Not just about the money: pioneering study reveals best and worst jobs in UK

theguardian.com:

If you seek happiness, try captaining a ship or tiling walls for a living. But choose to be a judge, a housing officer or a theme park attendant, and prepare for a measure of misery.

Groundbreaking research into UK employees’ “full earnings”, which tries to account for wellbeing as well as cash income, has revealed the jobs where the reality of the working day undermines the benefit of salary and those that offer the greatest rewards in addition to salary.

The study, by leading academics from the London and Paris schools of economics, suggests the best jobs are marked by autonomy and provide satisfaction from completing tasks, while the worst include roles where workers are assailed by others’ problems – whether customer service, administrators or welfare officers.

It also claims that if wellbeing is factored in, income inequality in the UK – already the worst in western Europe – is a third wider than previously believed, creating a hidden “real income” gap.

“The people who do worst out of this widening gap tend to be women and ethnic minorities and the winners tend to be white men,” said Andrew Clark, professor at the Paris School of Economics.

The study was co-authored by Maria Cotofan and Prof Richard Layard, the Labour peer who pioneered “happiness economics” and is co-editor of the World Happiness Report, which ranks the UK the 24th happiest country in terms of average life satisfaction.

Academics monitoring wellbeing in Europe and the US are growing increasingly concerned that conventional economic measures – such as gross domestic product (GDP) – underestimate the extent of social divisions, which in turn threaten political stability. They note that anti-government protests have surged in recent years in the UK, US,