The short answer: it depends. And what it depends upon is the degree to which policies invoked under such the economic rubric of wellbeing succeed in constraining capitalism’s growth imperative. Growth can evoke wondrously positive images, as when I watch my grandnephews stumble through infancy to toddlerhood. But in economic terms, growth remains trapped within capitalism’s reliance on increasing levels of material consumption that is pushing humanity beyond what the Club of Rome describes as our ‘safe operating space’.
Since the start of the pandemic and government plans to ‘build back better’ there has been a push to prioritize green growth and tame somewhat the predatory and disequalizing outcomes of neoliberalism’s half-century of unfettered capitalism. Given the continued rise in emissions, the political capitulation to Big Oil, and the still escalating appropriation of economic wealth by the billionaire class, economic reforms to date have not proved as successful as needed. Green growth and techno-optimism drown out calls for fundamental economic transformation. Enter a new rhetoric of ‘wellbeing economics,’ defined at as the pursuit of a globally equitable allocation of the material (hence also financial) resources people need for a healthy life whilst consuming within planetary ecosystem boundaries.
The World Health Organization’s Council on the Economics of Health for All (2021-2023) embraced wellbeing economics in its call for governments to actively shape markets to deliver health, social, and environmental goals. Among its policy-to-do list: increased progressive taxation, suspended or cancelled poor country debt repayments, trillion dollar transfers from have- to have-not countries, and an end to the GDP monopoly over wellbeing metrics. The Earth for All (E4A) collaboration, arising with the 50th anniversary of the Club of Rome’s seminal The Limits to Growth study, identifies a similar range of policies modelled on ensuring a livable planet when humans greet the next century. Its policy asks are more specific and differ little than what progressive political movements have been advocating for decades. It also comes a bit closer than the WHO Council to calling out capitalism as the root problem.
Both initiatives argue the survival necessity of governments and their citizenry embracing wellbeing economics. Elements of neo-Keynesian, neo-Marxian, steady-state, postgrowth/degrowth, feminist, doughnut, and green growth economics are variously referenced or inferred. Buttressing this ideological melange are non-Western and Indigenous concepts such as South America’s buen vivir, South Africa’s ubuntu, and South Asia’s eco-swaraj, with their emphases on democratic localism and collective living in harmony with nature giving wellbeing economies a universalist veneer. Most recently, the Japanese Marxist philosopher, Kohei Saito, has added to the wellbeing armamentarium with the English translation of his best-selling Capital in the Anthropocene which doubles down on ‘degrowth communism’ as the only means to ensure human and planetary health.
We can set aside the critiques of Saito’s ‘degrowth manifesto’ for its reading of Marxist theory (a body of work on which few self-declared Marxists have ever agreed) or that degrowth is not needed since green technology will eventually save us. There is a residual trickle-down neoliberalism to the latter notion since it is the 1% of us with our ‘imperial lifestyles’ (as Saito describes) that still enjoy first and most the benefits green technology and innovation might offer. If globalized under Big Tech’s watch this reliance on capitalism’s necessity for innovation and growth would rapidly consume all the material resources needed to provide the necessary ‘green energy’. While degrowth’s basic argument, that we cannot endlessly exploit natural resources on a finite planet, is empirically sound, it is also politically unpalatable. Wellbeing economics, it is suggested, offers a more acceptable way to present the same arguments. With its own global Wellbeing Economy Alliance (nominally supported by hundreds of organizations, researchers, and local hubs) it joins Doughnut Economics’ network of local mobilizations and earlier (eco-just infused) Healthy Cities initiatives in efforts to catalyze political support for step-wise change from the bottom (grassroots) up. Scaling up to national/population-wide policies has so far been elusive, although there are some rumblings of government buy-in. In 2020 five countries (Finland, Scotland, Wales, Iceland, and New Zealand) formed a network of Wellbeing Economy Governments (WEgo). Since 2021 the Euro WHO office has supported development of policy-level understanding of wellbeing economies across the EU region, alongside other WEGo countries. Many OECD member states (the club of rich nations) are said to be pursuing some wellbeing assessment initiatives. Therein lies the shortcoming.
Although there are renewed efforts to develop alternative policy-guiding metrics to the environmentally and equity-blind measures that form the GDP, there is less evidence of how such an exercise in mandatory reporting on new social indicators is altering fiscal, financial, economic, and even environmental political decision-making. As one example, the UK’s quality of life reporting team in its May 2024 report noted, without comment, how wellbeing measures were tracking downwards. Wellbeing economies (should) demand more than mere reporting on how all but the elites are faring worse. Last year the New Zealand WEGo member ambitiously tabled the world’s first ‘wellbeing budget’ targeting 5% of its overall spending to wellbeing initiatives, flagging more than a performative nod in the direction of a wellbeing economy. It was then defeated by a pro-business anti-tax pro-austerity conservative government casting some doubt on future wellbeing budgets.
On my optimistic days, when I hang out with friends, family, nature, and my two grandnephews, I resonate with the hopefulness of the simplicity of wellbeing economics. On my less optimistic ones, spent too long alone with my computer screens, I fear the existential wrath of geopolitical competition, austerity-created populist anger, exclusionary identity-branding, and the hard-right drift to charismatic authoritarianism. Borrowing from the Mi’kmaq notion of ‘two-eyed seeing’, an Indigenous way of accepting the strength that arises from viewing the world in its dialectical complexity, I hold both futures at once, striving for the first by committing to resist the second. And to plotting escape routes out of a capitalism that is no longer fit for human purpose.
About the writer
Ronald Labonté (PhD, FCAHS, HonFFPH) is Professor Emeritus in the School of Public Health and Epidemiology, University of Ottawa. He has enjoyed a 45-year career in public health spanning government positions, international consultancies, and universities.
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