In all my writings on well-being, I haven’t clearly articulated what I’m trying to maximize. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll call it JamesHappy 1.0.*
Painfully written in full, it’s the U.S.’s net present value of a combination of mean per-capita well-being and life expectancy, constrained by a minimum baseline that each person should have and with the possibility of separate categories for foreigners based on the aforementioned categories and the quality or well-being of flora and fauna (non-human).
As for an explanation of JamesHappy 1.0’s components, it starts with the most obvious aspect, psychological well-being. As Veenhoven notes explicitly, life expectancy is separate but also matters. Well-being today almost certainly should have more value than well-being in the future, requiring discounting. It must be calculated in mean per-capita terms, because median figures ignore movements among those either doing very well or poorly, and the easiest way to increase total rather than per-capita well-being would be to increase fertility. In the U.S., each person is has basic rights and is entitled to certain services even if the programs do not improve mean psychological well-being. Finally, it is possible (although very debatable) that the U.S. should try to improve the lives of foreigners and sustain or improve the environment to a certain degree even if it doesn’t improve any other aspects of JamesHappy 1.0.
*More professional-sounding names could include “Comprehensive Discounted Happy Life Years” based on Veenhoven’s word choice, although directly multiplying life satisfaction on a 0-10 scale and life expectancy is not necessarily the appropriate weighting. Some other ideas are “Consensus well-being” (even if there’s no consensus about this at this point) and “Maximized Ideal Society Figure” (which, I admit, could be misinterpreted as a socialite with an amazing – or rotund – body).
