While current happiness research has made significant progress, happiness policy , by contrast, is based on two simplistic assumptions: first, that politicians and public administrators are sufficiently informed about what influences subjective life satisfaction; and second, that politicians and public administrators will solely pursue the well-being of the population. However, in a democracy, happiness policy takes the results of happiness research to be only one ingredient (albeit an important one) in the wider political process. Critically, a political discourse that engages citizens, rather than a technocratic approach, is the way forward when considering the advantages and disadvantages of particular happiness policies.

This paper explores a new theoretical and empirical approach to the assessment of human well-being, relevant to current challenges of social fragmentation in the presence of globalization and technological advance. We present two indexes of well-being—solidarity (S) and agency (A)—to be considered alongside the standard indexes of material gain (G) and environmental sustainability (E). The four indexes—SAGE—form a balanced dashboard for evaluating well-being. The solidarity index covers the needs of humans as social creatures, living in societies that generate a sense of social belonging. The agency index involves people’s need to influence their fate through their own efforts. While “economic prosperity” (material gain) is conventionally measured through GDP per capita, “social prosperity” can be measured through our solidarity and agency indexes, alongside environmental sustainability that is measured through the Environmental Performance Index. The SAGE dashboard is meant to provide a “sage” approach to assessing well-being, since it aims to denote sagacity in the pursuit and satisfaction of fundamental human needs and purposes. Many of the prominent challenges of the 21st century, including the dissatisfaction of population groups who feel left behind by globalization and technological advance, may be viewed in terms of a “decoupling” of economic prosperity from social prosperity. We present a theoretical model that provides a new perspective on the welfare effects of globalization and automation. The dashboard is meant to provide an empirical basis for mobilizing action in government, business, and civil society to promote a recoupling of economic and social prosperity.

The article traces the emergence of the novel phenomenon known as “moral remembrance” (MR). MR refers to the standardized set of norms, promoted through the human rights infrastructures of world polity, in which societies are supposed to deal with the legacies of mass human rights abuses. This vision has adopted, over the past forty years, the three main principles of “facing the past,” “a duty to remember,” and having a “victim-centered approach.” Following the emergence of MR, I demonstrate what happens when the human rights–sponsored MR clashes with the nation-state-sponsored memorialization agenda and why decoupling from the “victim-centered approach” results, more often than not, in hierarchies of victimhood and, consequently, the production of new societal inequalities. I suggest here that the relationship between MR and the nationalist use of memorialization processes needs to be understood from the perspective of economic corruption, the politics of opportunism, and competing authorities.

In the larger public debate, it is often suggested that neoliberalism has been swept aside by an upsurge of what are commonly referred to as right-wing populist movements, parties, and figures but are, in fact, authoritarian ones. It is the more or less explicit assumption of this narrative—namely, that there is a conflictual and dichotomous relationship between neoliberalism and authoritarianism—which is the focal point of the critical inquiry contained in this paper, thus building on recent scholarly accounts, which also challenge this assumption. The argument proceeds in two broad steps, prefaced by a theoretical-historical conceptualization of neoliberalism. First, an admittedly cursory survey of authoritarian parties and movements is conducted to show that there is ample reference to typical neoliberal ideas and arguments in their party platforms or concrete reform proposals. Secondly, the issue is approached from the converse perspective in order to ascertain the extent to which there are authoritarian potentialities in neoliberal thought. Here, calls for a strong state by some neoliberal thinkers are discussed as well as the link between some of them and the military dictatorship in Chile. Finally, the paper argues that the neoliberal view of politics is—possibly inadvertently but still systematically—drawn toward authoritarian politics and the respective actors because neoliberal thinkers largely lack any alternative option to account for the possibility of neoliberal reform. Neoliberalism and authoritarianism are not intrinsically tied to each other, but even less are they inherently opposed to one another; an amalgam of “authoritarian neoliberalism” thus seems far from impossible and may very well become the dominant shape of neoliberalism to come.