Measuring well-being

Measuring well-being is an overlapping concern of both environmental economics and various movements for social justice. It is also broadly associated with the labor movement and Green Parties in some countries. It seeks to index pensions, entitlements, and other benefits to losses in well-being due to "environmental and social deficit".

These measures are often associated in the United States with the Seventh Generation Amendment[?] proposal to the U.S. Constitution, and in Canada with the Canada Well-Being Measurement Act[?] co-authored by Mike Nickerson[?] of the Green Party of Ontario and Joe Jordan[?], a Liberal Party of Canada Member of Parliament for Leeds-Grenville, ON. This Act specifically cites a seventh generation standard for assessing large-scale government action, and is thus similar to the US proposal.

Several First Nations in both Canada and U.S. seem to have independently originated this standard, prior to European contact, which seems to represent the age ratio between the longest-lived elders and newborns expressed in terms of generations, i.e. humans live at most 100-115 years, and reproduce in most tribal cultures at about 15-17 years old, a ratio of about seven to one. So, according to the standard, any child born as a decision was being made would be able to assess its impact over their entire life as an elder.

Although laws to require standards for measuring well-being have not yet been adopted, they are growing in popularity in the labor movement, forced attention to these matters to the NAFTA level and have begun to challenge assumptions of economics regarding inflation and money supply.

Early negotiations on NAFTA adopting the U.S. dollar (i.e. in both Canada and Mexico) have been drastically complicated by proposals to agree, as a prerequisite, on measuring well-being, which is still a very new subject. In part to stall or block currency union[?], the Canadian Labour Congress[?], Green Party of the US[?], Green Party of Ontario and Green Party of Canada[?] have all backed well-being measures very strongly. However, there is broad agreement among green economists that a common standard for measuring well-being, and possibly also Bioregional Democracy[?] measures, would be required in order to ensure biosecurity after a currency union.

this is a stub article - please extend it with major figures, being careful to attribute in form A said B about C, since this is a quite new field. Also if you know this field well please review the above links to see if you can improve those articles - thanks

Some standards of well being in use:

Vanderford-Riley well being schedule