The Quality of Life Turn: The Measurement and Politics of Well-Being in the 1970s

Abstract

In the “long 1970s,” measuring well-being or quality of life was high on the agenda of international organizations, governmental agencies, and social science research centers. The article examines how their endeavors to monitor and quantify people’s quality of life spawned a new world of ideas, concepts, numbers, graphs, and facts that transformed the meaning of welfare and the postwar foundations of social and economic policy. By focusing on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s quality of life program of the 1970s, the article brings into view a variety of epistemic actors, including social scientists, governmental officials, and the bureaucrats of international organizations, and analyzes how their interactions shaped the production and circulation of new, policy-relevant knowledge in this nascent field. The article argues that the quality of life endeavors of the 1970s mark an epistemic and political shift away from the postwar concepts of material well-being and toward psychological notions of well-being; and, too, that this opened up new horizons for political intervention and paved the way to the “happiness boom” in the early twenty-first century.