Crafting well-being alert systems to inform policies that improve the quality of low-skill jobs and help the out-of-work find purposeful activity

This project will expand and improve the capacity of a nationwide 'vulnerability monitor'--the Vulnerability Indicator, a tool that focuses on trends in well-being and ill-being at the national, state and county levels--to inform policy today and for the longer term. Early work with the indicator found that drops in optimism among less than college-educated whites began in the late 1970s, coinciding with the first declines in manufacturing--suggesting that indicators of well-being and ill-being could have served as warning indicators of trouble well before an upturn in deaths began. Deliverables will include an analysis to build COVID-19-related shocks to well-being into the tool; updating the monitor with new well-being data from Gallup and with EMS first-responder data; and workshops to help federal, state, and local policymakers and academics use the tool.