But in contrast only 3% of children in Colombia and Romania have low wellbeing.
In England only 9% of eight-year-olds have low wellbeing.
Improving Students Mental Healthh, says the majority of students experience low wellbeing; depression and loneliness affect one in three; more than one in 10 have a diagnosable mental illness; and the number of student suicides has risen.
Researchers speculate that tight community bonds and high diversity of age and ethnicity may act as a buffer against low wellbeing, although they caution the pilot study's small sample size makes such ward-by-ward comparisons tenuous.
Glenn Everett, ONS director of measuring national wellbeing, said: "The low wellbeing in middle-age might also suggest that those in this age group are struggling with the double responsibility of caring for children and for elderly parents".
Of course, as Heyd notes, in many cases an act that creates a low wellbeing level for a person whose existence depends on that act will also create low wellbeing levels for people whose existences are independent of that act.
We then confuse the atypical case with the ordinary case in which low wellbeing levels do signify a person's having been made worse off.
And suppose that those low wellbeing levels cannot be justified (on the ground, for example, that they save many existing persons from still lower wellbeing levels) and that we are accordingly convinced that act A is wrong.
Consider, then, an act A that is performed at a possible world w and yields at w positive but low wellbeing levels for one or more people who will but do not yet exist at w. Suppose that wellbeing levels are low in virtue of the fact that act A performed at w causes those persons to endure pain, misery, disease, deprivation or limitation.
What the precariousness point tells us is that in many cases the very future persons – call them the "A-people" – who endure low wellbeing levels also "owe their very existence" to that act A. Perhaps an act B existed as an alternative for the agents at the time just prior to choice.
WHO5 scores below 13 indicate low wellbeing [ 23].
