The wellbeing economy: Possibilities and limits in bringing sufficiency from the margins into the mainstream
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The idea of sufficiency faces great obstacles in contemporary political economies in which production and consumption growth has long been considered imperative. Despite evidence supporting calls for a sufficiency-oriented, post-growth approach to environmental challenges, only pro-growth environmental perspectives have found significant mainstream political support until now. However, one recent formulation that has a strong affinity with a sufficiency approach—a wellbeing economy—has found growing support among mainstream political actors including governments and international organizations. Does the growing support for a wellbeing economy represent the long-sought breakthrough for a sufficiency-oriented, post-growth environmental approach? To help answer this question, we conduct case studies of New Zealand, Scotland, and Iceland—the three founders of the Wellbeing Economy Governments (WEGo). These nations have (to varying degrees) taken steps to downplay the centrality of economic growth and instead highlight wellbeing as the ultimate goal. They have also moved “beyond GDP” by introducing new wellbeing measurements and using them in policymaking. However, movement in a post-growth direction is limited by continuing dependence on economic growth to achieve intermediate goals, such as employment creation and provision of welfare state services, that are closely associated with the goal of wellbeing. We therefore characterize the emerging practice of the wellbeing economy as a “weak post-growth” approach. To become a “strong post-growth” perspective, it needs to be linked to a much more challenging project of disentangling contemporary societies' dependence on economic growth. The article includes a discussion of ways that WEGo nations could contribute to addressing that considerable challenge and build on the sufficiency-oriented elements evident in the wellbeing economy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.101 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.032 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.023 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".