The Global Outbreak of Social Positivity

Social planning and policy evaluation are rapidly changing worldwide by taking on some of the positivity and appreciative psychosocial understanding that have been core principles of PP. This rethinking of our priorities is in large part due to a long-term global social progress: gains in productivity, security, health, education, and civility, have all permitted in most parts of the world a gradual shift of attention from survivalist minimalism to more ambitious concerns with positive personal and social flourishing (Helliwell, Layard, & Sachs, 2012, 2013; Inglehart & Welzel, 2005; Kenny, 2011; Pinker, 2011). The rethinking is also driven by new medium-term adversities: environmental harms and unsustainabilities; financial inequalities; the current global economic volatilities and recessions and the appalling governance and ethical failures that led to them; and increased awareness of various cultural and social harms in both traditional and modern societies.

Whichever of these may be the most significant underlying driver, more proximate triggers of change in trend assessments have been the PP movement, the longer term strengthening of happiness research, and the global movement toward strengthening of business ethics and reporting on corporate social responsibility, which is now also percolating into public and voluntary sector agencies. The combined insistence on both positivity (attending to goods, not just bads) and respect for subjectivity (taking an empathic interest in people's experience) prepares the way for greatly enhanced ethical transparency in the moral reasoning that planners apply in the analysis and evaluation of states of affairs, causes, objectives, and outcomes. Together, these constitute the core functions of the deployment of the happiness lens in social policy (Thin, 2012b).There are good prospects for synergies and collaborations between social analysts and psychologists. Although many politicians, planners, and investors worldwide are embracing the shift of attention from economic goods toward well-being and positive social goods, social scholars remain in general slow and reluctant to capture the spirit of the PP movement. It remains to be seen whether and how the identification and promotion of social goods can be improved.

Planners, managers, and evaluators at all levels from global down to local seem to be becoming more empathic and ethically transparent by taking a more systematic interest in psychological strengths and enjoyments, and by encouraging the expression of subjective experiences of clients, workers, pupils, community members, and citizens. Information on subjective valuation is being used to identify and promote convivial urban spaces (Dinnie, Brown, & Morris, 2013; Shaftoe, 2008), positive school climates (Cohen, 2013; Reasoner, 2006), great places to work (Henderson, 2013), and at higher levels community quality of life or societal quality of life (Sirgy, 2011; Sirgy, Phillips, & Rahtz, 2011), social quality (Lin, 2013; van der Maesen & Walker, 2011), or global civil society (Kaldor, 2003; Walzer, 1998). In public, voluntary, and business sectors, and in both small and large organizations, there is a new tide of enthusiasm for the idea of assessing the social value of production (Cox, Bowen, & Kempton, 2012; Jordan, 2008), although there is a bewildering diversity of interpretations of this concept.

However, before we rush to celebrate positive social entrepreneurship and public social planning, we must sharpen our collective ability to conceptualize, discuss, and assess social quality in sensible ways. Psychosocial planning needs to be appreciative (recognizing and promoting mental and social goods), but it is important that we promote intelligent appreciation rather than just naive enthusiasms. An intelligently appreciative approach will avoid on the one hand the excessive individualism and psychologism of some positive psychology, and on the other hand the excessive externalism and pathological clinicalism that have pervaded social research and social policy and planning. To be persuasive, this approach will require clear articulation of social goods that have widespread appeal worldwide, as well as clear and valid tools for promoting better understanding of interactions between mind and society.

National and Global-Level Conceptions of Social Progress

There have, of course, been numerous lists of social qualities advertised since before the dawn of the modern era, ranging from wildly utopian to more realistically aspirational. Most of them are somewhat ad hoc, culture bound, and too abstract to offer much guidance to planners or evaluators. More concerted efforts to forge a global consensus on social quality took off in the modern development era with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and follow-up texts such as the 1969 UN Declaration on Social Progress and Development. These made frequent use of abstract and strong-sounding and appealing but analytically weak categories of social goods: equality, dignity, liberty, the rule of law, peace, religion, and education.

In parts this rhetoric also descended into utopianism, as in the 1969 declaration's call for “immediate and final elimination of all forms of inequality” and for “continuous raising of the material and spiritual standards of living of all members of society.” But UN declarations also paved the way for unpacking these into more specific requirements for the good society, such as free speech and thought; security; nondiscrimination; national citizenship; marriage; access to public service; work and free choice of employment; the right to peaceful assembly and trade unions; and participation in the cultural life of the community and in scientific advancement.

Generally, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA), its associated wings such as the Economic and Social Council and the UN Research Institute for Social Development, and its annual Report on the World Social Situation (e.g., UN-DESA, 2011) have defined social progress mainly defined in terms of poverty reduction, social sectors, and needs of vulnerable interest groups. But they have also drawn attention to the importance of social integration and inclusion; family integrity; social protection; crime and social instability; employment; economic volatility; inequality (mainly financial); and demographic trends (fertility, population expansion, ageing, dependency ratios, gender ratios). Table 43.1 summarizes a sample of recent attempts at global and national levels to articulate goals and indicators for social progress.

Positive Psychology and Social Quality

The PP movement and associated studies and practices have already done humanity an enormously important service in promoting our understanding of mental goods and our ability and willingness to think about, debate, and promote these in rational ways. To a lesser extent, and mainly at the level of individual capabilities and dyadic or other small-scale interactions, the movement has promoted appreciation of social dimensions of psychological health (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Berscheid, 2003; Roffey, 2012; Ryff & Singer, 2000). One of the five qualities of flourishing in Seligman's PERMA formula is positive relationships (Seligman, 2011). Similarly, the character strengths in the Values in Action inventory include several categories that pay strong attention to social virtues, particularly Humanity (including love, compassion, and social intelligence), Justice (citizenship, fairness, and leadership), Courage (which includes honesty), and Temperance (which includes forgiveness and humility; Peterson & Seligman, 2004). In the former case, the perspective is that of individual self-interest: A sound mind requires good relationships. In the latter there is a shift toward social virtue: A decent person shows prosocial character. Still, both schemas focus on the individual mind and associated actions.

But we can and should expand our appreciative horizon to promote clearer understanding and appreciation of positive social qualities with a view to promoting these more effectively and enhancing the positive synergies between mental and social dimensions of human experience and value. This is an argument in favor of social realism as much as it is an argument in favor of tactics and effectiveness: The various kinds of positivity that the PP movement promotes cannot be taken for granted as psychological valences, but must be interpreted and contested as sociocultural values. We explore here some of the ways in which this socialization of PP, and complementary positivization and mentalization of social planning, has already been happening worldwide, particularly in the past decade.

Most people with an interest in PP already hope that it leads to practices that result in social benefits—that is, benign social transformations, not just happier individual minds or individual social capabilities. Among those that argue carefully about PP in moral terms, there is often an implicit belief that social progress is driven by changes in individual minds, rather than the other way around. Indeed, Seligman's iconic popular text Authentic Happiness (2003) offers virtually no treatment of the social facilitation or inhibition of happiness, other than a few mentions of the importance of nice relationships. Seligman is astonishingly dogmatic and pessimistic in claiming that it is “usually impractical and expensive” to change any of your life circumstances, including your social environment (p. 50). As in the nonacademic self-help and life coaching world, the dominant emphasis in PP has been the individual mind as the locus for progressive action: If people can pursue their own happiness more authentically and intelligently, and play to their mental strengths while also exercising prosocial virtues such as kindness and gratitude, the world will surely become a better place to live.

But for most of people worldwide, the opportunities to follow the excellent advice of personal advisers, positive psychologists, life coaches, and therapists are to some extent thwarted by adversities in our social and cultural environments (for a fuller discussion of examples from around the world, see Thin, 2011). Or, viewed positively, our ability to fulfill our mental capabilities, or to choose which of our many potentials we want to fulfill, is facilitated by our culture, our relationships, and our institutions. So all serious PP must seek to understand synergies between mind and society, and between mental and social progress. And this requires interactive approaches, not just noticing the social environment.

In Seligman's famously problematic equation metaphor, happiness is a result of genetics plus circumstances plus voluntary effort (2003, p. 45). In Lyubomirsky's similarly simplistic pie chart metaphor, our circumstances account for just 10% of our happiness (2008, p. 20). These kinds of reductionism dumb down the science of happiness and detract from the meaning of positivity. It is vital for the PP movement to take a systematic interest in the interactions between our minds, our behaviors, and our circumstances. Our circumstances are not an inflexible percentage of determining factors. Particularly in the case of our sociocultural circumstances, we are co-responsible for them: We co-create our culture and our relationships and our institutions throughout our lives, while also being influenced by them as to go along.

Prospects for the socialization of PP have already been explored in generic texts on social change (Biswas-Diener, 2011; Donaldson, 2011) and in more specific texts on family and community therapy (Conoley & Conoley, 2009; Prilleltensky & Prilleltensky, 2006), organizational development (Cameron, Dutton, & Quinn, 2003), and schooling (Gilman, Huebner, & Furlong, 2009). Here, I would like to explore some of the basic prerequisites for this to be pursued explicitly through rational planning. Many benefits may, of course, happen without or in spite of rational planning. But if we want to make good social transformations intentionally, we had better hone our ability to agree with collaborators on what kinds of social goods we want to bring about. And our social diagnoses, proposals, and indicators for assessment had better be not only clear but also informed by philosophical and psychological wisdom, spelling out the sources and processes of valuation and appreciation, and both the mental causes of social progress as well as the mental benefits of living in the improved society.

Ethics: On Social Values and the Rethinking of Prosperity

PSP refers to any rational and collective efforts to understand and promote social goods at any level from the family to the world. Social quality matters not only instrumentally, by facilitating production systems and psychological well-being, but also intrinsically insofar as people care about social quality independently of their mental self-evaluations: As socially constituted humans, we want to live well and in good societies (Marangos, 2012). Though analytically separable, these desiderata are in practice so strongly interwoven that our happiness, along with the rest of our minds and our identities, is in large part constituted by social quality. (Sociocultural factors also matter epistemologically, by affecting how individuals think about and report their own well-being, though that important theme is not the focus of this chapter, and has been addressed by many PP scholars, usually under a culture rubric (e.g., Butler, Lee, & Gross, 2007; Diener & Suh, 2000). Evidence on the distribution of mental well-being clearly matters a great deal for the understanding of social quality, particularly social justice but also other factors such as solidarity, social participation, and security (Helliwell et al., 2012, 2013); but it does not in itself tell us all we want to know about social quality.

In an important philosophical paper on irreducibly social goods, Charles Taylor (1990/1995) argued that due to the inseparability of culture, society, and individual well-being, there are some sociocultural goods that have intrinsic value. Taylor's writing is unhelpfully abstract and mystical, but he means by this that their importance to us is not reducible to their roles in facilitating our individual well-being. It doesn't mean that they can't also be useful, nor that their goodness is unconditional. Intrinsic goods are often useful, but they can also sometimes be harmful. For example, peaceability is useful (it helps the economy work), but it can be dangerous (if a society is threatened by aggressors). Intrinsic value is endlessly debatable, but most people appreciate that some social qualities are good in themselves. The practical importance of this lies in the need to escape from atomistic worldviews that see society as nothing more than a heap of individuals and their interests, and from the supporting subjectivism that treats people's minds as the only ultimate source of evidence on goodness (Taylor, 1990/1995, pp. 129–130).

This underlines the importance of socializing the twin influences of positive psychology mentioned earlier (positivity and subjectivity). Aggregate measures of individually self-reported happiness do not in themselves tell us much about social quality. A society of happy pigs does not fulfill most people's vision of social goodness. Although no doubt happiness and social quality tend to be mutually supportive, you could have a society high in average self-reported happiness that was low in social qualities such as fairness or citizen engagement. If we care about these social goods, we should assess them separately from happiness. Our happiness is qualified by, and conditional on, our belonging in a social environment that is partly built on our own self-transcending social motivations and virtuous engagements. As many recent texts on the evolution of morality have insisted, we are hardwired with capabilities and motivations that transcend the satisfaction our immediate selfish desires (Pinker, 2011; Smith, 2003; Wright, 1995), even if these have to fight it out with more selfish drives relating to survival (Wilson, 2004). A great deal of empirical research on the psychological rewards of altruistic or prosocial behavior supports this (Aknin, Dunn, & Norton, 2012; Borgonovi, 2008), as does a great deal of research on deferred gratification and self-regulation (Shoda, Mischel, & Peak, 1990).

Understanding social goods and the evidence and debates relating to them will take us well beyond minimalist social responsibility approaches that simply try to minimize social harms. It will also take us beyond the basic functions and efficiencies that are lumped together under social development and human development rubrics—the medical systems, legal systems, schooling, environmental infrastructure, and financial safety nets through which citizens may or may not be enabled to live long, safe, and healthy lives. These are instrumental social values, the outcomes and performance indicators of the well-ordered society. This chapter focuses, instead, on the identification of those social qualities that are attributed intrinsic value, that are deemed good in themselves and so are worthy to serve as social goals. I propose that our ability to identify, discuss, and evaluate such goals can be significantly enhanced through closer engagements between positive psychologists, social theorists, and planners.

Both the PP and the PSP movements draw our attention to questions of value. Rhetorical use of the term social has in recent years often been combined with well-being and/or happiness, marking the promotion of renewed vigor in considering what really matters in life. As one recent policy research report puts it, “Local progress as a concept is often used interchangeably with concepts such as ‘well-being,’ ‘happiness,’ and ‘societal progress’” (Caistor-Arendar & Mguni, 2013, p. 6; see also, e.g., Lawlor, Nicholls, & Neitzert, 2009; Wood & Leighton, 2010). As the Social Return on Investment Network's (SROI) guide puts it, “SROI is about value, rather than money” (SROI, 2012, p. 8). In other words, suspicion of monetary reductionism and so-called materialism is closely associated with an interest in elusive and hitherto unmeasured aspects of personal and social well-being. This linkage between happiness and social value has been particularly evident in the United Kingdom, where the Conservative Party announced in 2008 a strong interest in promoting both, and where the big society concept is now associated with formal requirements to promote and assess happiness, well-being, and social value at national and local levels, and at institutional levels in the public and voluntary sectors (Wood & Leighton, 2010, p. 18).

It is, however, important not to confuse skepticism about money metrics with anti-market sentiments. A first step toward strengthening the analysis of social quality must be to fight the artificial economy-versus-society opposition that distracts and misleads so much public discourse, and instead to recognize markets as absolutely central to positive social quality. Evidently, since most people in most corners of the world have become highly dependent on markets, finance, and commercial transactions, these must be regarded as part of social quality and included in our understanding of social goods and social progress, rather than glibly treated as separate from or necessarily antithetical to society, community, and culture.

Economic freedom correlates strongly with self-reported happiness worldwide (Gropper, Lawson, & Thorne, 2011), but recognizing both the intrinsic and the instrumental value of markets does not entail naive assumptions about their goodness. Indeed, it is important to recognize corporate financial recklessness, for example, not just as some de-humanized and abstracted economic failure, but as a serious social and psychological pathology that threatens even more widespread erosion of social values and democracy (Stiglitz, 2012, p. 13). Whether we see markets as amoral (as economists traditionally do) or as immoral (as social critics often do) it is quite wrong to partition the economy off from society. It makes no philosophical sense to call for “a better balance between social and economic development” (Estes, 2010, p. 364). No social goods are necessarily benign, not even freedom, peace, and solidarity. There is no plausible reason why rethinking prosperity critics should single out free markets and economic growth as peculiarly ethically suspect. Other social goods such as democracy, justice systems, schooling systems, medical services, and social security systems can also produce harmful effects.

Markets are, of course, mainly of interest for their instrumental rather than intrinsic value. But it is also worth pausing to consider whether some aspects of markets can be considered to have intrinsic social quality. The global movement toward well-being-focused social planning and evaluation therefore shares with PP not only a reaction against excessive pathologism, but also a concern for authenticity in the face of purportedly inauthentic valuation. In other words, there are synergies and commonalities between the pursuit of authentic happiness and genuine wealth. Economistic planning and growth obsession at national levels are portrayed as the sources of inauthenticity just as materialism and shortsighted hedonism have been the bogeymen of the PP movement at the individual level.

In addition to the false economy/society dichotomy, the other problematic opposition commonly deployed in debates about value is that between society and the individual, and consequently between social and individual well-being. In a somewhat overstated but brilliant essay on social well-being based on the phenomenological concept of Mitsein (conviviality, social being, or being-with-others), Stephen Webb has argued that

The well-being of the person is fundamentally determined in its mode of being through the relationships in which it stands to other people. If this is correct then language and communication rather than mental perception is the locus of well-being… The contribution of Mitsein to considerations of well-being is one that not only provides for a more expansive and richer social dimension but most importantly is a foundation for meaning and ethics. (Webb, 2010, pp. 971, 974)

Similarly, a collection of Amazonian ethnographic essays on conviviality has argued that for Amazonians social being (including concepts of peace, harmony, and sociability) is so paramount that Western concepts of individual well-being are inapplicable (Overing & Passes, 2000, p. xiii). Like Webb, and like many texts on Eastern, African, and Pacific collectivism—the editors exaggerate cultural differences in collectivism versus individualism. All humans are clearly social beings, and nearly all recognize this frequently and in many ways, but no anthropologist has yet produced a credible account of a society in which the individual person is not recognized as in some ways a separate agent with discrete interests. Still, in much of Western scholarly and popular psychology, and in quality of life studies in general, the intrinsic value of sociality is under-recognized, crowded out by the implicit and fallacious assumption that well-being only resides in the individual person.

The Social Well-Being Matrix: A Tool for Describing and Analyzing Social Quality

Positive psychologists and sociologists have attended to social dimensions of well-being at four levels, each of which is sometimes called social development:

1. Individual: self-transcendence, prosocial attitudes, and social intelligence.
2. Interpersonal: relational well-being, qualities of dyadic relationships and interactions such as friendship, romantic love, parental warmth, and acts of kindness.
3. Organization or community levels: positive qualities of social processes and institutions such as families, decent workplaces, and community vitality.
4. Societal/global: the overall state of national and global society and culture.

Though few would have any difficulty agreeing to these basic distinctions, in practice social factors get discussed without specification as to which level is meant. Individual scholars and practitioners also tend to specialize in one or two of these four levels and hence are professionally or situationally inhibited from developing the ability to explore relationships between the different levels at which social and cultural processes operate. In Table 43.2, the social well-being matrix is proposed as a simple tool to facilitate clearer description and analysis of how social goods manifest at these different levels.

For the sake of simplicity, just four categories of social quality are distinguished: justice, solidarity, participation, and security. Based on a global review of international, national, and local agencies promoting social change, I identified these as a minimal list of social processes that seemed to be universally valued in principle, even if endlessly debatable in practice (Thin, 2002). Other possibly distinct categories could include collective capabilities (such as the demonstrable ability to cooperate and share knowledge and resources efficiently; Evans, 2002); freedom (respect for cultural diversity and individual autonomy, choice; Sen, 1999); cultural integrity (transgenerational shared knowledge and beliefs; Foster, 1998); and interest (facilitating the creative challenges and entertainments and enabling citizens to achieve flow and avoid boredom; Swedberg, 2005). Nonetheless, I see no difficulty in fitting all of these comfortably within this matrix. Freedom, for example, though featuring in some way in most visions of social progress, seems to be most effectively described and analyzed under these headings separately than it is as a generalized good: People value freedom as political rights and as freedom from want and violence (negative liberty); and as freedom to choose friends and partners, and to participate in social decision making (positive liberty).

Probably no one will ever come up with the definitive list of social goods, just as PP scholars continue to diversify the ways of classifying psychological goods. But further work on such lists, combined with analytical work exploring how the different social qualities interact with one another and with mental goods, should greatly improve the prospects for intelligently positive social planning.

Social planning, then, requires positive visions of really good social quality. It also requires recognition of social progress together with efforts to understand how this happens—themes that are in short supply in social research (Best, 2001; Thin, 2002). If positivity gets short shrift among social theorists and activists, so, too, does psychology. Social planners hardly ever refer to the kinds of personal development advice offered by self-help authors and life coaches as the high road to better lives. Theories and practices aimed at becoming a better you have surprisingly rarely been linked systematically with efforts to make a better society.

Distinguishing these levels and categories of social quality does not seem particularly intellectually fraught or practically challenging. To understand why, in practice, so many scholars and agencies make such a poor job of discussing and promoting social goods, it is also necessary to appreciate that in policy discourse the term social carries a rich and often bewildering variety of meanings, some of which stray a long way from the commonsense understanding of social as pertaining to society (as in social science and social structure). Policy usages include

1. Public goods (instrumentally valued): public as opposed to private goods (as in social marketing, social forestry, social design, social procurement, social profit, social return on investment, social economy, social value, corporate social responsibility, and social entrepreneur, and the extension of social sector to include commercial provision of schooling and medical services).
2. Residual, neglected, or elusive and disparate factors: nonmarket or not-for-profit rather than purely commercial transactions (as in social sectors, social infrastructure, social reporting, and social fund); elusive and intangible, nonbiophysical or nontechnical factors (as in social medicine, social town planning, social factors, and some uses of social value and social well-being); habitually neglected social factors and to the voices of ordinary people (as in social history); relatively uninstitutionalized and informal social processes (as in social movement and sociolegal studies).
3. Problems: pathologically and/or remedially, referring to various matters of inequity, injustice, and poverty (as in the most common uses of social impact, social indicators, and social issues), and various compensatory or remedial policies and clinical practices (e.g., social housing, social debt, social firms, social banking, social work, social policy, social administration, social service, social welfare, and some usages of social goals).
4. Personal capabilities and character: psychologically, as used by developmental psychologists and educators, referring to the external, relational self as opposed to the introspective self (as in the terms social intelligence, social skills, social identity, and social development).
5. Positive social qualities (intrinsically valued): the desirable qualities of social processes such as the equity, kindness, and affective quality of interpersonal and intergroup relationships, institutions, trust, and citizen engagement (as in social quality and social progress, and some uses of social thought/philosophy, social well-being, social goods, social teaching/gospel/creed/ministry, and social advantage).

The first three usages are of at least passing interest to positive psychologists, both because of the insertion of well-being and happiness into the residual social category, but also to the extent that they all involve choosing social as a form of deliberate linguistic positivity in preference to the negative terminologies such as nonprofit, nonprivate, nongovernment, poverty, and disadvantage. The fourth, the social capabilities and dispositions of individuals, has always been a core concern of psychologists. In the next section we will explore the normative implications this last meaning of positive social quality, which in some ways overlaps with the others but which scholars and planners alike seem to find difficult to conceptualize clearly.

Linking Social Quality With Mental Thriving

With these twin movements toward psychological and social positivity, we live in an era of unprecedented interest in synergies between social and psychological progress. Against widespread antimodernist cultural and environmental pessimism, there is a tide of evidence-based optimism about synergies between personal happiness, virtue, and social progress. Since the PP movement has so far located positivity mainly in the individual mind, there is scope for enriching the discipline by strengthening its attention to social quality, recognizing that positivity can be a property of sociocultural environments not just of individual minds.

Though inevitably individualistic, the PP movement has from the time of its inauguration paid significant heed to social well-being. The point, its founders told us, was to “understand and build the factors that allow individuals, communities, and societies to flourish” (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p. 5). Many of the strengths studied and promoted are social capabilities that require two or more minds to work in harmony (Snyder & Lopez, 2002). Much of the public policy engagement associated with PP and happiness research has been about transcending economism by looking at residual social factors that influence or constitute well-being, as is evident for example in the emphasis on noneconomic factors in Diener and Seligman's “Beyond Money” article (2004, p. 1).

Positive psychologists can therefore enrich their understanding and enhance their practical influence by expanding their attention beyond the personal level to explore interactions between people's minds and the social qualities of their environment. For their part, social planners and development activists can improve their scope and effectiveness by attending to the need to incorporate psychological experience, or ‘subjectivity’, into our understanding of positive social qualities. Social justice isn't simply an objectively fair set of circumstances and relationships: Citizens need to appreciate the fairness of the processes that matter to them. Security is more than just the objective lack of damaging volatilities and vulnerabilities: People must recognize that they are secure and act accordingly by showing trust in other people and in the future.

Normative Considerations: What Can and Should We Do About Positive Social Qualities?

Normative considerations proceed from ethical debates about values and from the descriptive and analytical capabilities discussed earlier. The problem of inadequate conceptualization of social goods was recognized already in the very first edition of the Social Indicators Research journal as a critical factor inhibiting normative translation from values to plans, which argued that “we have no normative models for prescribing means of enhancing social welfare… Fragmented social programs, welfare services community projects and the like, prevail” (Galnoor, 1974, pp. 28, 29; emphasis added).

Despite the massive expansion of the social indicators and social reporting industries worldwide since Galnoor wrote those words, his pessimism would be just as valid four decades later. In practice, most proponents of social goods offer no attempt at defining these. Instead, they implicitly assume an adequate degree of common understanding of what qualities we all hope to see in the good society. These assumptions are ill-founded, and this becomes particularly clear when we see how the happiness lens reveals important disjunctures between presumed social goods and the evidence of private self-reported happiness.

For example, it has become all too common for scholars and media on the beyond-GDP bandwagon to make glib claims that economic growth does not increase happiness, despite many robust examples of evidence showing correlations between growth or income and happiness (Helliwell et al., 2012). Arguably, though, it is much more interesting and disturbing that cherished public expenditures such as expensive public schooling and medical services, and even educational attainments and gender equality, do not seem to correlate with self-reported happiness (Stevenson & Wolfers, 2009; Veenhoven, 2000). This research exposes the naïveté of mistaking social expenditures for good social processes and outcomes.

Whether or not we find the term happiness useful in policy and practice, few would argue against the idea that development should help people to thrive, not just to survive and avoid undue discomfort. Living conditions matter, of course, but so does mental experience. It matters both for its intrinsic value and for the benign effects of well-organized minds. Indeed, you do not need to be a declinist to recognize that in some ways humanity's triumphs over material discomfort have led to setbacks in psychological functioning (Eckersley, 2000; Steedman, Atherton, & Graham, 2011) and that in some ways capitalism can lead to dismantling of social capital (Putnam, 2000) and social recession (Rutherford, 2008).

Instead of the spurious idea that there is a growing gap between economic growth and happiness, a more persuasive argument would be that many of the most important benefits of modernity are neither caused primarily by economic growth (itself a somewhat blunt and arbitrary invention of the 1930s), nor well captured in so-called economic statistics (Kenny, 2005). Economism must be offset by attention to positive subjective experiences. For example, despite economic and political gender inequalities worldwide, women tend to report themselves as happy as men or happier, and to enjoy many more happy life-years. This does not mean that gender inequality does not matter, but it does reveal complexities in gender relations that require us to recognize, celebrate and promote women's and men's positive experiences and strengths. If the PP movement could join forces with a new parallel movement focused on social goods and social progress, there would surely be important benefits both to individuals and to society.

Perhaps the most important outcome of the PP movement is that it has made it much harder for psychologists and associated professionals to avoid considering psychological goods. Sadly, pathologism and clinicalism still dominate the rest of the social sciences along with applied social policy and social work. Until very recently, social scholars and professionals have attended mainly to harms and to their mitigation or prevention, rather than looking at social goods and flourishing societies. It is still quite normal worldwide for students to complete degrees in social science, even in applied subjects like social development, social work, or social policy, without ever learning how to identify or analyze social goods or social progress, let alone assess or measure them systematically. Sociocultural anthropology is still routinely taught in ways that not only neglect but also actively discourage the moral evaluation of cultural and social phenomena, on the relativist grounds that we should not judge phenomena in one cultural context using values and concepts that are alien to that environment.

The Intrinsic Value and Plausibility of Positive Social Appreciation

Happiness research and monitoring of positive social goods may or may not lead to improvements in services, treatments, and effectiveness, and there is no shortage of public skeptics and pessimists in this regard (Johns & Ormerod, 2007). Meanwhile, it is important to recognize and celebrate the intrinsic value of attending to social goods such as aggregate happiness, peace, and trust (Bruni, 2010). An organization or society that takes a systematic interest in members or citizens' psychosocial well-being and the quality of the social fabric is, other things being equal, better than one that does not. The pursuit of cross-cultural understanding and solidarity requires appreciative empathy (recognizing and sharing people's good experiences, not just their sufferings). As the Dalai Lama has repeatedly argued, recognition of humanity's common striving for happiness marks a crucial empathic move away from the exaggeration of cultural differences (Dalai Lama & Cutler, 1998, p. 21).

Whether we value happiness and social progress research for its intrinsic or for its instrumental value, however, it is first of all crucial to answer the skeptics by making this work scientifically robust and persuasive rather than tokenistic. Unlike a century ago, today social scientists are generally reluctant even to use the tainted term social progress. So the job of examining it is left to bureaucrats and planners who rarely seem prepared to articulate any vision of society that you or I would find aspirational.

The root problem seems to be that social policy evaluation is driven less by rational appraisal of what social processes matter most, than by two quite different criteria: countability and clinical priority. The (parsimonious) countability criterion persuades us to assess those kinds of social change that seem amenable to reduction into numerical form, for which statistical evidence can be affordably gathered and which can offer the public simple and memorable information. This criterion does not in itself rule out the measurement of social goods. You can count trust and call it social capital. You can count things like intercultural empathy and tolerance. But the clinical priority criterion persuades scholars, governments, and media to pay attention mainly not to social goods but to those social harms that we ought to be immediately worried about: poverty, injustice, violence, crime, and so on.

Regarding the countability criterion, in both the social quality/social audit movement and in happiness studies, there are worrying tendencies for scholars and practitioners to look beyond GDP but not beyond measurement. I have already criticized elsewhere the problem of distortive uses of pseudo-accurate and pseudo-realist measurements of happiness (Thin, 2012a; Thin, 2012b, Chapter 7). Similarly, among promoters of social audit, the worthy enthusiasm for drawing our attention to goods that have traditionally gone unmeasured seems all too easily to be distracted by an obsession with assigning numerical values to elusive and complex goods (Thin, 2012b). For example, the previously mentioned government-endorsed 108-page SROI guide offers multiple assurances about the possibility of accurate monetization of social values, despite the fact that its authors seem unable to identify clearly any of the social goods that urge us to evaluate. Texts on social audit available from sites like www.neweconomics.org, www.socialauditnetwork.org.uk, www.accountability.org, and www.philanthropycapital.org are similarly long on numerophilia and short on social or philosophical analysis.

What really matters is not that we pretend to be able to measure social goods accurately, but rather that we acknowledge their importance and sharpen our ability to observe and discuss them intelligently, in order to promote them better. If public happiness scholarship is to have intrinsic value by constituting public empathy, it has to be pursued through empathy-inducing processes, and it is hard to see how the numerical reductionism of surveys can achieve that. It is therefore imperative that future efforts to improve the evidence base for PSP diversify the methods used to generate knowledge about subjective experiences of social quality.

Our collective goal should not be to aim for accurate factual information on either happiness or social quality, but rather to foster intelligent conversations about these by improving our concepts, our analytical capabilities, and the availability of a variety of quantitative and qualitative evidence. Whereas the positivity of the PP movement can surely make a benign difference to social planning, there are ample signs that positivism, in the form of naive beliefs about pseudo-accurate measures of personal happiness and social quality, can all too easily capture the imagination of public media and planners alike and distort our conversations in unhelpful ways. The mind and social systems are complex, intertwined, emergent systems that are both understood and generated through conversations. Numbers can sometimes play a part in facilitating conversations, but most of what matters in life is very poorly represented by numbers.

Conclusion: Gross National Happiness in Bhutan

I have traced the logical progression from ethical discussion of values, through the process of sharpening our descriptive and analytical abilities, to normative considerations leading toward improvements in practice. It may help to conclude by exploring how these processes have unfolded in the now globally iconic example of Bhutan's promotion of the idea of Gross National Happiness (GNH) as a policy rubric. It started with an off-the-cuff remark by the new 16-year-old king to a journalist in the 1970s: “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.” This obviously echoes the earlier idea, first expressed by Francis Hutcheson during the Scottish Enlightenment in 1727, that happiness is what counts, and Sinclair's later development of the idea that it can be counted in national statistics (Thin, 2012b, Chapter 1). GNH has become a rallying cry for diverse array of not only happiness policy promoters but also anti-GDP critics, antimodernists, and advocates of cultural and environmental conservation.

The king's quip made two ethical claims: that economic growth is not ultimately as important as other goods, and that what ultimately matters in life is happiness. However, given the great diversity of meanings of happiness and related concepts in all cultural contexts, all it does is tell us to think about what is good—that is, that values matter. Essentially, happiness is a conversation starter but never in itself an analytical term. There followed a couple of decades during which the king's GNH slogan was echoed around the world, and meanwhile his government rapidly modernized the country with (despite the much-vaunted cultural and environmental conservationism) a surprisingly strong emphasis on economic liberalization and growth, which greatly reduced the poverty, ill health, and illiteracy of the Bhutanese population. Perhaps during this era happiness and social qualities improved, but until very recently they were not systematically monitored.

From the late 1990s, the government of Bhutan with assistance from various international agencies and scholars began trying to develop the analytical and descriptive tools that would give GNH some practical substance within Bhutan as well as credibility on a global stage (Ura, Alkire, Zangmo, & Wangdi, 2012). After a series of national consultations and international GNH conferences, Bhutan's Centre for Bhutan Studies began helping various government agencies to monitor a variety of goods, all subsumed under the GNH rubric. In practice, this meant expanding the concept of happiness a very long way from its normal Anglophone meaning of mental well-being. Adapted from Anielski's Genuine Well-Being Index (2012; see earlier summary), the GNH Index uses the same nine domains. Of these, three are particularly focused on positive social qualities: governance includes participation, freedom, and services; community vitality includes social support, relationships, family, and crime; and cultural diversity includes linguistic affiliation and collective recreational activities such as arts and crafts, festivals, drama, and music.

Doubtless many people looking at the Bhutanese list of indicators may detect hints of dogmatic conservatism and be tempted to question whether the full diversity of citizens' preferences is well represented. Indeed, before and since the 2013 change of government, the importance of GNH has been a matter for heated public debate in Bhutan (Sonam, 2013). Still, there can be little doubt that the immense effort at conceptual clarification and development of assessment tools has raised public awareness within and beyond Bhutan of the importance of discussing and promoting the goods we value. A key concept is that of sufficiency in a select set of those domains the respondents see as important: Self-reported sufficiency in 50% of the 124 variables classifies 90% of the population as happy. This provides an important normative restraint on the default assumption that if something is good, then more of it must be better. In this form, GNH has become sufficientarian in its recognition that people can't simultaneously pursue the full variety of goods, and that we need good enough but not maximal satisfaction in the goods that we pursue.

A key moment in the globalization of GNH came with the unanimous adoption on July 19, 2011, of the UN General Assembly's Resolution 65/309: “Happiness: Towards a Holistic Approach to Development,” introduced by Bhutan's prime minister and cosponsored by 68 nations. At the time of going to press it seems highly likely that the follow-up work by a Bhutan-led international panel of experts, which is developing evidence-based analysis of the intrinsic and instrumental values of the nine GNH domains, will ensure that the UN's post-2015 development goals will pay substantial attention to happiness and to social goods (Government of Bhutan, 2013).

Summary Points

• Social planners at all levels and in many countries worldwide have been taking inspiration from the positivity of the PP movement, and from its emphasis on the importance of subjective experience. The new rubric of positive social planning is recommended as a way of drawing these disparate processes together.
• It is important for PSP to be based on philosophic recognition of the intrinsic value of social goods, and not just on their instrumental value in facilitating happiness. Our happiness is constituted, in part, by the knowledge that we live in a good society.
• Social quality is an important concept that neither social planners nor the PP movement have yet used systematically. Further work is needed on social quality for it to become a sure basis for positive social planning: Key categories of social goods need to be spelled out, and it needs to be rescued from the diverse other uses of social in research and public planning, which tend to be too general, residualist, and pathological.
• There is intrinsic value in public happiness and social quality research and evaluation, since a society that takes systematic interest in well-being and in social goods is better than one that does not. This value can be strengthened by shifting emphasis from reductionist survey-based measurements toward more empathic qualitative methods.
• It is essential that further analytical work is done by psychologists, sociologists, and planners together to map out the interactions between social and psychological goods and harms, exploring both universal generic interactions and the ways in which these operate differently in various cultural and socioeconomic settings.

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