Irish Well-Being Framework Update

I spoke at an event on 28th November organised by the Irish Taoiseach's office on the national well-being framework. I was involved as part of an expert group in establishing the framework. It is now part of the Irish policy framework and is constructed each year and presented as part of the Irish budget.

Details of the framework are available here and here. The Annex published alongside the annual Irish budget is available here. 

At the event Carrie Exton spoke about the international context of well-being frameworks. Details of the widely used OECD Better Life Index are available here. 

In my remarks I mentioned the late Alan Krueger as a key figure in articulating the role of well-being in the economic policy context. Two of his key works on this are here and here 

I also referenced the growing literature on the increase in anxiety among young adults as one potential avenue for further work on the background of the framework. Some key papers for that are here and here. 

It might have been a rush of blood to the head but I had a short rant about AI and job displacement. I have no idea how many jobs AI will displace or indeed create. The point I was raising was a more general one that job loss was for most of the 20th century one of the main causes of psychological distress and that has continued to be the case. So it is fundamental to understand this process in evaluating the welfare impacts of a disruptive technology and the regulatory environment around it. But the main point I tried to get across was the potential for structured well-being frameworks to be informative with regard to broader aspects of crisis response and population resilience (recent paper expanding that thought here). 

There was a lot of discussion about how the well-being framework interacts with other measures such as SDGs. I made the case that the well-being frameworks provide a novel space to talk through aspects of well-being both within and outside environmental sustainability contexts. Clearly the SDGS are broad enough to encapsulate many things a well-being framework will measure but the focus is broader.