On Flourishing: Political Economy and the Pursuit of Well-Being in the Polity

DEVA WOODLY

Philosophical liberals and modern conservatives have long used Aristotle's thoughts on eudaemonia, or flourishing, as a justification for a limited state and the primacy of negative liberty because they read the Nicomachean Eth­ics as a treatise on the possibilities of individual moral development (Ar­istotle 1893).

The task before us in the twenty-first century is to figure out how to cre­ate and maintain flourishing polities. In order to conceptualize what would be required for such a polity, this chapter proceeds in several parts. First, I discuss the concept of flourishing, exploring its definitions in philosophy and psychology as well as the corollary concept of well-being in economics. Second, I discuss the political and economic commonsense beliefs that we must chose to break from in order to move toward a polity in which ordi­nary people can expect to live and thrive.

What Does It Mean to Flourish?

On the question of how to decide what counts as flourishing, let us take as our rubric one that is, improbably, shared by both the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, and the contemporary American Left—that is, “no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the pro­duce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged” (A. Smith 1977, B1, chap. 8).

Political conservatives tend to argue about what counts as “tolerable” whereas I will argue that the rule on which our judgment must be based is the prevalence of “misery.” The reality is that in the world as it is the vast majority of people report that they are miserable—dealing with precarity in every aspect of life—and those of us who are concerned with either justice and/or the preservation of democracy must seek to understand and imple­ment the changes of perspective, practice, and policy required to diminish the structural reality of misery that conditions so many lives.

But what counts as flourishing? Psychologists define it as a state of well­being in which a person “lives within an optimal range of human function­ing” which means that people experience “positive emotions, positive psy­chological functioning, and positive social functioning most of the time” (Fredrickson and Losada 2005, 678). Flourishing is a broader category of well­being than “happiness,” which is usually used to describe immediate feelings or, as Daniel Kahneman puts it, “what I experience in the here and now,” and it does not always take into account the balance of affect and satisfaction that characterizes a person's lived experience from day to day (Mandel 2018).

Flourishing is the opposite of both psychopathology like depression and a nonclinical yet unhappy state called “languishing,” a kind of misery that causes people to describe their lives as “hollow” or “empty,” which is char­acterized by prolonged, low-level distress brought about by chronic neglect, inactivity, and decreasing vitality and/or inability to thrive.

Flourishing is important, for our purposes, not only or primarily because it is a pleasant state but instead because flourishing people are more able to engage in focused attention, creative problem solving, inventive planning, and resilient follow-through. A flourishing person is able to “broaden and build” their “thought-action repertoires,” or the range of cognitive, physical, and social possibilities that an agent can conceive and execute in given cir­cumstances. This allows people to discard time-tested or automatic “action tendencies” and pursue novel, creative, and unscripted courses of thought and action. These are characteristics that are not only nice to have but, more importantly, critical to cultivate in democratic citizens, particularly in the current moment, when large-scale solutions and changes in societal, cul­tural, and individual habits are necessary for the survival of democracy and the continued, long-term human habitation of the planet.

It is important to note that while a politics toward flourishing is ambi­tious, it is neither utopian nor absurd. Not every individual can be made happy or well. However, our current politics and political economy forces choices that make most people miserable most of the time. This reality may not be unique in the history of human civilization, but the nesting of this mis­ery within the doctrine of the American Dream or the more widely Western doctrine of liberal-capitalist development is particularly brutal, as it causes people to not only experience misery but to feel that their misery is either groundless or solely a result of their choices and actions. The result is that people feel “gaslighted,” or manipulated into questioning their own experi­ence and sanity by the dominant ideology. This causes a despair that mani­fests at all levels, causing individual- and community-destroying behaviors as well as democracy- and polity-destroying actions.

We find evidence of despair in individual-level data regarding the shock­ing decrease in life expectancy among American adults (Devitt 2018), the de­terioration of happiness all over the developed world, with particular drops in populous rich countries (Helliwell, Huang, and Wang 2019), and the de­crease in reported interpersonal and institutional trust in democracies (Meer 2017). These dynamics have been accompanied by a popular clamor for the leadership of bombastic authoritarians in many locations across the globe.

Political despair is a lack of efficacy brought on by an (often accurate) as­sessment of current conditions that views social and political ills as innu­merable and natural—forces of (human) nature that cannot be combated, only avoided or girded against. It is the experience of social groups (similarly situated persons who recognize themselves as such) with a profound con­straint on their lives and life chances that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, impacting their ability to both develop themselves (oppres­sion) and determine the trajectory of their own lives (domination) (Young 1994). In sum, it is the feeling that nothing can be done, that politics itself is a dead end, and that whatever remedies there are for human suffering and political injustice must be carved out piecemeal by individuals who are either lucky or blessed with unusual gifts.

Relegating much-needed political and social change to hero tales is what we do when democratic politics and our belief in our own citizenship fails. This is why the members of the polity pushing toward authoritarianism and away from democracy seem less interested in their own material interests than in the frank, public declamation that their reality—and that of most people they know—is characterized by languishing.

While the wave of political despair sweeping the globe caught many un­aware, believing that the late twentieth century had brought “the end of his­tory,” with economic development and pluralist tolerance on an inevitable, global spiral upward (as dominant discourse and what I have elsewhere called neoliberal common sense would have it), most people have had reason to doubt the efficacy of modern liberal democracy for some time (Woodly 2015). The form of capitalism that is now dominant—variously called neoliberal capitalism, corporatism, or crony capitalism—takes the logic of the hyperef­ficient, profit-maximizing rational person (either individual or corporate) as the relevant agent in all aspects of life and has spawned ways of reasoning that devalue all aspects of human life that cannot be properly categorized by price or efficiency.

This means that areas of life that support the human body (health care), human connection (voluntarism, nonprofessional clubs and associations, child and elder care), or human spirit (leisure time, vocation) have been in­creasingly unsupported by public resources and priced at a premium that most people either cannot or struggle to afford. We are told that this gruel­ing setup is simply the nature of “the economy” and/or that striving with anxiety, depression, and ill health is good for our character. In the US, we are taught that this suffering is actually key to any patriotic identity. It is fine, we are to believe, that in the richest country in human history, 1 in 5 children are too poor to have stable housing and seasonal clothing, and that 1 in 12 is in ex­treme poverty—that is, too poor to eat regularly. For those who are not poor, scrambling to remain in the “middle class,” or the 51 percent of Americans who make between $45,000 and $125,000,¹ they can expect to see between 30 and 50 percent of their income (depending on geography) go to housing costs that have inflated four times faster than income from wages (which have remained stagnant for 40 years) and health care, education, and child care costs that have each doubled in average price since 1996 (Desilver 2018). Indeed, according to a 2017 Urban Institute study that surveyed 7,500 people, 4 in 10 Americans are struggling to pay for their basic expenses: food, hous­ing, utilities, and health care (Michael Karpman 2018). Alissa Quart argues that these realities have given rise not only to a precariat, as Guy Standing dubbed working-class people saddled with temporary, low-paying, and part­time jobs, but also to a “middle precariat” who are at the upper end of the middle distribution and “believed that their training or background would ensure that they would be properly, comfortably middle class, but it has not worked out that way” (Quart 2018). Quart's vivid account of the state of af­fairs boils down to a misery born of having lost “the narrative of their lives and futures,” not only dealing with the material reality of struggle but also the philosophical and psychological question: “Who are [we] and what will [we] become?” A fair question since “their incomes have flatlined [and] many are ‘fronting' as bourgeois while standing in a pile of debt” (Quart 2018).

We are supposed to tolerate this hardship because “the economy,” we imagine, naturally produces winners and losers. The winners, we are told, win because they have worked hardest—despite ample evidence that the surest way to win is to be born winning (Hess 2019). We are to believe that “the economy” necessarily blows people to and fro in accordance with its anthropomorphized whims, which are only able to be divined—with limited accuracy and questionable ethics but boundless faith—by credentialed aco­lytes steeped in the mysteries of supply and demand curves and the variously meaningful shapes they may take.

The premodern sense of “economy,” which simply meant the prudence and frugality with which tasks for living are carried out, has fallen out of usage and now the word almost always carries the personifying article “the,” creating an invisible hand of god where one of many useful characteristics of human behavior once resided. My purpose here is not to mock modernity or to recall us to the “true” meaning of economy, but to highlight that we have, through our language and ideology, put most of the activities that organize human life out of our own control because of a belief in a mysticism that seems modern only because it is mathematical. This ideology has prevented us from rearranging the priorities and organization of our systems of care, exchange, and governance in accordance with the things we say we value, both as individuals and collectively.

The ideology, institutional policies, and social practices that characterize the current political economy ensure that resources accrue disproportion­ately and almost exclusively to those who already occupy the highest decile of income and wealth while the vast majority face the reality that there are astounding and nearly insurmountable institutional barriers to creating a stable economic foundation for their families and communities. This grim reality is systematically more forbidding when disaggregated by race, region, and country, making the progress that exponential capital growth has prom­ised a punishingly illusive mirage (Bourguignon 2015; Coyle 2011; Piketty 2013; Skidelsky and Skidelsky 2012; Standing 2011; Wilkinson and Pickett 2009).

Economists J. Allister McGregor and Nicky Pouw put the matter this way: “As we are aware from recent major contributions to the literature..., the primacy given to the pursuit of private wealth and the ways that govern­ments sanction and support this has served to strengthen the economic and political power of those who are already in a privileged position, while people at the bottom of the income distribution receive limited benefits and are marginalized from the development process” (McGregor and Pouw 2017, 1126). Phillip Smith and Manfred Max-Neef state things more bluntly, argu­ing that we are “under the spell of a dehumanized economy” in which “there is never enough for those who have nothing, but there is always enough for those who have everything” (Smith and Max-Neef 2012, 128-29).

Soaring inequality and the precarious instability that is its most telling hallmark have been the topic of increasing concern in a variety of domains, from academic economics to the political agendas of social movements and politicians, but the dominant perspective, policies, and practices that have enabled market logic to colonize almost all areas of life have yet to change. As a result, last century's economic ideas carry us unhappily forward with a momentum that can only be broken by the repetition of a clear and resonant theory that prioritizes the well-being of the individual-in-context over ef­ficiency, endless growth, and maximal profit.

The good news is the efficiency and austerity economy can be remade into the well-being economy. We can create conditions under which many more or even most people can attain a flourishing life. In order for this to be pos­sible, we have to change our minds about what counts and what to count, then make judgments about the political and economic infrastructure based on new commonsense priorities. To this end, our politics must concern itself with identifying, acknowledging, and attempting to remedy oppression and domination and preventing new forms (or reinscriptions of old forms) from becoming embedded in perspective, practice, and policy. Such an aim can only be facilitated if the health of the polity is judged based on the assess­ment of the lived experience of those whose misery is most palpable—that is, from the bottom up and from margin to center.

Oppression, Domination, and the Misery of the Polis

The individual-in-context has their own perceptions, dreams, desires, and agency, but individuals are nevertheless born into a world that is a given, and that givenness includes power asymmetries rooted in and reproduced by un­just inequality. Therefore, an account of flourishing that is grounded in what we know must begin with the acknowledgment that individuals are never wholly autonomous, self-reproducing, utility-maximizing agents who begin in a state of universal human equality. The natural equality that obtains at birth is immediately supplanted by the realities of a world that is already built—a world that has a history and structuring forces that condition but do not fully determine the individual's place in it. This means that observing characteristics of individuals alone cannot tell the whole story of the well­being of the polis; instead, we must observe how groups of individuals who are similarly situated may systematically differ in their ability to flourish.

We do not often talk about the ways that oppression and domination have conditioned not only the political economy as it is, but the possibilities ex­tant in the understandings of that economy. The dominant understanding of individuals as ever-productive autonomous entrepreneurs and the per­spectives, practices, and policies that flow from this understanding was fa­mously called neoliberalism by Wendy Brown. She contends that this ideology has been a constructive project, a marked shift from the classical liberalism that reigned during most of modernity, in that the neo ideology refuses to acknowledge and, indeed, seeks to smother all domains, logics, and values that refuse or exceed market logic (Brown 2003). While I think Brown's ob­servations about the changes in the liberal paradigm are largely accurate, it is a term that is too colloquially fraught and conceptually limited for our pur­poses. Instead, I take up Iris Young's notion of “the distributive paradigm,” which refers to not only the totalizing market logic that has infected com­monsense thinking since the middle of last century, but also to the “decision­making power and procedures, division of labor, and culture” that adaptively reproduce conditions that enable and preserve that logic. Like Young, I con­tend that the distributive paradigm encompasses the thinking of both neo­liberals and their class-first or class-only critics, joining her in observing that “even explicitly socialist or Marxist discussions ofjustice under socialism... assume the primary difference between socialist justice and capitalist justice is in their principles of distribution” (Young 1994, 17).

Neoliberalism is also fundamentally characterized by oppression and domination, often excused as the risks and remainders of liberty given luck, divergent commitments to moral austerity, and freedom of choice. But cri­tiques of neoliberalism that concede the logic of the distributive paradigm cannot answer the intersectional reality of oppression with only the blunt instrument of welfare or the guarantee of material goods—whether it is of­fered as a perk of ethical capitalism or a mandate of moral socialism. This is because oppression is a “family of concepts” with five aspects: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. Oppres­sion cannot be reduced to the economic inequality that neoliberalism creates because oppression always “involves social structures and relations beyond distribution” (Young 1994, 9).

While the distributive paradigm does not by itself produce the misery of the polis, the atomism and autonomy (an autonomy that slides dangerously into an impossible expectation of sovereignty) of its social ontology does. This is because, regardless of the American social theology of “personal re­sponsibility,” in what Nancy Fraser has called the “actually existing world,” people arrive, from the moment of their birth, into a context, and that context is structured—meaning that many of the personal characteristics observed or bequeathed to them at birth (race, gender, family, region, nation) will shape (though not fully determine) the way that they experience the rest of their lives as surely as the structuring laws of physics do. It is for this rea­son that conceptions of justice based on or unreflectively embedded in the distributive paradigm can only, as Machiavelli says, come to grief.

This is because justice is not quantifiable. It is not definite. It is not cer­tain. It is, in much the same way that human beings are, the product of con­text, negotiation, and action. A social ontology (neoliberal individualism) and politics (interest group pluralism) that ignores context and discourages action through the production of despair is one that can only produce an apportioning justice—one that seeks to make laws about what people ought to have and by what rules, rather than how people can be supported in their efforts as “doers and actors” (Young 1994, 37).

The oppressive structuring of power and privilege in race, gender, and class hierarchies is relevant for a full accounting of this despair because what politics can promise those who are languishing, in lieu of deep and difficult restructuring of the political economy, are scapegoats: the promise that some group ascribed as other is responsible for the general misery and will be punished. That most people, including those who vote for and/or support neoliberal authoritarians will be harmed by their policies, is not the relevant decision rule. The mythologized autonomous individual is not, it turns out, a universal character. Instead, this individual is raced and gen­dered, a white man who by the commonsense logic of the myth, deserves, by virtue of his values and value, to be at the top of the human hierarchy. In the United States, this phenomenon is vividly illustrated inJonathan Metzl's important book, Dying of Whiteness. Metzl relates the story of Trevor, an uninsured working-class white Tennessean, who at age 41 was dying of the debilitating effects of the hepatitis C virus. Hepatitis C is curable. In his interview with Trevor, Metzl pointed out that if he lived only 40 minutes away, in the state of Kentucky, he would have access to life-saving drugs be­cause that state chose to set up insurance exchanges and expand Medicaid in compliance with the Affordable Care Act while Tennessee had not. But, as Metzl writes:

Even at death's doorstep, Trevor wasn't angry. In fact, he staunchly sup­ported the stance promoted by his elected officials. "Ain't no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it,” he told me. "I would rather die.” When I asked him why he felt this way... he explained, "We don't need any more government in our lives. And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans and welfare queens.” (Metzl 2019, 3)

Metzl was shocked that Trevor “voiced a literal willingness to die for his place in [the racial] hierarchy.” Metzl went on to interview many people across the American Midwest and South, writing:

[They] were dying in various overt or invisible ways as a result of political beliefs and systems linked to the defense of white "ways of life” or concerns about minorities or poor people hoarding resources. People like Trevor who put their own bodies on the line, rather than imagining scenarios in which diversity or equity might better the flourishing of everyone. (Metzl 2019, 5)

The logics that excuse or ignore oppression harm us all because they make us believe that it is OK for some people to suffer. And, more insidiously, if you are one of the suffering, it is very likely your own fault or, at least, a necessary sacrifice to the social hierarchy. This view rests on the idea that there is noth­ing but rights (executable or not) that we deserve, and that freedom and au­tonomy principally mean being left alone. These kinds of beliefs have begun to harm even people of relative privilege. The cultural hunger for exploring "mindfulness,” "work-life balance,” and "self-care” is a symptom, a cultural response to a political economy that is punishing, approaching impossible, for most people most of the time. The poor and historically marginalized are most inhibited from flourishing via oppression, but even the relatively privi­leged are increasingly structurally vulnerable to three of the four miseries that characterize languishing—poverty, isolation, poor health, and precarity. This is because a distributive paradigm posits people as atomistic and au­tonomous but paradoxically politically passive agents. It imagines the world as full of individuals gifted with inherent powers that they simply have and ought to be left free to use, rather than as people in diverse contexts who can do a variety of things and may, indeed, be made capable of learning and creat­ing still more. Young calls her theory "the politics of difference.”

Amartya Sen articulates a similar view with his capabilities approach. He writes, "In contrast with the utility-based or resource-based lines of think­ing, individual advantage is judged in the capability approach by a person's capability to do things he or she has reason to value................................ The focus here is on

the freedom that a person actually has to do this or be that—things that he or she may value doing or being” (Sen 2009, 231-32). Further, "the Capabil­ity approach focuses on human life, and not just on some detached objects of convenience, such as incomes or commodities that a person may possess, which are often taken, especially in economic analysis, to be the main criteria of human success. Indeed, it proposes a serious departure from concentrat­ing on the means of living to the actual opportunities of living” (233).

Sen writes that capabilities are heterogenous rather than homogeneous and cautions that “we cannot reduce all things we have reason to value into one homogenous magnitude” (239). And he calls out utilitarian theories, the most popular philosophical arguments in economics, for institutionalizing this mistake:

The utilitarian tradition which works toward beating every valuable thing down to some kind of allegedly homogenous magnitude of "utility,” has con­tributed most to this sense of security in "counting” exactly one thing.... If the long tradition of utility has contributed to the sense of security in com­mensurable homogeneity, the massive use of gross national product (GNP) as the indicator of the economic condition of a nation has also made its contribution in that direction. Proposals for weaning economic evaluators away from exclusive reliance on the GNP have tended to generate worry that with diverse objects to judge we shall not have the sense of ease that goes with just checking whether GNP is higher or lower. (Sen 2009, 239)

Sen understands that "by proposing a fundamental shift in the focus of at­tention from the means of living to the actual opportunities a person has, the capability approach aims at a fairly radical change in the standard evalua­tive approaches” (253). However, that radical shift seems warranted given the great incommensurability of mass misery with democratic governance.

Sen's conception of capabilities accords with Young's politics of difference in that his ideas about how to evaluate the progress and success of people in the world is not by measuring what they have, but by taking account of what structural conditions allow and/or enable them to do. While the distributive paradigm points to whether one has the appropriate amount of nonmaterial social goods, the tack taken by Young and Sen, what I will call the liberatory paradigm—the one we need to facilitate a political economy toward well­being—points to whether one can take advantage of, or exercise and enact the activities associated with, living well. In this way, the distributive para­digm imagines people and their just portion as being determined by what characteristics they are said to possess, the liberatory paradigm, to what evi­dence shows they are able to do. Further, since the distributive paradigm asks only "What do you have,” the only referent is the individual—no context, other than the rules that have been deduced, is necessary. For the second way of seeing the world, the context is essential to the assessment of capability and justice and to the ability toward flourishing polities. Since the liberatory paradigm relies on situated individuals and cannot be deduced from behind a veil or any other Archimedean point, it takes the asymmetrical positions of social groups seriously and takes the recognition of patterned asymmetry (systemic injustice) to be politically essential.

This meaning-giving social context is organized in and through institu­tions and structured by the habits, rules, norms, and law that characterize the condition of their enactment. What we find is that this social, institu­tional, and structured context may, and empirically often does, prevent peo­ple from exercising or enacting their claim to social goods even when they may be said to have, or be possessors of, those goods according to rules and law. This happens because while individuals exist in the world as irreducible pluralities, the world cannot and does not apprehend them that way. From the moment of their birth, people are in relation—situated with regard to the other things in the world. And they share similar (though never identical) situations with others. Which of these situations are deemed significant are matters of custom and negotiation, but the fact of this situatedness is ines­capable. Furthermore, we find, those who are similarly situated often have similar chances to exercise their capabilities with regard to social goods. A paradigm that concerns itself only with what people have, rather than with what people can do, is unrealistic and eventually fails to help people make sense of their realities because it is a conception that ignores the world, even as it attempts to order it. The political upheaval of the first two decades of the twenty-first century gives an inkling of the political danger that obtains when dominant paradigms no longer help people make sense of the world, their place in it, and what they can do to maintain and improve it.

One limitation of Sen's approach compared to Young's is that he does not take asymmetrical power, and the oppression and domination it evinces, se­riously enough. Sen insists that the capability approach is not methodologi­cal individualism, although “capabilities are characteristics of individual ad­vantages” (Sen 2009, 296). Still, he contends, “the capability approach does not assume... detachment, its concern with people's ability to live the kind of lives they have reason to value brings in social influences both in terms of what they value... and what influences operate on their values” (244). Sen ultimately argues that groups rely on the value judgments of individu­als to figure out what is valuable for the group, and further asserts that “the increasing tendency toward seeing people in terms of one dominant ‘iden­tity'... is not only an imposition of an external and arbitrary priority, but also the denial of an important liberty of a person who can decide on their respective loyalties to different groups” (246-47). This ignores the fact that there are groups in which ascribed membership—in itself—limits one's capabilities because of systemic injustice, not only the false consciousness of internalized oppression. You need not feel loyal to the group in order to be affected by its status. Groups that experience oppression are not usually voluntary associations. If you are Black, for example, it does not matter one whit the affinity you feel for Black people as a group; statistics show that if a law enforcement officer encounters you and, for whatever reason, fears for their life, you are more likely to end up dead than those otherwise ascribed. Young does a much better job of acknowledging the reality of these asym­metries and the ills that they produce, chiefly the politics of despair that we are wrestling with globally. The remedy for this despair is to embrace a lib- eratory paradigm that can give rise to more accurate assessments of reality and forms of political action and policy that put the cultivation of human life rather than the efficiency of markets and maximization of growth at its center.

Economics and Well-Being

The idea that the political economy needs a massive overhaul toward well­being is not a new one. At least since the Great Recession, many economists have been calling for reform in their discipline at the same time that people have filled the streets around the globe in movements demanding a reckon­ing and governing bodies and political candidates have scrambled for regres­sive (fascist), radical (socialist), or retrenched (liberal) rhetorical cover for the fact that there is wide acknowledgment of a fundamental common problem with no consensus solution. In 2009, leading economists Joseph Stiglitz, Am­artya Sen, and John Paul Fitoussi produced a report for the French Commis­sion on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. In it, the authors argue that economists and states have been measuring so­cial progress in the wrong way, narrowly focusing on gross domestic product (GDP), an indicator of the growth of the size of the economy, while ignoring or failing to collect data on indicators that more accurately measure people's ability to thrive. They quite reasonably point out that “we often draw in­ferences about what are good policies by looking at what policies have pro­moted economic growth; but if our metrics of performance are flawed, so too may be the inferences that we draw” (Stiglitz, Sen, and Fitoussi 2009, 7). Eco­nomic growth and quality of life do not necessarily correlate, particularly in view of environmental degradation, and the practice of assuming the former indicates the latter is a fundamental mistake with pernicious and increas­ingly devastating consequences. Economists J. Allister McGregor and Nicky Pouw point out:

While economic growth is vital at different stages of development to provide the food and incomes to bring populations out of absolute poverty, when we delve deeper into the historical and present day effects of growth, it is apparent that it does not always equate with improvement in our broader conception of well-being. While material conditions may improve, other as­pects [of] well-being may suffer (e.g. the quality of the environment that one is able to live in, work-life balance, the social institutions of neighborhood and community). Both the relational and subjective quality-of-life out­comes of well-being are often reduced during development processes that are myopically focused on growth. (McGregor and Pouw 2017, 1134)

They propose that our assessment of economic progress must change its focus from prioritizing the “growth paradigm” to “how to protect and pro­mote sustainable human well-being apriori” (McGregor and Pouw 2017, 1125). This requires a fundamental reorientation of how most people think of the economy. They argue that the foundational metaphor of neoclassical eco­nomics of the “auctioneer” who moves agents to the optimal efficiency of rational action is flawed because there are many optima, not one, as Aristotle pointed out 3,000 years ago. Even so, in an attempt to make this inaccurate model work, economists have employed the idea of average optima, cutting out data that evinces the reality of heterogenous and endogenous prefer­ences. Further, this model refuses to account for the reality that there are many situations in which only suboptimal options present themselves. As Mc­Gregor and Pouw put it: “The optimal point at which the economic agent is behaving rationally and, in a cost-optimizing manner (efficiently) may not be among the possible alternatives. If the person wants to survive in the short run, then it is possible that only suboptimal solutions will be available, for example when people are forced to accept below-minimum wages or infe- rior/harmful working conditions that are detrimental to their health” (1127).

In sum, in the world as it actually exists, the economy is not an objec­tively observable set of phenomenon but instead a socially and politically instituted process of resource allocation in which power differences between resource agents matter profoundly and decision-making is characterized not by uninflected rationality but “by a sense of identity, community and their relationships to others and their environment.” Understanding that what we call the economy is emergent, or the contingent product of interaction within a wider system, helps us to reason from the reality that “resource ex­change between agents is driven not only by relative prices within the nar­rowly defined system, but by a wider range of forces, including: power differ­ences in resource and market access and control; people's culture and social habits; legal rules about factor payment; and concerns about the relationship between the natural environment and production processes” (McGregor and Pouw 2017, 1129).

Well-being, then, should be judged by the combination of “what [people] have (material), how they are able [to] use what they have (relational) and the level of satisfaction or subjective quality of life that they derive from what they have and can do” (McGregor and Pouw 2017, 1125). It is important to underscore that well-being is plural. If people are institutionally enabled to author their own thriving, they will choose to pursue different forms of satisfaction in different ways. Unlike the neoclassical stick figure approxima­tion of the human who is only a rational economic agent pursuing utility maximization of optimal outcomes in accordance with self-interest, an eco­nomics toward well-being understands that “what is an optimal choice for one human being at one point in time is not necessarily an optimal choice for the other,” and that “well-being cannot be achieved by people in isolation; it is achieved through their relationships to others in society” (1132). This insight highlights an important point about the need for a view of econom­ics that accounts for the necessity of cooperation and social integration, on the one hand, and power asymmetry, on the other. In the contemporary po­litical landscape, liberal pluralists tend to downplay power asymmetry and the ways that their historical legacies compound, shaping current relations, while Marxists (though not Marx) tend to downplay the need to respect and encourage plurality in the pursuit of multiple goods in multiple ways, rather than one universal good pursued by methods dictated by states, parties, and regimes.

Answering this skewed view can no longer be achieved by promoting “welfare” as was done in the mid-twentieth century because the logic of so­cial welfare still gives the growth paradigm pride of place. In the twentieth­century reformist view, economic growth is seen as the main provider of improvements in welfare. Growth is seen as providing jobs that increase in­comes that can be invested in consumption, health, and education while at the same time providing the tax base to fund services. In the tradition of nineteenth-century welfare states, social welfare is then provided to those who, for one reason or another, are not able to benefit from economic growth (McGregor and Pouw 2017, 1134).

Therefore, it is not welfare (tolerable material sustenance only) but well­being (flourishing—material sustenance, social connection, subjective as­sessment of well-being) that must be the foundational concept for the transformation of our understanding of the economy and its purpose and possibilities. As Amartya Sen has noted, it is not the things that we have that make us well, but what we can do and achieve with those things (Sen 1985). In point of fact, it is not only what we can do with things that make us well, but also our connections to other people. Economists interested in well-being's effects on organizations and nations, including Alan Krueger, Ed Diener, and John Helliwell, among others, have found that “much of what contributes to well-being happens outside markets” (Crabtree 2008).

Empirical research in both psychology and economics has shown that “al­though at low levels of economic development, income does indeed predict subjective well-being, at somewhat higher levels (say above the median for OECD countries) material well-being has a quite modest effect” (Helliwell and Putnam 2004, 1436). That is, above a modest threshold, more money cannot buy you more happiness. The three things that most consistently impact subjective well-being are material well-being, family circumstances, and health (Easterlin 2004). Interestingly, although our common sense is ori­ented toward ever-more acquisition, after our basic needs are met with some comfort (at a rate of about 20 percent above the median income of the nation we happen to be in), we experience “hedonic adaptation” to greater sums. That is, we simply adapt to making more money and our happiness level does not increase. With family and health, however, our happiness levels continue to increase as we get more good things in those realms (and decreases if we get bad things). Economist Richard Easterlin writes that “each of us has only a fixed amount of time available for family life, health activities, and work. Do we distribute our time in the way that maximizes our happiness? The answer, I believe, is no, [because] we decide how to use our time based on the false belief that more money will make us happier” (32). Easterlin calls this the “money illusion,” which causes people to “allocate an excessive amount of time to monetary goals and shortchange nonpecuniary ends such as fam­ily life and health,” even though social connections and self-care have more potential for increasing our sense of well-being (32). Put more succinctly: “most people could increase their happiness by devoting less time to mak­ing money, and more time to nonpecuniary goals such as family life and health” (33).

Paying attention to the life satisfaction of the individual-in-context mat­ters at the level of society as well. Helliwell and Putnam (2004, 1437) write that “a common finding from research on the correlates of life satisfaction is that subjective well-being is best predicted by the breadth and depth of one's social connections. In fact, people themselves report that good relationships with family members, friends or romantic partners—far more than money or fame—are prerequisites for their happiness. Moreover, the ‘happiness ef­fects' of social capital in these various forms seem to be quite large, compared with the effects of material affluence.” Of course, this is notjust a matter of individual choice. Our political economy is structured such that if one works for a living (and could not live off the capital gains of investments), one's grasp on material comfort is always precarious. This reality obtains for a number of reasons, chief among them that firms, as employers, increas­ingly have monopsony or concentrated buying power. This means that even when labor markets are tight, workers cannot command the wages or work­ing conditions that would allow flourishing lives. Combine this with a work culture in many parts of world that insists one should always be available for work and, if employed, should never complain (unless wages are not paid). But firms are not the only or even primary villains in this state of affairs. The monopsony-creating practices that have become commonplace have been al­lowed by federal governments that simply look the other way as people who work for a living are bled dry by the collusion and outsized political power of those few who do not have to work (Ghilarducci 2019; Naidu, Posner, and Weyl 2018; and Weil 2018).

This work culture has, of course, developed on the foundation of a neolib­eral common sense in which market logic is suitable for all ends and firms and their interests are perceived to be self-evidently more important than workers and their needs, because firms are lionized as “job creators” on whose fate the capacity for endless growth rests. That the empirical picture seems to show that the astronomical growth in economies around the world has not corresponded to a concomitant widespread prosperity and has, in the last two decades, corresponded with a precipitous drop in people's sense of well-being has, until recently, been ignored by those with decision-making power.

As it turns out, participating in the maintenance and governance of their communities is something that contributes to people's sense of well-being. As Helliwell has observed, “People directly value their engagement with oth­ers, including their involvement in the process making public decisions and delivering public services” (Helliwell 2006, C43). For example, psychologist Laura Wray-Lake and her coauthors have found that civic engagement is as­sociated with well-being in US adolescents, particularly civic engagement that causes people to meet and help each other in settings that bring them face-to-face and activities that they perceive to be improving their environ­ment or the environment writ large (Wray-Lake et al. 2017). Likewise, Rashmi Choudhary and Deepali Sharma Gupta, in a study of Indian adolescents, found that civic engagement was tightly correlated with subjective well­being, with a youth's level of civic engagement explaining 58 percent of the variance in the subject's reported well-being (Choudhary and Gupta 2017). Economists Bruno Frey and Alios Stutzer found that among adults, subjec­tive well-being is higher in Swiss cantons that had more frequent consulta­tions with their electors (Frey and Stutzer 2000). Elsewhere, psychologists Michael Chandler and Christopher Lalonde found that several measures of community-level self-government were associated with dramatically lower suicide rates among indigenous communities in British Columbia (Chandler and Lalonde 1998).

Helliwell further observes that social context makes a definitive differ­ence in all areas of people's lives. “Whatever their personality type, they value trust in their neighbourhoods, their workplaces, their public services and their public servants” (Helliwell 2006, C43). More pointedly:

Once the importance of trust and engagement are digested, they might be expected to inform almost every policy decision about the form and delivery of public services. We might expect to see more provision of multi-use pub­lic spaces; more linkage among generations in the provision of care, educa­tion and leisure; provision of better ways for community newcomers to give as well as get public services and social contacts; meshing of voluntary and professional workers in more effective ways; and changing the nature of the lessons and myths that inspire education. In particular, it is incumbent on economists especially, who have been responsible for propagating the myth of economic man, to at least consider the costs of policies that rely too much on its assumed truth. (Helliwell 2006, C43)

As Julie Rose points out in her chapter in this book, it is time to consider that “beyond some level of wealth, people may be better off in a society that ceases to pursue economic growth.” My brief review of the literature on well­being in economics suggests that we should not be investing in the acqui­sition of things (past a certain level of comfort) but should instead be in­vesting in structuring society such that people are able to spend time on their relationships and participate in activities that build and engage with their communities. The key takeaway here is that contrary to the doctrine of the autonomous individual, happiness is not only or primarily an individ­ual trait; it is a characteristic of the individual-in-context, produced by feel­ings of self-esteem, efficacy, and satisfaction that are fashioned in relation with others. Our current political economy inhibits our relations with others with both structural barriers and a commonsense paradigm that privileges growth at the economy-wide level and a desperate (and for most people) never-ending push for material sustenance at the individual level. Ordering society in this way makes for a miserable situation for most people most of the time. We can and should do better.

We can begin to do so by incorporating measures of well-being into the data that we collect to inform us about our political economy. Daniel Kahne- man and Alan Krueger have developed a method of measuring well-being in the populace using “hedonic” time-allocation surveys, which ask a repre­sentative sample of people to keep diaries of their activities during a two- or three-day period and record their subjective reaction to those activities. The data can then be averaged across individuals for a national-level measure of well-being or disaggregated for population-specific measures (Krueger 2006, 5). Such accounts can give policy analysts objective measures of average or median subjective states. In other words, “national accounts of subjective well-being can reflect many different aspects of quality of life beyond the economy, and thus serve as an efficient way to assess many different aspects of quality of life” (Diener, Oishi and Lucas 2015, 234).

A Political Economy Toward Flourishing

At this historical moment, we are at what political scientists call “a criti­cal juncture.” Paul Pearson writes that “junctures are 'critical' because they place institutions on paths or trajectories, which are then very difficult to alter” (Pearson 2004, 135). The dissolution of and disillusionment with the dominant ideology of the last century has been unsettling, but the upside of being unsettled is the opportunity to think anew, to consider not only how we understand the world but also how many of us have misunderstood it, granting us the opportunity to reconceive the principles and parameters of the world we share. We are in a unique period when we have an opportunity to not only pay attention to the empirical reality of the increasing misery of the polis but also to make moral choices and institutional changes that aim to alleviate some of that misery and, more boldly, to reimagine and restruc­ture the economy toward the end of enabling most people to live well. This requires letting go of some of the notions that have been regarded as com­mon sense for (at least) the past century: that the autonomous individual is best conceived as unbound by context and unfettered by social ties and that profit and efficiency represent the highest economic goods. We have to come to believe that people deserve to live well simply because they are people and that our society ought to be geared toward making that both possible and probable. We can do so by displacing profit, efficiency, and austerity from the center of the catechism of late-capitalist virtue and instead placing the lived experience of the least well off as the touchstone at the foundation of twenty-first-century political economy. We must do this not only because it is a good in itself, but also because it is necessary for the health and likely the survival of democracy.

Notes

1. Dollar amounts are based on a family of three.

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