Drugs: yup, Huxley's dystopian "Brave new world" scores remarkably high on a subjective wellbeing scale. I think this is a sort of obvious limit to the validity of the metric though; it doesn't invalidate the metric within sensible limits (though we could have a chat about antidepressants and adhd I suppose)
On your last point, Wales legislated for wellbeing as a guiding principle in the Well-being for Future Generations Act which incorporates that concern.
My other issues with wellbeing are ...
1. it's shaped by expectations. There are well known cases of people who have horrific life changing accidents yet after adapting to their new lifestyle are just as happy as before. We can also imagine very well off people being picky because the champagne and caviar are not up to standard.
2. we know how to measure it at individual level but don't have enough data on how we as a society think we should trade off between average levels of wellbeing and inequality of the same.
More on all this on my link in sibling comment. I'm interested to hear feedback on all the above as we're working on the next stage of this project now.
On your last point, Wales legislated for wellbeing as a guiding principle in the Well-being for Future Generations Act which incorporates that concern.
My other issues with wellbeing are ...
1. it's shaped by expectations. There are well known cases of people who have horrific life changing accidents yet after adapting to their new lifestyle are just as happy as before. We can also imagine very well off people being picky because the champagne and caviar are not up to standard.
2. we know how to measure it at individual level but don't have enough data on how we as a society think we should trade off between average levels of wellbeing and inequality of the same.
More on all this on my link in sibling comment. I'm interested to hear feedback on all the above as we're working on the next stage of this project now.