Measuring Well-Being for Public Policy: Preferences or Experiences?

Paul Dolan and Tessa Peasgood

The Journal of Legal Studies, 2008, vol. 37, issue S2, S5-S31

Abstract: Policy makers seeking to enhance well-being are faced with a choice of possible measures that may offer contrasting views about how well an individual's life is going. We suggest that choice of well-being measure should be based on three general criteria: (1) the measure must be conceptually appropriate (that is, are we measuring the right sort of concept for public policy?), (2) it must be valid (that is, is it a good measure of that concept?), and (3) it must be empirically useful (that is, does it provide information in a format that can be readily used by policy makers?). Preference-based measures (as represented by income) are compared to experience-based measures (as represented by subjective evaluations of life) according to these criteria. Neither set of measures meets ideal standards, but experiences do fare at least as well as preferences, and subjective evaluations perform much better than income alone as a measure of well-being. (c) 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/595676 link to full text (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:jlstud:v:37:y:2008:i:s2:p:s5-s31

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Journal of Legal Studies from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().