 A Happy Choice: Wellbeing as the Goal of GovernmentPaul Frijters,
Andrew Clark,
Christian Krekel and
Richard Layard
Post-Print from HAL Abstract: In this article, we lay out the basic case for wellbeing as the goal of government. We briefly review the history of this idea, which goes back to the ancient Greeks and was the acknowledged ideal of the Enlightenment. We then discuss possible measures on which a wellbeing orientation could be based, emphasising the importance of acknowledging the political agency of citizens and thus their own evaluations of their life. We then turn to practicalities and consequences: how would one actually set up wellbeing-oriented decision-making and what difference should we expect from current practice? We end by discussing the current barriers to the adoption of wellbeing as the goal of government, both in terms of what we need to know more about and where the ideological barriers lay. Date: 2020-07 Published in Behavioural Public Policy, 2020, 4 (Special Issue 2), ⟨10.1017/bpp.2019.39⟩ There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-02492628 DOI: 10.1017/bpp.2019.39 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Post-Print from HAL |
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