Reassessing Wellbeing as a Policy Compass

 

Wellbeing, often proposed as a progressive alternative to purely economic indicators like GDP, reveals significant limitations when examined through the lens of empirical rigour and policy applicability; despite its appeal, its measurement lacks consistency, with time series data failing to show robust correlations with key socio-economic variables such as public expenditure, income growth, reduced working hours, or even life expectancy, and its use in political contexts risks oversimplifying complex trade-offs into emotionally charged narratives that lack analytical depth; foundational economic literature, including insights from Simon Kuznets and Paul Dolan, already highlight the difficulty of capturing human welfare through singular metrics, while hedonic adaptation theories, which argue that happiness quickly returns to a baseline after life changes, are challenged for underestimating the broader, often non-linear value of material and aspirational achievements; further, data from longitudinal studies on marriage point to strong associations between social stability and wellbeing, yet causal direction remains contested, raising concerns about policy interpretations; additionally, current wellbeing frameworks fail to address essential policy challenges such as intertemporal preference allocation and the valuation of trade-offs across populations and time, both crucial for coherent decision-making in areas like health, education, and environmental policy; rather than offering clarity, wellbeing risks becoming a vague policy placeholder, vulnerable to politicisation and detached from concrete outcomes, suggesting that its role in governance requires cautious restraint, methodological refinement, and far greater conceptual precision before it can inform policy with the authority often claimed on its behalf.