omniharmonicWell-Being Economy
The well-being economy is an economic paradigm that centers human and ecological flourishing as the primary measure of success, replacing GDP growth as the dominant metric. Rather than asking “Is the economy growing?” it asks “Are people and ecosystems thriving?” This reorientation shifts policy focus toward health, education, community resilience, ecological regeneration, and equitable distribution of resources.
The well-being economy movement has gained significant institutional traction through the Wellbeing Economy Governments partnership (WEGo), which includes Scotland, Iceland, New Zealand, Wales, and Finland — nations experimenting with alternative indicators and policy frameworks that prioritize quality of life over throughput. This represents a break from the assumption that economic growth automatically produces well-being, an assumption contradicted by decades of evidence showing that beyond a modest threshold, GDP growth correlates poorly with life satisfaction and actively drives ecological destruction.
In the broader landscape of economic alternatives, the well-being economy connects to doughnut-economics through its focus on meeting human needs within planetary boundaries, to regenerative-economics through its emphasis on systemic health rather than extraction, and to buen-vivir as an Indigenous philosophical framework that has long understood prosperity as relational rather than material. It provides the evaluative framework within which mechanisms like economic-democracy, community-land-trusts, and worker-cooperatives can be understood as not just ethical alternatives but as more effective means of producing genuine prosperity.