What are we making policy for?

Recent years have surfaced persistent challenges to our individual and shared wellbeing. The forces of a global pandemic, an intensifying climate crisis, and persistent racial and economic inequality have nudged our nation to a precipice, facing critical choices about the kind of economy and society we will shape. What do we prioritize and who decides? Whose experiences and voices will guide these efforts? Can we arrive at a shared vision for an equitable and thriving society?

If we are to chart a course to a more wise and equitable future, we will need to change our systems in ways that directly address wellbeing disparities across the country. We must consider the indicators we use, how they direct our policy and investment decisions, and in turn shape our narratives about who we are and who we seek to become.

Historically, decision makers have relied primarily on large aggregate indicators like gross domestic progress (GDP) to make policy. But momentum has been building behind ways to think about progress that center the wellbeing of households and communities across a comprehensive range of domains; health, belonging, environment, lifelong learning, meaningful work, opportunity, and culture to name a few. The goal is to to build the capacities of government to create policy with wellbeing as the guide.

The urgency of these questions feels more potent in the context of the dramatic changes seen in American society over the last half century. Today’s “syndemic of overlapping economic, educational, behavioral health, substance use, housing, and food insecurity crises” have deepened the suffering and limited opportunities for many households and communities. These crises are linked to the rapid social, environmental, and technological change of recent decades, which has exposed the divide between current public policies and the realities of our families, workplaces and society at large. For example, while dual-income households have been a majority for at least the last two decades, millions of families are struggling with childcare disruptions and overall lack of affordable and accessible care options. Additionally, more than one third of adults aged 45 and older feel lonely, which has been linked to serious health conditions.

From an economic perspective, while there is new focus on the challenges presented by inflation and risk of recession, the economy has been characterized by stagnant wages and rising inequality for decades. The chance that an adult will earn more than their parents - the very essence of the American dream narrative - has plummeted from greater than 90 percent to approximately 50 percent. Simultaneous with economic mobility becoming a coin flip, the share of wealth held by families outside the top 10% has dramatically declined. Even worse are the disparities in wealth across racial groups. The median white family has ten times the wealth of the median Black family, a gap that has widened over the last 30 years.

As the U.S. invests trillions of dollars in economic recovery, social programming, and other infrastructure projects, we have an opportunity to reimagine our current system and envision robust policies that support real flourishing. Why settle for the recovery of a system that no longer meets 21st century needs and challenges? We require a capacity to both cultivate practices, policies, systems, and structures that are not yet known and a means to successfully transition toward that shared vision. New measures to track our progress towards equitable wellbeing would greatly enhance our capacity. Measures not only signal our values and shape narratives, they “trigger conversations, attract new change agents, encourage new partnerships, and foster joint exploration.”

For nearly a century, GDP has been synonymous with progress and policy creation has centered around the question of how best to support its growth. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner and former chief economist of the World Bank, pointed out that, despite prosperity, COVID-19 deaths were disproportionately high in many high-income countries; “striving to grow GDP is not the same as ensuring the well-being of a society.”

Unlike several OECD peer nations, the U.S. currently has no formally agreed-upon whole-of-government measures that align with various dimensions of wellbeing and lacks an official means to track household and community wellbeing. One promising effort is the recently released Federal Plan for Equitable Long-Term Recovery and Resilience. This Plan is advocating a whole of government approach to the vital conditions for thriving people and places and can bridge from a focus on resilience to broader wellbeing efforts.

The federal government should seek inspiration from places around the globe that are starting to adopt more holistic approaches anchored in concepts like wellbeing or quality of life, as an alternative way of measuring progress. They include efforts like Canada’s Quality of Life metrics, New Zealand’s Living Standards framework, and local efforts like Santa Monica’s Wellbeing Index, among others. These efforts recognize a short-term focus on growth is detrimental if it also creates long-term climate risks, exacerbates inequality, inhibits our ability to care for our loved ones, or fails to fully deploy our nation’s full stock of human capital by marginalizing some individuals or groups.

New America, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and the Departments of Commerce and Treasury recruited four teams of technologists and data scientists, a dozen expert advisors with deep knowledge and practice in the area of wellbeing measurement, and a dozen user advocates/community leaders who were interviewed and consulted by solutions teams around their lived experience and perspectives on well-being.

Teams were tasked with using federal open data to build new digital tools and we recruited twenty "data stewards" from across fourteen agencies to advise teams on the possibilities and gaps with existing data. Altogether, we identified sixty-one datasources across federal data and other relevant data sources for use by teams. The identified datasets span dozens of domains of life: the economy, community demographics, health, housing, transportation, education, crime, and more.

As part of The Opportunity Project, teams created public facing digital tools that help policy makers understand wellbeing in their community and better utilize federal data to advance local wellbeing. All of our teams are continuing to develop and improve these tools, working to empower communities to better understand how decision makers can lead with wellbeing in mind.

United for ALICE created the Economic Vulnerability Dashboard (EVD) to help identify where where it is hardest for ALICE (asset limited, income constrained, employed) families to live and where there is the most support. This is achieved by quantifying local gaps in housing, jobs, and basic community resources in each community. To understand the geography of vulnerability and disaggregate indices that could conceal vulnerability, the EVD utilizes comparison between measures to map these gaps. It also generates profiles for individual communities and provides an action plan for addressing deficiencies in any particular indicator.

The Wellbeing Infrastructure Tradeoffs Tool (WITT) was developed by a collaborative team led by the Full Frame Initiative. Desiring to empower communities to pursue ‘shovel-worthy rather than shovel-ready’ infrastructure projects, the WITT was created to identify tradeoffs in the planning process and ensure an inclusive and representative public feedback process. The tool integrates participatory data from impacted community members, verifies representation to ensure populations are not over or under-sampled, and provides insights on how different groups - such as racial or socio-economic - perceive the impact of the project on wellbeing differently as well as providing a map of community assets.

The Social Progress Imperative and its partners built the Livable Cities Tool to help communities link economic conditions to social outcomes, identify and learn from peer cities, and facilitate informed decision-making. In addition to geospatial overlays for 67 different wellbeing indicators, the heart of the tool is a framework for decision-making and city-specific scorecards to understand the wellbeing of their constituents - especially the relationship between social and economic indicators - and identify opportunities for areas for investment and improvement.

While already an established tool, Citi Ventures’ City Builder platform used the sprint as an opportunity to evaluate how information about community and resident wellbeing is communicated to stakeholders interested in place-based investing. By adding additional measures of wellbeing, such as health and environment, and how indicators changed over time, City Builder aims to empower users to better understand wellbeing within a community.

The powerful invitation of this collaborative undertaking was to reflect across disciplines and dimensions of wellbeing, to ground the exploration in lived experience through the involvement of user advocates, and to capture learnings from the process about the promises and pitfalls of data in wellbeing measurement today.

While the sprint generated impressive tools that communicate and promote wellbeing in new ways, the experience of participating teams highlights the significant strides we have remaining to effectively center equity and wellbeing in our national measures. Some of the barriers include data infrastructure challenges: many federal datasets are not currently updated frequently enough or don’t provide detail at the local level. But there are also myriad planning questions that will require inter-agency cooperation to solve; aligning on the dimensions of wellbeing, clearly delineating how the siloed federal statistical agencies will each contribute, and building deeper partnerships between federal and local leaders to empower communities to drive data and measurement needs as they define wellbeing in their particular contexts.

We also need to wrestle with the relationship between equity and wellbeing. Historically, research and policy development has not fully prioritized issues of equity within wellbeing activities, through practices such as measuring differential access to opportunity, historical and systemic barriers to wellbeing, and policies and practices that impede wellbeing.

Looking ahead, we need infrastructure to hold this cross-agency and cross-disciplinary inquiry in these areas. We know that in order to chart a course toward a more just future, meeting the challenges of today and creating the conditions for equitable wellbeing, we need to practice that future today. That entails aligning our intentions and behaviors, both individually and collectively, to the aspiration of wellbeing for all. This is one pathway for shared practice, and in the spirit of the common good, we invite others into this journey. To participate in the ongoing process toward this goal, reach out to us at garlow@newamerica.org.