Abstract
What is the ultimate goal of Politics and Policy? This introductory chapter suggests that the best answer to this question is “Well-being”: The ultimate goal of politics and policy should be to ensure that citizens are able to live good, flourishing lives. In the twentieth century, politics and policy erroneously inverted its means and ends: Instead of making human well-being its ultimate goal, it focused on economic prosperity, measured by GDP. Resulting policies often treated citizens as mere means to the end of a sound economy. However, in the early twenty-first century, GDP “fetishism” was identified as the fundamental mistake it is, and Politics and Policy were called upon to go “Beyond GDP”, and focus directly on human well-being. But what is human well-being? Surely everyone has their own conception of the good? This chapter argues that, given our common biology and common sociality, it would be surprising if there were no universals of human well-being. This study will employ a suite of methods, including documentary analysis of national constitutions, analysis of political “Beyond GDP” programmes, and analysis of the World Values Survey, to identify a universal core of human well-being, as a foundation for people-centred politics and policy.
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Notes
- 1.
Constitution of the United States of America (1789 rev. 1992). Available at https://constituteproject.org/constitution/United_States_of_America_1992.pdf?lang=en (accessed January 2019).
- 2.
Constitution of Kenya. (2010). Available at https://constituteproject.org/constitution/Kenya_2010.pdf?lang=en (accessed January 2019).
- 3.
http://www.pp.es/sites/default/files/documentos/estatutos_definitivos.pdf (accessed January 2019).
- 4.
https://www.jimin.jp/english/about-ldp/history/104257.html (accessed January 2019).
- 5.
Of course, GDP remains an important measure of national economic progress; some programmes are framed as “GDP and Beyond.” However, second wave initiatives tend to include the Economy as just one aspect of the social setting of well-being , and so go “Beyond GDP ” as a proxy for human well-being .
- 6.
Note that this is not a statistical hypothesis to be accepted or rejected based on statistical tests, but a free-standing statement to be explored qualitatively.
- 7.
All constitutions are sourced from the Comparative Constitutions project (Elkins et al. 2010).
- 8.
This question is appealing because, due to its simplicity, it is likely to have high construct validity across countries and languages—for example, the concept of “family ” translates very easily. All WVS questions are subject to extensive validity checks.
- 9.
A constraint on ethical naturalism is that it refers to a particular time period, namely the current evolutionary epoch of homo sapiens.
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Austin, A. (2020). Well-being in Politics and Policy. In: A Universal Declaration of Human Well-being. Wellbeing in Politics and Policy. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27107-7_1
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