An Economics of Wellbeing: What Would Economics Look Like if it were Focused on Human Wellbeing?
This paper makes a number of fundamental proposals to reconsider economics by putting human wellbeing at the centre. This conception of wellbeing takes into account the material, relational, and cognitive/subjective aspects of people’s needs and goals in life. The first dimension – material wellbeing – resonates with the narrower definition of welfare by looking at material determinants of quality of life. The relational dimension considers people’s quality of life in respect of the relationships that are important for them in their social and physical environment. The cognitive or subjective dimension of wellbeing recognises that the quality of the material and relational achievements are then translated into a person’s subjective evaluation of their quality of life. This raises questions about how satisfied people are with what they are able to have and do in any given natural and societal context.
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