The Four Approaches to Measuring Wellbeing

Abstract

Discussions of the relationship between wellbeing and material progress go back a long way. One of the earliest extant comes from Aristotle: What is it that we say political science aims at and what is the highest of all goods achievable by action? … It is happiness, and we identify living well and doing well with being happy… the life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful for the sake of something else.² Economic growth in classical times was so slow as to be unobservable