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The primary purpose of economics is to contribute to enhanced wellbeing of persons. Economists have often assumed this is best achieved through high economic growth. Nevertheless, experience shows that the pursuit of growth for its own sake can result in policies that harm the wellbeing of large numbers of people. Threats of global climate change, as well as other environmental and social damage caused by current patterns of economic growth, intensify this concern. This first chapter argues for a new framework—wellbeing economics—to guide private and public sector efforts for expanding the capabilities of persons to lead the kinds of lives they value and have reason to value. The wellbeing economics framework focuses on seven types of capital investment at seven levels of human choice. This typology provides the structure for the book’s remaining chapters.

The wellbeing economics framework begins with individual persons seeking to create the kinds of lives they value, and have reason to value. These persons are able to make time-use choices they reason will promote wellbeing, influenced by cultural values, personal abilities and social capabilities. The attention to choices about time-use is because persons have equal time to allocate each day, and because time-use choices influence monetary values recorded in market transactions. Persons can expand capabilities through formal education and through relevant experience, which are time-use choices that economists describe as investment in human capital. Progress in wellbeing can be monitored using measures of subjective and objective wellbeing, exemplified in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s .

This chapter focuses on wellbeing within households and families, paying careful attention to child development. This is important from the perspective of the child, of the child’s parents, of wider society and globally. Investment in cultural capital enhances wellbeing by creating opportunities for persons to express, develop, transform and pass on to the next generation their cultural inheritance. Men and women can have equal capabilities for wellbeing; yet studies show that significant sacrifices of time and financial costs for parents are carried disproportionately by women, who are also more vulnerable to intimate violence. After accounting for housing costs, nearly one in three children in the United Kingdom are growing up in households with income below 60 per cent of the country’s median equivalised income. Thus, the chapter reveals serious problems that can be overlooked when policy advice focuses on economic growth rather than on wellbeing.

This chapter explores how humans collaborate with others outside their families and households to expand capabilities for wellbeing, particularly by creating and participating in civil society institutions. The chapter also analyses social capital and how it can be increased through mechanisms that include: learning in schools; participation in networks; enforcement of norms; development of societal aspirations; and efforts for social inclusion. There are tensions between cultural capital (discussed in the previous chapter) and social capital (this chapter) since access to the services of social capital—especially to bridging social capital—is much easier for people who share the cultural capital of the community’s dominant social group. Policy can enhance capabilities for wellbeing by ensuring persons are not disadvantaged as a result of ethnicity or other personal characteristic in their equitable access to services from all forms of capital.

The market economy supports human wellbeing. This chapter offers evidence for this observation, while recognising that markets need rules, customs and institutions to work well. A key market institution is the firm, which combines different types of capital to maintain specialist capabilities for supplying goods and services valued by their customers. This expands the potential for wellbeing, but a large number of jobs pay less than the real living wage, with a strong gender bias, which diminishes wellbeing. The chapter analyses economic capital, comprised of physical capital and financial capital. Growth in economic capital has increased material living standards for billions of people, but recent economic development is also associated with cumulative environmental damage, episodes of financial instability and greater concentration of wealth.

This chapter marks a significant change in the book’s narrative, as the analysis moves from private citizens to the public sphere. Its starting point is that good government can develop distinctive capabilities to ensure that certain types of goods and services, especially those involving externalities and economic public goods, are provided for persons to use to enhance wellbeing. For some policies, particularly where local residents can improve outcomes by participating in policy design or implementation, local government can do this better than central government. In this context, the chapter explains Ostrom’s theory of co-production of local government services and applies it to regional economic development. The chapter also discusses natural capital. Since ecosystem services provided by the natural environment can be diminished by human activity, investment in natural capital is required to maintain wellbeing.

This chapter analyses how a Nation State can contribute to enhanced wellbeing. It begins with its responsibility to act on behalf of citizens as wise custodian of the market economy and welfare state within its borders. This requires central government to adopt an integrated and balanced approach to all its economic and welfare policies. The second half of the chapter focuses on the concept of knowledge capital as a driver of wellbeing. Knowledge creation can be an economic public good, which creates a distinctive opportunity for a well-functioning state to contribute to expanded capabilities for wellbeing through policies that foster the growth and use of knowledge. Knowledge is essential to the operations of the Nation State, whose civil service can offer a specialist capability for creating, collating, synthesising, utilising and disseminating knowledge capital for the common good.

This chapter examines how persons can collaborate for the common good of the global community through participation in international non-governmental organisations, multinational corporations and intergovernmental organisations. It also explains the collaboration of researchers globally to develop knowledge by following well-established norms and protocols to build an interconnected corpus of publications that offer evidence for falsifiable propositions. An example of researchers contributing to global efforts for wellbeing is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The chapter introduces the metaphor of diplomatic capital to represent institutions and norms designed to foster cross-cultural collaborations in order to strengthen capabilities of the global community to act together for the common good.

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.