You have full access to this open access chapter. This chapter summarises key points in the wellbeing economics framework and illustrates how it can be used to guide decision-making. The first section lists the 24 propositions that emerged as key points in the analysis of the preceding eight chapters. The second section introduces a diagram that integrates inputs into wellbeing capabilities 7 types of capital stock with outputs of wellbeing capabilities 11 wellbeing indicators developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
The diagram is called the wellbeing fabric. The remainder of the chapter illustrates how the wellbeing fabric can be applied at different levels of human choices, before a brief conclusion. You have full access to this open access chapter, Download chapter PDF. That statement holds that growth is a necessary, although perhaps not sufficient, condition for wellbeing.
This understanding leaves policy advisors free to focus on growth in the first instance, while allowing for supplementary policies to address other aspects of wellbeing. A sharp distinction is made between economic policy, which is required to focus primarily on growth, and social policy, which is permitted to have a wider focus on welfare.
This book rejects that two-tier approach. It has argued that how economies grow can have large impacts on wellbeing, for better or for worse. Economic growth over decades, for example, has not solved major wellbeing problems such as affordable housing, living wages and the end of child poverty.
This book has argued that the current approach to the design of economic policy must change, to directly address the wellbeing of persons. The book has therefore developed a wellbeing economics framework built on the capabilities approach introduced by Amartya Sen , and Martha Nussbaum , Important foundations for the framework were set out in the first chapter, which explained that the objective is to contribute to enhanced wellbeing of persons by expanding the capabilities of persons to lead the kinds of lives they value, and have reason to value, through different types of capital investment at different levels of human choice.
