The Capabilities Approach to Prosperity

In April 2016, Palgrave Macmillan approached Caroline Saunders with an invitation to write a book for the Wellbeing in Politics and Policy series edited by Ian Bache, Karen Scott and Paul Allin. Caroline accepted the invitation and invited Paul Dalziel and 

Joe Saunders (now an academic at Durham University) as coauthors.

The result was Wellbeing Economics: The capabilities approach to prosperity. It was published as an eBook on 11 September 2018, as a hardcover book on 26 September 2018, and as a softcover book on 26 December 2018. The preface explains its structure:

The framework is developed in this book as a series of 24 propositions, beginning with the proposition that the primary purpose of economics is to contribute to enhanced wellbeing of persons. Subsequent analysis then explains how this purpose can be achieved. 

Public policy is important in this analysis, but it is not the sole, or even the first, focus of the book. Instead, the framework recognises that wellbeing is supported by capabilities at several different levels of choice-making, with successive chapters focusing on persons, households and families, civil society, the market economy, local government, the Nation State and the global community.

Wellbeing Economics was published with an Open Access licence and is therefore free to download. It has been accessed here [external link].