Meaning, politics, and well-being policy

My girlfriend had a really profound thought this morning that I wanted to log. She said that "politics is endogenous to well-being because meaning is endogenous to well-being". 

The empirical relationship between a sense of meaning and subjective well-being (life satisfaction, positive emotion, vitality, optimism, etc.) is well established. Meaning has three sub-items: purpose, coherence, and significance. People need their lives to be dignified and make sense. Increasingly, they rely on politics to achieve this (as opposed to religion, their community, family, etc.). As my girlfriend went on to say (paraphrasing): "meaning in a politically fractious world relies on hanging on more and more tightly to your little slice of ideology". There is a lot of depth to these statements, but the bit I'm hung up on at the moment is the implications for well-being policy. There are presently a large number of academics operating as if well-being can be promoted technocratically. Like some machine, an expert with sufficient knowledge can turn a few policy dials and improve well-being. This is fundamentally erroneous (though not worthless as an idea) because policy is inherently political and politics is inextricably (and increasingly) tied to well-being. What well-being means must be decided through the political process, not by experts.

A naive description of representative democracy is the following. The people voice their concerns through the public sphere (media, activism, public discourse etc.). Politicians hear these concerns but often don't know how to address them (e.g. climate change). So they turn to experts, who come up with a range of solutions that are technical feasible (in that they "work"). These technically feasible solutions will differ in their ideological attractiveness. For example, more state-based solutions will typically appeal to the left, while more market-led solutions will appeal to the right. Politicians pick solutions that they like and think their constituents will get behind and get to campaigning. Those who are best able to capture public sentiment get elected an enact their policies.

You can't do something like this for well-being because, in a sense, the solution is an ideology. There is no ideology-free way to talk about well-being. Take inequality as a simple example. Data from large scale social surveys suggest that relative inequality (i.e. high gini coefficients) is bad for aggregate life satisfaction. So an expert could recommend that you reduce relative inequality to improve well-being. Is that politically neutral? Of course not. Inequality is a hot button issue across the left-right divide. But it goes deeper than that. The expert is saying that "justice" however it might be defined is subordinate to life satisfaction. But once you recognise that "justice" is an integral part of social meaning for people, you appreciate that justice and life satisfaction cannot be ranked.

This is why any well-being policy needs to be thoroughly co-designed, otherwise it simply risks smuggling the values and meanings of experts in under the guise of a value-neutral and/or sterilised concept.