The article by Katharina Lima de Miranda and Dennis J. Snower proposes an ambitious rethink of the way that public policy is evaluated and a nice conceptual tool kit for thinking about socioeconomic problems of the present age. Lima de Miranda and Snower’s work is motivated by a number of related phenomena. One is a sense of widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo in Western democracies that is not picked up in conventional measures of well-being. There has been a stream of research tying this dissatisfaction to recent political events, most notably Brexit in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump in the United States. There is, furthermore, consensus that solving the problems of the twenty-first century will require new approaches and new ways of measuring success in terms of human flourishing.
Lima de Miranda and Snower highlight that most of the present measures of human well-being are...
University of California Press