having work is relatively less important and income relatively more important. For people born outside Europe, satisfaction with the home is also relatively more significant for the number of unfavourable outcomes than for other origin/country of birth groups.

Changes between 2019 and 2023

As a result of a revision in the indicator selection and the boundaries between the upper and lower ends of the distribution, accumulation figures from previous editions of this monitor are not directly comparable with the results in this edition. To illustrate accumulation trends, the new indicator set and boundaries have also been applied to the data for reference year 2019. This shows that 1.4 percentage points fewer people are in the top group of the distribution (23.3 percent in 2023 compared with 24.7 percent in 2019). The group at the bottom has shrunk by 1.4 percentage points. The main changes for the separate population groups were:

• The share of men at the top of the distribution has decreased by 1.7 percentage points, the share of women in the top group is 1.1 percentage points smaller. At the bottom of the distribution, the group of men has hardly changed, while for women this group with accumulated unfavourable outcomes is 3 percentage points smaller. For both men and women, the middle group is larger than in 2019.
• If we look at changes for the various age groups, we see that the share of the 18- to 34-year-olds at the upper end of the distribution has shrunk by nearly 7 percentage points. The proportion of this age group at the bottom end of the distribution changed by less, so a larger group now falls in the middle of the distribution than in 2019. Among 45- to 74-year-olds both the top and the bottom of the distribution changed by the same amount, so the group in the middle of the distribution remains largely unchanged.
• For the different education levels, there is a noticeable shift towards the middle. The groups at the top and the bottom of the distribution have become smaller, expanding the size of the middle group. For people with low and medium levels of education the middle group rose by 4 percentage point, for the higher educated by 3 percentage points.
• In the case of origin/country of birth, most notably a larger proportion of people born in the Netherlands with one or both parents born outside Europe were in the middle group of the distribution in 2023 (12 percentage points up). This is mainly because the share in the top group decreased, by 7 percentage points. For people who were themselves born outside Europe there is also a visible shift towards the middle group. The group at the top of the distribution decreased by nearly 5 percentage points, while the group in the middle increased by 4 percentage points.