Pagani skewers wellbeing BS

Josie Pagani writes:

The Treasury has released a new report to accompany its Living Standards Framework.

The framework is a salad of abstract concepts like ‘’knowledge’’, ‘’voice’’ and ‘’subjective wellbeing’’ attractively arranged in columns and bubbles with no development of logical relationships between them. Nor any use of old-fashioned analytic tools such as whole sentences. …

Anyway, the nation’s leading economic agency is trying to define ‘’advantage’’ and ‘’disadvantage’’, how to measure them and understand the causes, and ‘’the normative challenge of assessing whether advantage and disadvantage is cause for concern’’.

In summary, the Treasury finds that ‘’life is better for some people than for others’’. Crikey! Who knew?

It adds, “Life has got better over time in some ways but worse in others”. That sentence is so banal that I can’t be bothered coming up with a sarcastic barb.

So the report is full of the all too common meaningless buzzwords. But does it matter?

‘’Wellbeing’’ is the descent of politics into diplomacy and bureaucratic blancmange. Who could disagree with ‘’wellbeing’’?

Well, me. ‘’Wellbeing’’ does public policy by replacing choices and priorities at the heart of politics with fog. Instead of looking around us and seeing obvious problems to fix, we get: Depends what you mean by ‘’disadvantaged’’.

One example of how real problems disappear: An enormous inequality in New Zealand exists in access to dental care. Half of us do not have adequate dental care, causing massive ongoing problems, from shorter lives, to pain and social exclusion. Yet there is no reference to dental care in Treasury’s 115-page discussion of ‘’the distribution of advantage in Aotearoa New Zealand’’.

It is a triumph of spin over action.

The reality is every Budget is about wellbeing. The tens of billions of dollars spent every year on health, education and welfare isn’t about economics – it is about improving the wellbeing of people. And then Grant Robertson comes along in 2018 and claims it is something new, and get lauded around the world for it.

I suppose wellbeing is trying to find a language to understand this mysterious phenomenon of people whose periodic ‘’disadvantage’’ is a ‘’cause for concern’’.

I have a better alternative: make our public institutions genuinely representative, so the priorities and language of working people will surface on their own.

This mush is the opposite of progressive. Tough choices are obscured behind fifty shades of bureaucratic beige. That makes for an amusing column. Less amusing, it stops us making decisions at all.

Great points.