Making SWB more relevant to policy: some issues in the context of older people

Broadly speaking, there are three accounts of well-being: mental state accounts, objective list accounts and desire fulfilment accounts (Parfit, 1984) The latter two perspectives have arguably had a much greater influence on academic debate, particularly in economics, and certainly on public policy (Diener and Seligman, 2004). For example, governments routinely target poverty, unemployment, literacy rates and violent crime, and try to increase the choices people have through raising average incomes and/or deregulating public services. Much less attention has been paid to exploring and trying to directly improve how people actually feel.