The erosion of GDP as a holistic measure of social progress has prompted a paradigmatic shift in governance towards subjective well-being (SWB) as a meaningful compass for public policy, recognising that material affluence alone fails to reflect lived human experience, hence Karin Tailbot (2020) presents a rigorous and multidimensional argument for the integration of SWB metrics in policy frameworks, beginning with a historical critique of GDP’s limitations—noting its neglect of inequality, environmental degradation and non-market contributions such as care work or social cohesion—and tracing a lineage from classical utilitarianism to modern happiness economics, where thinkers like Easterlin, Sen, and Layard advocate for well-being-oriented governance, the paper delineates how governments—from Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index to New Zealand’s Well-being Budget—are deploying both objective indicators and subjective data to reframe political priorities around human flourishing, yet this movement is not without contention: Tailbot methodically explores the epistemological and methodological critiques levelled at SWB, particularly its alleged imprecision, cultural bias and vulnerability to political instrumentalisation, scholars such as White, Graham, and Frey argue that policy should be grounded in clearly defined metrics, while others caution against technocratic overreach, where citizens risk being reduced to “metric stations” rather than autonomous agents, nevertheless, Tailbot contends that SWB data—when robustly collected and interpreted—offers invaluable insight into the unseen costs of policies, especially in areas like unemployment, which she evidences as profoundly detrimental to both personal dignity and social cohesion, the author promotes a pluralistic model where subjective and objective indicators coexist, allowing governments not to impose happiness but to identify structural conditions that support it, moreover, she underscores the procedural dimensions of well-being: that is, how individuals are treated by institutions matters as much as outcomes themselves, thus shifting the policy focus from output to experience, from economic abstraction to affective reality, in conclusion, Tailbot asserts that SWB, far from being a utopian distraction, is a pragmatic, democratically-aligned tool to reorient governance towards what people value most—dignity, meaning and relational life—and must be integrated not as a silver bullet but as one thread in a multidimensional tapestry of social measurement.
Tailbot, K. (2020) Objective well-being indicators and subjective well-being measures: how important are they in current public policy?
