A happy choice: wellbeing as the goal of government

Abstract

In this article, we lay out the basic case for wellbeing as the goal of government. We briefly review the history of this idea, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and was the acknowledged ideal of the Enlightenment. We then discuss possible measures on which a wellbeing orientation could be based, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging the political agency of citizens and thus their own evaluations of their lives. We then turn to practicalities and consequences: how would one actually set up wellbeing-oriented decision-making and what difference should we expect from current practice? We end by discussing the current barriers to the adoption of wellbeing as the goal of government, both in terms of what we need to know more about and where the ideological barriers lie.

Opposing Effects of Economic Inequality Concentrated at the Top or Bottom of the Income Distribution on Subjective Well-Being

“…Our results also suggest an alternative path through which policy-makers may want to support subjective well-being across the income distribution (Frijters et al, 2019). One way to better understand the effects of economic inequality on subjective well-being is to shift attention to the gap between the poorest and the median earner, i.e., bottom-concentrated economic inequality, and test interventions that reduce this gap.…”

The SDGs and human well-being: a global analysis of synergies, trade-offs, and regional differences

“…The data is from nationally representative samples, for the years 2016-2018. Some methodological issues remain with subjective well-being measures 6 , but life evaluations are widely recognised as the standard measure of subjective well-being 7,19 . Data on other dimensions of subjective well-being, such as the experience of positive and negative emotions, are analysed separately and can be found in the Supplementary Information section online.…”

“…Variance decomposition analysis of regional SDG groups in relation to well-being. In these analyses, we group the SDGs into Economic (4,8,9), Social (1, 5, 10), Health (3), Law (16), and Environmental goals (2,6,7,11,12,13,14,15). Figure 5 first shows the results for how well these SDG groups explain the variance between all countries.…”

The economy of wellbeing: what is it and what are the implications for health?

“…We could consider creating a single measure capturing wellbeing with which to assess and compare social progress, as well as to allocate resources to different sectors of the economy according to their relative contribution to wellbeing 11. If governments could measure the contribution of each sector to an overarching common concept of wellbeing, it would, in principle, be possible to adopt a better informed and more systematic approach towards allocating resources between sectors.…”