Wellbeing in Politics and Policy

WELLBEING IN POLITICS AND POLICY Series Editors: Ian Bache, Karen Scott and Paul Allin WELLBEING ECONOMICS The Capabilities Approach to Prosperity Paul Dalziel, Caroline Saunders and Joe Saunders Wellbeing in Politics and Policy Series Editors Ian Bache Department of Politics University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK Karen Scott Cornwall Campus Exeter University Penryn, Cornwall, UK Paul Allin Department of Mathematics Imperial College London London, UK Wellbeing in Politics and Policy will bring new lenses through which to under- stand the significance of the dramatic rise of interest in wellbeing as a goal of public policy. While a number of academic disciplines have been influential in both shaping and seeking to explain developments, the Politics discipline has been relatively silent, leaving important theoretical and empirical insights largely absent from debates: insights that have increasing significance as political interest grows. This series will provide a distinctive addition to the field that puts politics and policy at the centre, while embracing interdisciplinary contributions. Contributions will be encouraged from various subfields of the discipline (e.g., political theory, comparative politics, governance and public policy, international relations) and from those located in other disciplines that speak to core political themes (e.g., accountability, gender, inequality, legitimacy and power). The series will seek to explore these themes through policy studies in a range of settings – international, national and local. Comparative studies – either of different policy areas and/or across different settings – will be particularly encouraged. The series will incorporate a wide range of perspectives from critical to problem-solving approaches, drawing on a variety of epistemologies and meth- odologies. The series welcomes Pivots, edited collections and monographs. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15247 Paul Dalziel • Caroline Saunders Joe Saunders Wellbeing Economics The Capabilities Approach to Prosperity Paul Dalziel Caroline Saunders Agribusiness and Economics Research Unit Agribusiness and Economics Research Unit Lincoln University Lincoln University Lincoln, New Zealand Lincoln, New Zealand Joe Saunders Inter-Disciplinary Ethics Applied Centre University of Leeds Leeds, UK Wellbeing in Politics and Policy ISBN 978-3-319-93193-7 ISBN 978-3-319-93194-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93194-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018946238 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This book is an open access publication Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the reativeC Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regu- lations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface Wellbeing is a word that has entered the vocabulary of almost everyone con- cerned with current economic and social trends, with good reason. Many families and communities struggle with issues of wellbeing (including various forms of depression, addiction and self-harm). Obtaining paid employment is no lon- ger sufficient for a person to be confident of earning enough resources to sup- port wellbeing; instead, the market economy is creating large numbers of jobs that pay less than the living wage, reinforced by new forms of work such as zero-hour contracts and the gig economy. Measures of objective and subjective wellbeing indicate that rising prosperity is not shared by everyone, and some groups of people are falling further behind. Observations such as these have stimulated global attention to wellbeing. A major impulse was the 2009 Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, headed by Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi. The report concluded as its main theme that “the time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being”. This shift is taking place around the world, including in the United Kingdom, where the Measuring National Wellbeing Programme was initiated in November 2010 by the then Prime Minister, David Cameron. International organisations are implementing programmes to measure and promote wellbeing. Important examples include the wellbeing conceptual framework of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the quality of life framework of the European Union, the indicators v vi Preface of global development maintained by the World Bank and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development created by the United Nations. Despite this renewed focus on wellbeing, the priority of regional and national decision-makers typically remains tied to economic growth. David Cameron, for example, emphasised this priority at the launch of the United Kingdom’s Measuring National Wellbeing Programme: “Now, let me be very, very clear,” he said, “growth is the essential foundation of all our aspirations.” Even as scientific evidence shows with increasing clarity that current patterns of economic production are causing dangerous climate change, the political impetus for higher growth in gross domestic product remains unabated. There have been counter voices. A courageous example was Tim Jackson’s report for the UK Sustainable Development Commission, published in March 2009. Entitled Prosperity without Growth, it set out in a compelling manner how a genuine focus on wellbeing will require a different approach to economics. This book responds to Jackson’s challenge. It does not claim to develop a new economics; rather it seeks to recover insights from the economics tradition on how persons can create wellbeing through personal effort and through collabo- ration with others at different levels of choice-making. Thus, the reader will find the text is peppered with references to scholars recognised as giants in the field, from Adam Smith writing in the eighteenth century to recent recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economics. We draw on key elements in their work, supple- mented by the published findings of other researchers, to create a synthesis that we call the wellbeing economics framework. The framework is developed in this book as a series of 24 propositions, begin- ning with the proposition that the primary purpose of economics is to contrib- ute to enhanced wellbeing of persons. Subsequent analysis then explains how this purpose can be achieved. Public policy is important in this analysis, but it is not the sole, or even the first, focus of the book. Instead, the framework recog- nises that wellbeing is supported by capabilities at several different levels of choice-making, with successive chapters focusing on persons, households and families, civil society, the market economy, local government, the Nation State and the global community. We received considerable assistance as we prepared this book. Our thanks begin with colleagues, students, clients and partners of the Agribusiness and Economics Research Unit at Lincoln University and of the Inter-Disciplinary Ethics Applied Centre at the University of Leeds. The strong collegiality and engagement at both institutes contributed to the development of our ideas and analysis expressed in this book. Preface vii This book builds on an earlier text on wellbeing economics, published for a general audience in New Zealand by Bridget Williams Books. The new book goes well beyond that text, but we remain grateful to Bridget Williams and to Tom Rennie for supporting our initial efforts to synthesise a wellbeing economics framework. In April 2016, we were approached by Laura Pacey at Palgrave Macmillan. Laura introduced us to the Wellbeing in Politics and Policy series, edited by Ian Bache, Karen Scott and Paul Allin, and invited us to submit a formal proposal for the series. Our plans for this book were further developed after two insightful reviews by anonymous referees. We

Load more