Employment
With an evidence-based well-being approach, policies around employment and the labour market could also look different to the way they do now. Specifically, if labour market policy took stronger account of well-being evidence, more emphasis might be placed on prioritising full employment, on the grounds that unemployment is strongly negatively associated with well-being. Its effects go substantially beyond just the loss of income, and it also has a long term scarring effect, with lowered well-being persisting beyond the period of unemployment. High levels of unemployment are also associated with low well-being amongst the employed, probably because they create fear of unemployment. Clearly, prioritising full employment would involve trade-offs with other employment policy goals, such as flexibility for employers, as well as with other competing macro-economic goals such as controlling inflation( which evidence suggests, has a much weaker overall impact on well-being than unemployment). Using a well-being framework to help identify priorities could ensure that these employment and macro-economic decisions were made with the ultimate goal of creating good lives always at the forefront of the agenda.
The list of policy areas could go on – as our recently published review of the evidence demonstrates. But the main point is this: the well-being agenda does not‘ belong’ to the political right. It belongs to anyone who shares the vision of a socially just, sustainable society in which all people can flourish, now and in the future.
' Climate change is the human rights struggle of our time '
Naomi Klein( author and social activist)
photo credit: Ed Kashi
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