Governing for Happiness

There is a discipline — taught in every business school and practised, with varying degrees of rigour, in every well-run organisation — called implementing strategy. Its central insight is deceptively simple: that having a worthy goal is not the same as having a plan for achieving it, and that organisations which cannot translate purpose into structure, behaviour, and measurement will fail to achieve their goals regardless of how sincerely those goals are held. The discipline has produced a substantial body of thinking about what an organisation needs — beyond a statement of intent — to actually pursue its objectives coherently.

Governments have not meaningfully engaged with this discipline. This is partly a matter of institutional culture, and partly a deeper problem: that governments, in most countries, do not have a clear, explicit, and enforceable objective in the first place. The meta-essay that introduces this project makes the case that this absence is the most fundamental deficiency in contemporary governance — that before asking how government should pursue its goals, we need to ask what its goals actually are. Preceding clusters have traced the consequences of that deficiency through the unhappiness data, the structural enemies of flourishing, and the institutional failures that prevent adaptation. This cluster attempts something different: not to catalogue what is going wrong, but to describe what governing for happiness would actually look like — not at the level of specific policies, but at the level of framework and architecture.

Implementing Happiness

The first requirement is a mission — not as a rhetorical gesture, but as a constitutional fact.

The argument developed across this project is that the correct objective function for government is the maximisation of sustainable societal wellbeing, subject to minimum human rights and security constraints. The definition of wellbeing is deliberately individual: happiness, in this framing, is whatever each person conceives as their best possible life. It is not a government’s business to prescribe what flourishing looks like for any given citizen. What it is government’s business to do is create the conditions in which each citizen’s conception of their best possible life is as achievable as possible — and to measure whether it is actually achieving that, using instruments that reflect individual self-assessment rather than government-determined proxies.

This mission should not be set by governments. It should be constitutionally embedded through a democratic process in a well-designed system. This is exactly the kind of deliberative mechanism, tribunacy, that the previous cluster described. A constitutional mission of this kind has democratic legitimacy of a different order from a government’s stated priorities: it survives changes of administration, provides a standard against which policy choices can be evaluated by courts and citizens alike, and removes the mission itself from the domain of partisan contestation. Governments can and will disagree vigorously about how to pursue the mission. That is exactly as it should be. Two firms selling essentially the same product in the same industry with the same objective of commercial profit can adopt fundamentally different and even competing strategies. The iPhone / iOS versus Android OS is a classic business school case study. The objective does not determine the strategy; it provides the standard against which the strategy is evaluated. Democratic accountability — the capacity of voters to remove governments whose strategies are not working — provides the corrective mechanism that the mission statement alone cannot. This is precisely the creative destruction that operates at the level of governments, even where it is largely absent at the level of governance systems. Constitutions should be hard to change; governments should not be.

If the mission is constitutionally embedded, the vision is the government’s interpretation of what achieving it would actually look like: a society in which every member feels genuinely valued, has genuine agency over the conditions of their own life, and has the realistic means to pursue whatever form of flourishing they find meaningful. This is, in essence, Maslow’s self-actualisation applied not to individuals in exceptional circumstances but to populations as a governing ambition.

Constitutional Values

The research literature on the determinants of national wellbeing converges, imperfectly but consistently, on a set of cultural conditions associated with higher levels of flourishing across populations: tolerance of difference, equality of treatment and opportunity, respect for persons independent of their social position, personal freedom within the constraints of equivalent freedom for others, and the rule of law as a common framework within which these values are given practical force. The relationship between these conditions and national happiness is among the most robust findings in comparative wellbeing research. Establishing precisely what this means causally — whether liberal individualist culture drives flourishing, or prosperity drives the adoption of liberal values, or some combination of both — remains work in progress, What is established here is the implication for governance: a government seriously oriented toward happiness as its mission would treat these cultural conditions not as incidental political preferences but as a foundational value framework within which its work is conducted.

The critical question is what “foundational” means in practice. Values stated are not values enacted, and the distance between what a governing system says it stands for and how it actually behaves is, in most systems most of the time, considerable. The answer developed in The Tolerant Society essay is that aspirational values should be constitutionally embedded through the Tribunate process: a citizen-constituted deliberative body, selected by sortition rather than election, charged with determining and periodically revising the foundational values of the constitutional order. The mechanism matters as much as the outcome. A parliamentary debate about national values collapses almost instantly into partisan point-scoring; a Tribunate process, constituted by citizens across the full income, geographic, and cultural spectrum, deliberating with expert testimony and structured facilitation over an extended period, produces something qualitatively different — a values framework that carries genuine democratic authority because it emerges from citizens rather than from the political class. Constitutional values arrived at this way are not a government’s declaration of its own preferences. They are the democratic expression of what citizens, taken seriously and given real authority, conclude their society stands for.

Constitutionally embedded values do more work than pure symbolism suggests, but they cannot do everything. They establish an interpretive framework and a standard against which departures can be named and resisted; they shape the terms in which political conduct is evaluated; and, as both the German and South African constitutional traditions demonstrate, they have a long half-life that outlasts the political circumstances that produced them. They are also, almost necessarily, universal in character — dignity, freedom, equality, tolerance — because those are the terms that can command assent across cultural difference. This means they cannot, by themselves, address the more particular need that this cluster has identified: the need for a specific community’s way of life, its traditions and shared stories, to receive genuine recognition rather than merely abstract tolerance. The constitutional values exercise establishes the civic framework within which particular identities coexist. Animating that framework — filling the universal with the particular — is the work of leadership.

Leadership is Foundational

What changes in this framing, compared to the conventional account of political leadership and values, is worth making explicit. In the conventional account, the leader decides what values to perform — picks a set of cultural signals, assembles a national story, and deploys both in the service of electoral advantage. The result is leadership as managed symbolism: carefully crafted, perpetually contested, and with a half-life tied directly to the leader’s own tenure. In the Fleurianism framework, the leader’s relationship to values is genuinely different. The foundational values have been determined, through the Tribunate process, by citizens. The leader’s job is not to declare those values but to animate them — to tell the national story within the terms that citizens themselves have defined, in ways that make those terms feel lived and particular, rather than abstract and procedural. This is meaningfully harder work, and meaningfully more consequential. It also gives the leader something the conventional account never can: democratic authority for cultural leadership that does not depend on their personal electoral mandate. What it does depend on though, is political commitment to taking the architecture seriously: commitment to the pursuit of national wellbeing, and commitment to the constitutional process.

This matters most at the point where leadership is most difficult — when the values that the evidence suggests a society needs to cultivate, and which have been formulated by the Tribunate, are not yet the cultural norm. Modelling values that the culture has not fully adopted is considerably harder than leading in alignment with existing cultural preferences, and it is also, the evidence on culture change suggests, the primary mechanism through which values actually shift at the population level. People take their cues about what is acceptable from the behaviour of authority figures — not primarily from formal pronouncements, which are freely available and readily discounted, but from how leaders actually behave when the values are personally costly. When a leader models tolerance, intellectual honesty, and respect for evidence in their own conduct — especially when the political incentive runs the other way — they provide the implicit permission that allows others to do the same. Without the Tribunate framework, this kind of leadership is essentially unilateral. With it, the leader is enacting a mandate that citizens themselves authorised, which is a fundamentally different political posture.

This still leaves a residual tension that should be acknowledged rather than papered over. The Tribunate defines the foundational values; it does not resolve every conflict between those values and the preferences of particular communities or electoral constituencies. A leader working within a citizen-derived values framework will still face moments where animating that framework means disappointing some of those citizens — where the story the framework requires is not the story some people want to hear. The resolution is not to abandon the framework but to be honest about what political leadership involves: it is not a mirror that reflects the electorate back to itself, but an active function that both serves and shapes the culture within which citizens form their preferences. The Tribunate process legitimises this function in a way that no individual mandate can. It transforms cultural leadership from an exercise of personal authority into an exercise of civic stewardship — and in doing so, it gives the belonging need its most direct institutional response. Citizens who have participated in, or been genuinely represented through, the process that defines the national values cannot reasonably claim that the values were imposed on them from above. The story is, at least in part, theirs.

Embedding Accountability

A government with a constitutional mission to maximise sustainable wellbeing needs to be able to explain, clearly and publicly, how its policies achieve that mission. This is not currently a requirement of governance in most countries, and its absence matters. Without an explicit account of the causal pathway from policy to outcome, governments cannot be held to account against their stated objectives, and policy choices default to what is politically expedient, ideologically congenial, or simply what was done before.

The discipline of strategy implementation requires that goals cascade through an organisation: that the high-level mission translates into specific objectives, that those objectives are supported by coherent strategies, and that strategies are accompanied by measurement systems capable of detecting whether they are working. Applied to government, this would look like a formal strategic document — something closer to a national wellbeing strategy than a conventional programme of government — that sets out how policies in each domain are expected to contribute to the constitutional mission, what evidence supports that expectation, and what indicators will be used to evaluate outcomes. Several countries have begun moving in this direction: New Zealand’s Wellbeing Budget, introduced in 2019, was an early attempt to reorient government expenditure decisions around a multidimensional assessment of population wellbeing rather than GDP growth alone. It is imperfect and incomplete, but it demonstrates that the approach is practically feasible.

The measurement framework matters as much as the strategic document. What gets measured gets managed, and the choice of what to measure is therefore one of the most consequential design decisions in governance. A government that measures GDP growth, inflation, and employment will tend to govern for GDP growth, inflation, and employment — not because its politicians are indifferent to broader wellbeing, but because the incentive structure created by measurement shapes attention, resource allocation, and the criteria by which success is judged. Expanding and reorienting the measurement framework is therefore not a technical adjustment; it is a structural intervention in the incentive architecture of governance.

Evidence Based Policy is Hardly Revolutionary

Policy should be made the way scientific conclusions are reached: by evaluating evidence, forming hypotheses, testing them against outcomes, and revising them in light of what is found. This is a statement that almost everyone in democratic politics would formally endorse and that almost no government consistently practises. The gap between the aspiration and the reality is explained partly by political incentives — it is rarely advantageous to publicly acknowledge that a policy has not produced its intended effects — and partly by the dominance of ideological frameworks that function as prior commitments rather than testable hypotheses.

A government genuinely oriented toward a constitutional mission has a structural reason to close this gap that governments oriented toward electoral survival do not. If the mission is constitutionally embedded and publicly committed to, and if the measurement framework is in place to evaluate progress against it, then the political cost of policy failure is not the abandonment of ideology but simply the evidence that a particular strategy did not work — and the obligation to try a different one. This is closer to how well-run organisations actually manage strategy: not by treating every policy choice as an expression of foundational values, but by treating it as a hypothesis about what will produce the desired outcome, subject to revision on the evidence. What is required is thoughtful discretion in decision-making — the application of judgement to evidence, rather than the assertion of ideological certainty in an absence of evidence.

You Can Only Try …

The framework described here does not prescribe specific policies. It prescribes the principles around which a government taking seriously the pursuit of sustainable wellbeing would be substantively organised: a constitutionally embedded mission with democratic legitimacy, a vision of flourishing that connects that mission to a concrete social aspiration, a value framework grounded in what the evidence associates with good outcomes, leadership that models the culture it is trying to build, strategy that cascades from mission to measurement, and policy that is treated as hypothesis rather than ideology.

This structure is not determinative: it relies on goodwill and good judgement on the part of both the members of the Tribunate, and the democratically elected government of the day. It is, at best, a formula.

The framework is also not a guarantee of good outcomes. Different governments, with the same constitutional mission and the same framework, will make different strategic choices — and some of those choices will work better than others. That is not a failure of the framework; it is democratic governance functioning as it should. It is navigated by the combination of informed strategy, honest measurement, and the democratic accountability that removes administrations whose strategies are not working and creates space for those willing to try something different.

What the framework does guarantee is that the question “is this making people happier?” is asked — systematically, measurably, and with constitutional force behind it. That question is almost entirely absent from contemporary governance. Its presence would change a great deal.

Are We Happy Yet?

The earlier essay on the enemies of happiness identified six specific themes for where modern society is seemingly failing at the root cause level: The misalignment between the interests of the ruling elite and the interests of ordinary citizens, the overwhelming complexity of modern life, pervasive negative arousal in the media, the unaddressed need for belonging, populations that have moved up Maslow’s hierarchy, but at best have failed to find fulfilment, and at worst are in fear of slipping back down, and a rupturing of the world order.

Before finishing this essay, I want to square the circle and be explicit about where the ideas I have surfaced leave things.

This essay, and the previous essay on Governance for Happiness, look at the problem of unhappiness through the lens of systems theory – what can and should be done to change the system so that it produces different, and better, outcomes for society. Much of the architecture I have proposed is very explicitly aimed at correcting the misalignment of interests between the rulers and the ruled. It overtly works at placing the levers of democracy beyond the reach of the ruling elite, and instead gives the Government of the day a clarity of purpose and a framework for governing that places the spotlight on its performance. The architecture also creates a new mechanism for organising international relations – one that is honest about the role of power, and of incentives, but which should be systematically benign for democracies.

This architecture goes some way to addressing the alignment of the ruling class to the interests of citizens, closing the gap on belonging, and remedying the rupture of the world order. The other challenges - of complexity, the information environment, and self-actualisation - are, I believe, beyond systemic solutions. They instead require a policy design disposition that takes the problems seriously as structural problems requiring active Government solutions rather than being accepted as background conditions that Government can be divorced from.

On complexity: a government serious about reducing the cognitive burden of modern life would treat simplification as an explicit design principle, not merely an administrative convenience. Regulatory frameworks, tax systems, welfare eligibility conditions, healthcare navigation, and civic participation all impose intellectual costs that are not distributed equally. The people least equipped to absorb those costs are, typically, those who most need the services and protections they provide access to. A design principle of deliberate simplification — asking, in every domain of policy, what the minimum necessary complexity is to achieve the desired outcome — would produce a materially different set of policy choices from one that treats complexity as an acceptable by-product of thoroughness.

On the information environment: a government governing for happiness faces a structural constraint that cannot be easily regulated away. The attention economy is optimised for engagement, not for the conditions of human flourishing, and the psychological effects of chronic exposure to algorithmically curated outrage are measurably corrosive to the wellbeing the government is trying to produce. What an adequate policy response to this looks like is not yet clear — proposals range from platform liability reform to digital literacy education to structural separation of social media and advertising —intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that none of the available options has a convincing evidence base. This is a domain where a happiness-oriented government would need to commission and follow the evidence rather than choose from existing ideological menus. It is mentioned here not because the answer is available, but because the problem is real and the framework demands that it be grappled with.

On self-actualisation: current psychological understanding makes this an uncomfortable topic for politicians. The human bias to judge their circumstances in comparative rather than absolute terms, hedonic adaptation, that is the tendency of people to return to a stable emotional baseline as improved circumstances become normalised, and the evidence that happiness will hit a ceiling, or at least have diminishing returns beyond a certain wealth level, all point to GDP growth as having limited utility in creating genuine fulfilment. This reality undermines much of the core ideology of both the left and the right: the question isn’t the size of the cake, or how you slice it, it is what you offer people who’ve had plenty of cake, but are still hungry. Answering this question spills into a realm that is more personal, and even more contested, than how to generate wealth. It raises questions that sit more comfortably with spiritual leaders and psychologists than with conventional politicians. It isn’t necessarily a space that politicians need to occupy as such – the policy responses can be more about creating pathways for people to find what makes them happy rather than direct interventions by Government. It does, however, require a significant shift in mindset and rhetoric.

In the opening essay I made the point that, as a society, we seem to be comprehensively failing to deliver happiness. While many individual leaders can be justly criticised for their choices, they are not wholly to blame – they operate within a system and an incentive structure that often makes the choices rational. Having observed that the system is not fit-for-purpose, the world needs new and better design solution. What the ideas I have floated in this project offer is, hopefully, a contribution to that better solution - an architecture to keep politicians focussed on delivering for their citizens.

The final essay in this project summarises the key tenets that have emerged from working through the evidence, a political philosophy I have christened Fleurianism.