From well-being to well-doing: engineering better societies...?

Economics - microeconomics in particular - is often viewed as the default frame of understanding, analysis and reference for policy. My general thesis - held strongly (in part to draw out stronger critique, rather than any fundamentalism or narrow-mindedness of mine) - is that much of this should be replaced by a kind of engineering thinking (which itself needs a good overnight soaking in social theory). This is part of my broader programme on engineering policy (new paper alert!).

One of the upshots of the shift from economic to engineering thinking in this way, is a shift to how we measure or understand 'good' in policy terms. So the short story is the economics gave us GDP, and 'Growth' (with a big G, because it absolutely isn't the something as growth as we understand it everyday). Then everyone was like - "hey Growth is a really bad metric for good!" So then we got 'well-being' thanks (in no small part) to a Nobel-esque economist that kicked off a debate about measuring good in society.

Now I don't have a massive problem with well-being as a concept, but at the same time I've always had a nagging feeling that it wasn't really that great a concept for guiding policy choices. I think part of the problem is that wellbeing is a subjective state (normally measured with subjective report on a scale of 1 to X) which again (as an interdisciplinary (social) scientist) I have no epistemic problems with. But if you are aiming to make decisions about the construction and reproduction of goods and services in the lives of millions, how can it really actually be useful? Part of the problem is philosophical - to do with phenomenology - to what extent is any one persons wellbeing - good or bad - in any way equivalent to anothers?

Fundamentally thought, the wellbeing move is a consequent of microeconomic thinking - it's an extension of the individual metric of utility, and suffers from the same utility maximisation issue. In part this the equivalence issue above, but also this the individualist stance it generates. Utility is a property of the individual generated via individual choices. So then it struck me - independently of my shift to engineering policy, but entirely consistent with it - that it's the 'being' bit that is a problem. Since we can't really know what what it means to 'be' well, in a way that makes sense across a society (not just within individuals), we need to look at phenomena that do make sense. Instead, surely what we want from society is for them to 'do' well, not (just) 'be' well.

Doing well is here meant to mean 'being a good citizen' i.e. helping each other, making good things, being supportive and so on, rather than scoring well in an exam. 'Well-doing' is a term that captures something a bit more objective - that is, something observable, on the same terms, by multiple observers. Which itself is surely a baseline for any public (as opposed to private) policy making - and sits in contrast with the private nature of 'well-being'. If anything the public, if flawed, nature of GDP as a source of Growth had its advantages over 'well-being'. But saying that making more of stuff that sells for higher prices as 'good' is part of the problem. I think, as a society, we don't really agree that that kind of doing is all that 'good' (in a moral, social sense at least).

What I'm getting at here is to connect the use of engineering policy as a concept (capturing a class of mechanisms for generating social change - oh! new UCL STEaPP Degree alert!) with a philosophically consistent - and usable - metric of 'good' for evaluating policy outcomes. This was all stimulated right now by me getting ready to teach the STEaPP MPA module 'Sustainable Infrastructure and Public Policy' where we are using Michael Neuman's recent book (Sustainable Infrastructure in Cities and Societies) as a kind of 'expert voice in the room' for the module participants (alongside me and Irina). It's a decent book, but just at the end of the Introduction he covers off the idea of the 'sharing economy' in relation to infrastructure. And this just seemed to capture neatly the connection between engineering policy (which gives rise to the infrastructure we have) and the outcomes we want - here he talks of the 'sharing economy' which where it is observably in place, can lead to high scores in 'well-doing' metrics.

Anyway, another musing about engineering policy... what do you think? Is well-doing a useful concept?