The Wellbeing Economy Forum in Reykjavik: in search of alternatives to Davos and the far-right
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 2024 Wellbeing Economy Forum highlighted diverse perspectives on the creation of a wellbeing economy (WE), which, in general terms, aims for sustainable wellbeing for people and planet and, for some supporters, represents a post-growth alternative to neoliberal capitalism. The event was hosted by the government of Iceland, one of five Wellbeing Economy Governments (WEGo) with shared ambitions of creating a WE, and also attracted representatives from major international organizations, WE activists, academics, and others. This Brief Report is based on participant-observation at the Forum, supplemented by a review of publicly available videos of selected presentations, and also informed by existing literature on the WE and WEGo. It provides an account of the state and range of WE thinking illustrated at the Forum, including the degree to which post-growth thinking was present, whether signs of a rightward drift among some WEGo nations under new conservative leadership were visible, and consideration of the evident strengths and limitations of the WE concept. The Forum took place days after a surge in support for far-right parties in European Parliament elections, which cast a shadow over the event and raised a pressing question: can a WE be a unifying concept to resist the rise of the far-right while addressing social and ecological crises? Although it is impossible to answer this question definitively, the Brief Report concludes by arguing that a WE vision that offers minimal change is not up to that task, but a more ambitious and transformative WE project might be.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it