On May 30th, 2019, the Government of New Zealand delivered for the first time a budget that was explicitly focused on implementing policies that are meant to improve the well-being of New Zealanders. This well-being-focused approach relies on New Zealand’s Living Standards Framework (LSF), a dashboard of indicators that is meant to provides insights into key aspects of well-being. The LSF is an adaptation of the more widely used OECD Better Life Index (BLI), a dashboard that covers eleven dimensions that reflect what the OECD has identified as essential to well-being, for example, income, community, health, and safety, among others. Each of these dimensions is measured using several indicators, totaling at twenty-four indicators overall for the BLI and sixty for the LSF. For example, the safety dimension in the BLI is a composite of two indicators—a question regarding people’s feelings of safety and the homicide rate in the country. What sets apart this dashboard approach to well-being measurement is that the different dimensions are presented separately with no claims made regarding how each dimension compares in importance to the others.
There exists a longstanding philosophical debate on the proper role of government, whether it is solely charged with ensuring people’s safety, promote equality, ensure justice, or something else. Yet for those of us who believe that improving the lives of its citizens is at least one of the roles of government, New Zealand’s explicit focus on well-being should be seen as good news. This interest in well-being public policy shifts questions regarding well-being and happiness from being asked in a purely philosophical context to related questions being asked in a much more practical context.
However, what it means to live a good life is one of the most enduring philosophical questions that humans have asked, and no agreement on the topic seems forthcoming. There is an ongoing lively literature in ethics arguing for hedonistic views of well-being, well-being as preference-satisfaction, perfectionism about well-being, objective-list accounts, and a variety of hybrid views. There is additional disagreement whether well-being is solely a prudential concept or whether it is impossible for a bad person to have a good life. There is even disagreement as to whether well-being should be understood as a momentary concept, a lifetime concept, or an episodic one.
Since fundamental philosophical disagreements persist, it might seem worrisome to focus on practice without coming to an agreement on the underlying theoretical disagreements. While improving the lives of people is a laudable goal, acting to promote well-being without a solid conception of what is good for people might result in a variety of unintended negative consequences.
For example, if the government were to consider pleasure to be the sole constitute of well-being, it seems reasonable to distribute soma to the masses the way the directors do in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in order to increase the population’s overall well-being. However, if the government implements such a policy, yet well-being is constituted by something other than pleasure, then the government is in effect reducing the population’s well-being by distributing soma. Huxley’s discussion of soma makes it clear that he believes it to be counter productive when it comes to people’s well-being.
For a less outlandish example, we might consider how some policies might seem to either help or harm vulnerable groups based on the theory of well-being we ascribe to. There were many more considerations beyond its effects on the well-being of the main group the law targeted—niquab wearing Muslim women—surrounding the 2010 French ban on face covering in public places. However, the same law could be seen as promoting women’s well-being if one is committed to some objective-list theories of well-being, while it can be seen as detrimental to Muslim women’s well-being if one is committed to some versions of a preference-satisfaction theory of well-being. If the well-being of women the law targeted was the main concern of the legislators, what theory of well-being they are committed to would sway a decision in one direction or another.
One worry is that what governments are measuring does not capture what well-being actually is. The BLI and LSF measures are supposed to provide an evidence-based framework for governments like New Zealand’s to identify their budget priorities, but if the measure is inadequate, then the policies that are based on it will likely fail as well. Since there are other types of measures of well-being, one might ask whether dashboard measures like those used by the OECD’s BLI and New Zealand’s LSF, are the right one’s to use in order to guide policy decisions that are meant to increase people’s well-being.
First, the traditional reliance on GDP per capita and unemployment rates (among others) to guide public policy can also be thought of as a way to guide policy aimed at promoting well-being. However, since these measures focus almost exclusively on economic prosperity, they have come under fire in recent years, especially since the 2008 recession, as failing to capture what actually matters to a good life. An alternative single-indicator measure, for example people’s self-reported overall life satisfaction, seems to some a more attractive alternative. Lastly, one might prefer the use of an index, such as the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI), which weights income, years of education, and life expectancy equally in order to provide a single numerical representation of the level of development (and some might say well-being) in a country or region.
One challenge, then, is to defend the use of dashboards as opposed to a single indicator or a weighted index. This is a difficult challenge, because both single indicators and weighted indexes can rank policies along a single dimension, thus providing an unambiguous answer to the question ‘is policy a better than policy b?’. Once we decide to use single indicators or weighted indexes, all that is required is to conduct the measurement exercise and the answer of what policy to choose becomes straightforward. This is something a dashboard measure cannot do. Dashboard measures, like those used by the OECD’s BLI and New Zealand’s LSF, do not allow policy-makers to rank policies along a single-dimension. Since the information is provided as a dashboard of several indicators with no weighting function, dashboards do not fully explicate which policy is better.
Imagine that policy a does better on income and community, while policy b does better on health and safety. Which policy increases well-being more is left open. It depends on how we weight those different elements. Consequentially, even if policy-makers manage to agree on a dashboard measure, they still need to do some additional work, that of deciding how to weight the different dimensions of the dashboard against each other. Generally speaking, policy-makers would much rather a clear, single, “scientific” measure. Dashboards do not provide this.
Then again, this lack of precise guidance can be thought of as a of strength of dashboard measures, rather than a weakness. In my view, well-being dashboard measures are scientifically, ethically, and politically superior to any single index measure approach. They are scientifically superior as they preserve the complexity of well-being by not reducing it to a single number. They are also ethically superior because they leave undetermined how different aspects of a life ought to be weighted and do not force a particular conception of the good life on citizens. Finally, they are politically superior because they leave space for political deliberation among people who disagree on what constitutes well-being and do not on their own determine which policies ought to be chosen.
How do these advantages compare to the advantages of the standard single-number indicators and measures, which are more simple and leave less room for different values and deliberation? I believe they are worth the trade off, though there are plenty of those who would consider simplicity and purported objectivity to trump other considerations, especially if we want policy-makers to actually make well-being policies.
Well-being policy questions have loomed large since the economic crash of 2008, and a serious effort should be made to better understand the way in which governments can approach the normatively loaded questions that surround the implementation of national well-being being policies. While I believe the dashboard approach to well-being measurement adopted by the OECD and by the government of New Zealand is promising, defending it against alternative well-being measures requires a lot more work to be done.
Gil Hersch
Gil Hersch is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Virginia Tech Department of Philosophy and the Program in PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics). Hersch specializes in ethical issues at the intersection of economics and policy, especially as they relate to happiness and well-being.
