Wellbeing vs Wellbeing

A word in two opposing worlds

Photo by Diogo Nunes on Unsplash

The word “wellbeing” looks harmless on the page. It fits neatly into speeches and strategy documents, and it reassures us that someone, somewhere, is finally paying attention to more than GDP. Governments launch “wellbeing budgets,” corporations create wellbeing officers, economists talk about a “wellbeing economy” as if a small shift in vocabulary could change the trajectory of a civilisation. Yet that same word is being pulled in two very different directions. One version of wellbeing is perfectly compatible with business as usual, provided growth keeps going. The other insists that if we take wellbeing seriously, the growth story itself has to be rewritten, and in some places brought to an end.

The first lives comfortably inside neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is not just a taste for markets in the abstract. It is a policy and ideological project that elevates competition, privatisation and deregulation into organising principles for whole societies, while shifting economic power from public institutions to private capital. Citizens become consumers, public services are opened to profit-making, and governments are judged on how well they foster business confidence and international competitiveness. In this frame, inequality, precarity and environmental damage are unfortunate but manageable side effects. When the language of wellbeing appears inside such a system, it does not arrive as a revolutionary outsider. It arrives as a management upgrade.

You can see this in the way many “wellbeing economy” initiatives are framed. The argument goes like this: if people are healthier, less stressed and more socially connected, they will be more productive, more innovative and less of a fiscal burden. Investment in wellbeing becomes a route to higher growth, and higher growth then generates the tax revenue needed to fund more wellbeing programmes. This circular promise shows up in European discussions of an “economy of wellbeing,” in OECD reports on inclusive growth, and in the strategies of the Wellbeing Economy Governments partnership, where New Zealand, Scotland and others experiment with new indicators while keeping a growth-oriented macroeconomic framework.

Within this logic, wellbeing is a means before it is an end. Mental health, social cohesion and physical health matter because they stabilise labour markets, reduce welfare costs and improve “human capital.” The preferred tools remain familiar: dashboards of indicators to sit alongside GDP, behavioural nudges to shape individual choices, targeted spending that leaves underlying property relations and profit imperatives intact. A government can claim to be building a wellbeing economy while continuing to subsidise fossil fuels, court foreign investors and measure its international status by quarterly growth rates.

There is a deeper layer to this story. Neoliberal societies generate a particular kind of consumption that some economists call “defensive.” When air quality deteriorates, people buy air filters. When public transport is unreliable, they buy cars. When work becomes more stressful and insecure, they pay for therapy, supplements and mindfulness apps. When climate chaos makes certain regions less livable, those who can afford it move to safer zones and pay a premium for insurance. In each case, money is spent not to expand possibilities or joy, but to shield oneself from harms that are themselves products of the economic model.

Defensive consumption shows up as growth in the national accounts. It looks like success. Yet it is a symptom of a system that externalises damage and then sells partial protection from that damage back to the people it has made vulnerable. A neoliberal framing of wellbeing rarely names this pattern directly. Instead, it reframes defensive measures as opportunities. Growth in private security is “job creation.” Rising sales of stress-related pharmaceuticals indicate a “strong health sector.” Digital wellbeing apps are celebrated as innovations. What is being optimised here is the resilience of a growth regime, not the conditions that would make people less reliant on such defences in the first place.

A degrowth framing of wellbeing starts from almost the opposite intuition. Degrowth is usually defined by ecological economists as a deliberate, democratic downscaling of production and consumption in high-income economies, in order to reduce energy and material throughput while securing or improving human wellbeing. It takes seriously the evidence that economic activity and resource use remain tightly coupled at a global scale, and that there is little sign of the absolute decoupling at the speed and scale required to stay within planetary boundaries. If this coupling holds, then serious climate and biodiversity policy will, at least in the rich world, slow growth or reverse it. The question then becomes: how do we design societies where this is not a catastrophe, but a path to better lives?

In that context, wellbeing cannot be a lubricant for more throughput. It becomes a criterion for deciding which economic activities should be expanded, which transformed and which phased out. Degrowth thinkers argue that many sectors of today’s economies are not just environmentally destructive, they are socially corrosive, or exist mainly to repair the damage done elsewhere. Advertising industries that intensify dissatisfaction, planned obsolescence that forces constant replacement of goods, speculative finance that inflates housing costs, and fossil fuel extraction that destabilises the climate all produce harms that downstream actors then monetise through defensive goods and services. A degrowth approach treats shrinking these sectors as a condition for genuine wellbeing, not as unfortunate collateral damage.

Because of this, the policy frontier looks different. Degrowth-oriented proposals often centre on universal basic services, democratically owned energy and housing, shorter working hours, and the expansion of care work and low-throughput cultural activities. The aim is to secure a high quality of life through access and time, rather than through ever-rising private consumption. Wellbeing here lives in the reliability of public goods, the strength of social ties, and the stability of ecosystems, more than in the churn of market transactions. When material throughput is intentionally reduced, the system must compensate by redistributing resources, decommodifying essentials and sharing labour, or else the transition will deepen inequality and insecurity.

The contrast becomes clear if you take a concrete field like working time. In a neoliberal wellbeing frame, experiments with a four-day work week are justified primarily by gains in productivity and mental health. Firms are praised when they maintain output while workers report less stress and more satisfaction. The pilot is counted as a success if the company remains competitive and the fiscal base is not harmed. In a degrowth frame, reduced working hours matter for different reasons. They are a way to share available paid work more fairly, to cut production in ecologically damaging sectors, and to free time for care, community and political engagement. Lower aggregate output in some areas is not a bug. It is the point, provided everyone’s basic needs are guaranteed.

Housing offers another useful lens. A wellbeing economy initiative inside a growth paradigm might support urban green spaces, cycling infrastructure and community hubs, while continuing to rely on private developers and property speculation to drive construction and municipal revenue. Rising neighbourhood desirability then feeds gentrification, and the people whose wellbeing was supposedly being improved find themselves priced out. Degrowth-oriented housing policy leans instead toward decommodified social housing, community land trusts and strict rent control, even when that constrains speculative investment and depresses certain kinds of growth. Here, wellbeing is tied to stability and non-market access rather than to asset appreciation.

It might seem, on first glance, that wellbeing economy advocates and degrowth proponents are natural allies. Some scholars argue that wellbeing framing can bring post-growth ideas into the political mainstream by using softer language and focusing on shared values. There are indeed actors inside the wellbeing economy space who see it as an explicitly post-growth project, oriented to sufficiency and ecological limits. Yet empirical studies of Wellbeing Economy Governments suggest that, so far, the shift in rhetoric has not translated into a decisive move away from growth as a central goal. Strategic documents and budgets tend to combine wellbeing talk with familiar aims of productivity, competitiveness and business friendliness.

This is where the difference in framings matters. A neoliberal growth framing of wellbeing is easy to adopt because it requires no fundamental change in who holds power or how wealth is generated. It fits naturally into existing coordination architectures. Ministries of finance can incorporate wellbeing indicators into their models without abandoning GDP. Central banks can talk about the distributional impacts of interest rate decisions while maintaining a mandate rooted in growth and price stability. Corporations can point to wellbeing programmes as evidence of social responsibility while continuing to rely on just-in-time supply chains and relentless cost-cutting.

A degrowth framing threatens those arrangements. If wellbeing is not improved by more throughput beyond a certain threshold, and if that throughput is destabilising the conditions for life, then some profitable activities must shrink or disappear. Power over land, energy and money must be redistributed. Growth dependence, the structural need for expansion to maintain employment, profits and debt servicing, must be unwound. That is not something a system can achieve by adding a new column to a statistical report. It involves conflict, because those who benefit most from the current regime will resist any attempt to cut their flows of income, influence and status.

You can feel the political discomfort here. Wellbeing, when attached to growth, offers reassurance. It tells voters that they can have cleaner air, better jobs and stronger communities without confronting limits, without questioning who owns what, without reducing the scale of industries they have been told are essential. Degrowth, when attached to wellbeing, withdraws that reassurance. It asks people in rich countries to imagine a good life that does not involve rising incomes and consumption, and to support policies that may shrink certain sectors and alter familiar landscapes. At the same time, it insists on global justice, since any downscaling in the Global North must make space for increased resource use where people still lack basic necessities.

The resulting tension runs through contemporary debates. Some argue that wellbeing economy language can be radicalised from within, that once governments start taking non-monetary indicators seriously, they will eventually confront the contradictions of pursuing growth in an already high-consumption context. Others worry that wellbeing talk will simply act as a gentle varnish on a neoliberal order, absorbing dissent and softening critique while the material drivers of crisis continue untouched. Both possibilities are open in principle. What decides between them is not the vocabulary alone, but which framing of wellbeing gains the power to organise budgets, laws and infrastructures.

Perhaps the most honest way to close is not with a neat verdict, but with a set of questions that cut through the shared word. How much of the economic activity in wealthy societies today is really defensive, an attempt to buy distance from harm rather than to create new forms of flourishing? Who gains when wellbeing is treated as a resource for competitiveness instead of as a reason to leave fossil fuels in the ground, slow certain industries, and expand public goods? What would it mean, concretely, to design a wellbeing agenda whose success is measured by people needing to spend less to feel safe, connected and alive, rather than more.

Those questions do not belong to any one camp. They are invitations to notice where the word “wellbeing” is being used to stabilise the growth machine, and where it is being used to imagine life beyond it. Degrowth does not own the desire for a good life within limits, but it does name those limits more directly, and it refuses the comforting promise that we can arrive there by doing more of the same. In that refusal lies its most important contribution to any serious conversation about what a wellbeing economy could be.