What is a Wellbeing Economy?

A ‘Wellbeing Economy’ (WE) prioritizes human and ecological wellbeing instead of material growth. The WE movements calls for putting this redefined goal at the center of policy-making. In doing so, the WE is designed to cater to human and planetary needs, ensuring they are equally met. It thus joins other ‘post-growth’ proposals, when arguing that the goals of the economy need to be redefined. Instead of increasing material consumption we should collectively fight for an increment in multidimensional wellbeing.

The WE starts from the assumptions that growth do not correlate with an increase in well-being, and that for countries still facing poverty and deprivation, there is enough global resources to distribute and ensure that they too can guarantee their population a sufficient level of well-being. This notion of abundance, instead of scarcity, provided resources are more equally distributed is behind the WE’s assumption that we can forego growth as a center goal for economic activity.

Some Examples of Wellbeing Indexes

• The Doughnut Economics Model – https://doughnuteconomics.org/about-doughnut-economics.
  
• The Social Progress Index – https://www.socialprogress.org/social-progress-index.

What to read about the wellbeing economy?

• Resources of the Well-Being Alliance – https://weall.org/resources
• Boyce, C., Coscieme, L., Sommer, C., Wallace, J., 2020. Understanding Wellbeing. WEAll Briefing Papers: Little Summaries of Big Issues. https://weall.org/wp-content/uploads/WEAll-Briefing-Understanding-Wellbeing_July2020-1.pdf
• Fioramonti, L., Coscieme, L., Costanza, R., Kubiszewski, I., Trebeck, K., Wallis, S., Roberts, D., Mortensen, L.F., Pickett, K.E., Wilkinson, R. and Ragnarsdottír, K.V., 2022. Wellbeing economy: An effective paradigm to mainstream post-growth policies?. Ecological Economics, 192, p.107261.