All Essays

What happiness means in this context, why it matters as a governance objective, and how — and how well — it can be measured.

Rising incomes have not delivered the happiness or freedom they promised. An introduction to the cluster on why the world feels like it is going backwards.

The rules-based international order is fraying. On polycrisis, the recession in democracy, and the loss of confidence in collective response.

The root causes of discontent and the structural barriers — elite capture, contested sovereignty, identity politics — to a system that genuinely fosters happiness.

Why governance systems everywhere have become structurally insufficient to the complexity of the challenges they face — and lack any mechanism to force adaptation.

How the invocation of sovereignty routinely shields ruling elites rather than citizens, and why a small, careful cession of it could strengthen sovereignty more broadly.

On the structural failure of mainstream democratic politics to address the emotional and identity-based needs that drive a large share of political behaviour.

Reading the polling rise of Australia's One Nation through this project's framework — and asking what it has to say back to the framework.

Why democratic institutions resist adaptation, and what an institutional response capable of forcing reform might look like.

On the structural limits of subsidiarity, and a proposed institution for the functions — security, climate, economic resilience — where scale is not optional.

What happens when a governance system is captured by the people with the least interest in reforming it — and an institution designed to prevent it.

The harder operational questions behind the Sovereigncy concept: governance mechanisms, distribution of power, and genuine enforcement capacity.

Not what is going wrong, but what governing for happiness would actually look like — at the level of framework and architecture.

A question for deliberation rather than a fixed answer: whether the design of the executive deserves to be asked with more seriousness than democracies currently allow.

If tolerant societies consistently flourish more, should liberalism and tolerance be treated as foundational values that governance should actively promote?