All Essays

What happiness means in this context, why it matters as a governance objective, and how — and how well — it can be measured.

A closer look at the World Happiness Report's own data exposes deep problems in how happiness is measured — and raises the question of what the rankings are really capturing.

Rising incomes have not delivered the happiness or freedom they promised. An introduction to the cluster on why the world feels like it is going backwards.

The rules-based international order is fraying. On polycrisis, the recession in democracy, and the loss of confidence in collective response.

An economic model of how an AI-driven productivity shock would move through a modern economy — and why the honest answer is a description of what has to go right, not a prediction.

The root causes of discontent and the structural barriers — elite capture, contested sovereignty, identity politics — to a system that genuinely fosters happiness.

Why governance systems everywhere have become structurally insufficient to the complexity of the challenges they face — and lack any mechanism to force adaptation.

How the invocation of sovereignty routinely shields ruling elites rather than citizens, and why a small, careful cession of it could strengthen sovereignty more broadly.

On the structural failure of mainstream democratic politics to address the emotional and identity-based needs that drive a large share of political behaviour.

Reading the polling rise of Australia's One Nation through this project's framework — and asking what it has to say back to the framework.

What would it take to lift Afghanistan's happiness to Finland's? Taking the question seriously exposes how far conflict alone falls short as an explanation.

Why democratic institutions resist adaptation, and what an institutional response capable of forcing reform might look like.

On the structural limits of subsidiarity, and a proposed institution for the functions — security, climate, economic resilience — where scale is not optional.

What happens when a governance system is captured by the people with the least interest in reforming it — and an institution designed to prevent it.

The harder operational questions behind the Sovereigncy concept: governance mechanisms, distribution of power, and genuine enforcement capacity.

Not what is going wrong, but what governing for happiness would actually look like — at the level of framework and architecture.

A question for deliberation rather than a fixed answer: whether the design of the executive deserves to be asked with more seriousness than democracies currently allow.

Even the most individualistic societies contain a substantial collectivist minority, often drawn toward illiberalism. What stance should a liberal society take toward it?