Urgent need for developing an 'Economy of Belonging'

London Prosperity Board Prosperity Index Public Services Europe

Juan Manuel Moreno

On Tuesday 19^th November, IGP Founder and Director, Professor Henrietta L. Moore, attended the Social Macroeconomics Hub workshop hosted by the Rebuilding Macroeconomics (RM) research initiative at the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford.

The event was attended by a diverse group of economists and social scientists and was concerned with the social foundations of economic decision-making and macroeconomic activity.

One of the RM Social Macroeconomic Hub’s central objectives is to develop new ways of working and measuring the social impact of economic shifts and decision-making processes within both government and businesses contexts. It does this through cross-disciplinary collaborations and conversations, the hub is aimed at measuring, is central to our work.

Prof. Moore's intervention, Rethinking Prosperity. Beyond Life Outcomes, Towards Life Opportunities, showcased some of the main findings and developments from two of IGP’s ongoing projects: Universal Basic Services and the London Prosperity Index.

Prof. Moore emphasised the urgent need for developing an ‘Economy of Belonging’ based on a commitment to social justice and a renewal of the value of reciprocal obligations, and called for new ways of working and measuring the social and the economic that depart from participatory, innovation and collaboration.

‘Our research shows that conventional ways of measuring socio-economic patterns and aggregates from diverse datasets and metrics are often at odds between each other and do not fully explain prosperity and well-being in terms of the lived-experiences of individuals’.

This is a serious issue as it speaks directly at the democratic deficit both in terms of political and economic decision-making processes and, most importantly, in terms of identifying and measuring improvements in quality of life for communities and individuals.

‘What we are finding, through exercises involving citizen science and different scales of analyses, is that a much more granular study is needed to understand the implications of macroeconomics at the local level, and the underlining personal and social foundations driving economic and political decisions’.