A new era of feelgood politics

It might say something about the hard-headedness, or maybe hard-heartedness, of politics that words like ‘‘feelgood’’ are seen as synonyms for wishywashy and naive. Politics for the past 30 years, during what might be called the neo-liberal era, has been underpinned by an unwavering belief that economics is a science. Feelings don’t come into it.

But there has been a growing counter-narrative that says measures of a country’s success and progress should also track the wellbeing of its people. It is not enough to simply measure gross domestic product (GDP) or read a balance sheet. There should be other targets, other goals. We can ask whether our economy is improving our lives or if it is having a negative effect.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Finance Minister Grant Robertson signalled such a shift in direction during the closing stages of the new Government’s scene-setting 100-day plan. Ardern said that future Budgets would be assessed for their impact on child poverty, an issue of personal importance that was the focus of her first major speech of the year. But her promise to introduce new measures to track wellbeing go even further by measuring the impact of Budget spending on natural, social, human and possibly even cultural capital.

Treasury has been put to work on devising a living standards framework. Ardern expects the new measures to be ready by the 2019 Budget.

To reset the priorities of government in this way is a quiet revolution. It would also make us a world leader, which we tend to like. To measure wellbeing has the flavour of a progressive, Scandinavian society that, in our more optimistic moments, we believe New Zealand also espouses. While such ideas have been discussed and written about by the OECD and other organisations for a number of years, with the OECD issuing its own guidelines on measuring subjective wellbeing in 2013, Ardern’s announcement will make New Zealand the first country to include wellbeing as an economic indicator.

A wellbeing measure could also be seen as the natural outgrowth of longrunning arguments about child poverty and inequality that quickly became frustrating because of the lack of evidence. People found it hard to agree on basic definitions or data, so the human cost of economic and political decisions was marginalised by more traditional economic concerns.

How will it work? Ardern says a policy that increases GDP but also destroys the environment, fragments communities and drives down wages will not be considered a success. We know already that depression is a growing epidemic in the developed world, despite, or perhaps because of, a focus on work and prosperity.

We can expect resistance from some about the value of these measures and the Government will have to be certain that Treasury’s numbers stand up. There will be an enormous amount of scrutiny in 2019, in both business and political circles. A move as bold as this must be underpinned by precision and certainty.

But there is no question that this is a paradigm shift. Few things could be more important than measuring quality of life.

To measure wellbeing has the flavour of a progressive society.