“…for all!”

A thought experiment

Suppose we could ask every person in the world a single, simple question: “Do you have wellbeing?” (or “Do you consider yourself to be well?”) and get from each a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. Let's call this question Q1. Their answers would be Boolean (1 or 0, true or false) values that we could label x₁ ∈ {1, 0} for the first person we ask, x₂ for the second person, and so on to x_8000000000 and eventually x_N, where N > 8×10⁹ is the number of people on Earth. We can write X to denote a vector including all of these values or data points.

Next, we compute the function or statistic:

This is the logical union of every x_i, i ∈ (1, N). It is a very simple function that has the value ‘yes’/1/true if—and only if!—every x_i is ‘yes’; in other words, if every person in the world says, “Yes—I have wellbeing.” If even one person says, “No—I do not have wellbeing,” then W¹(X) = 0.

I want to set up a few straw-man claims around this thought experiment, question, and function. To be clear, I'm only sketching each one, not setting out to give a full defense or discuss all the implications. The hope is rather to invite some responses and pointers: Is there already good writing on any of these ideas, or research that uses similar framing? If so, where?

Briefly:

1. W¹(X) is the most parsimonious and direct representation of the background notions and widely used language that both express and inform our shared understanding of “universal wellbeing.”
2. X and thus W¹ would be very hard to measure directly.
3. We can imagine alternatives to W¹(X), which we can label W²(…), W³(…), etc. These are different functions, that may be computed on x_i or on different data (labeled y_i, z_i, etc.) whose values might approximate or proxy for values of X or W¹ that we do not observe directly. These alternate measures inevitably involve value judgements that replace the subjectivity of individuals with those of (the) researcher(s).
4. However convenient or useful, the alternate data or functions in (3) are “wellbeing indicators” only to the extent they (a) have precise definitions and (b) clear, empirical relationships with X/W¹.
5. Tension exists between fidelity to X/W¹ and ease of operationalization. Researchers face incentives to choose alternate data (3) that seem more accessible, and to pick alternate measures W² etc. that can be computed on such data. These incentives tend to sharpen the divergence from W¹.

These overlap, but I'll try to treat each in a separate section.

I also want to emphasize at the outset that, although the thought experiment may sound vaguely utilitarian (“the greatest good for the greatest number”), I am very much opposed to the so-called ‘TESCREAL’ bundle of ideologies and the way they are deployed in public discource and research. This essay is in fact motivated by my worry that there is a risk of normalizing these ideologies through incautious choices (5).

1. Universal wellbeing

Many well-known aspirational declarations, statements, targets, goals, and initiatives use very clear universal language, or imply universality and totality. One example is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 3

Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of the person.

Others include many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), for instance:

Goal 2: Zero hunger

End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainble agriculture

or:

Goal 5: Gender equality

Acheive gender equality and empower all women and girls.

…and the names and goals of initiatives like:

• Sustainable Energy for All.
• Sustainable (Urban) Mobility for All.

It is worthwhile to take these at face value. In other words, I set aside the question of whether any one or all of these are merely aspirational, were made insincerely, and/or are promoted cynically: whether the proponents (signatories, member states, secretariats, philanthropies) don't actually mean that ‘everyone’, ‘all’ etc. should enjoy the unimpaired rights, material conditions, or capabilities described—merely that most people should, or perhaps more than enjoy them today. If we take these statements as written, function W¹(X) is clearly their most direct representation. If even one person lacks the thing in question (“security of the person”, “sustainable energy”, etc.), then x_i = 0 for some i, thus W¹(X) = 0, and the stated, universal goal or target is not met: not everyone has the thing. For instance, if one woman or girl is not empowered, then the goal to “empower all women and girls” is not achieved.

This case of a single exception sounds extreme, but is itself a well-known thought experiment. In the classic short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. LeGuin (which won Locus and Hugo awards in 1974) and Isabel J. Kim's Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole (Nebula 2024, and Locus and Hugo nominee 2025), the “Omelas child” is a person for whom x_{Omelas child} = 0 —in a very stark and tragic sense. Many positive things are said about the quality of life for everyone else in the city of Omelas, yet W¹(X) = 0 for Omelas in particular, and for the world in which it exists. In pop philosophy the so-called trolley problem and other devices are sometimes used to frame similiar discussions: some frivolous, some useful.

It's not my intent here to discuss all these. It's only to observe that a statement like “Everyone—except for the kid in the Omelas hole—has the right to liberty,” is not what was endorsed by the signatories to the UDHR. On the other hand, if we say that a variable y_i is 1 if and only if (‘iff’) a person enjoys their right to liberty, then W¹(y_i) = 1 is unambiguously consistent with “universally enjoyed human rights.” W¹(y_i) = 0 just as clearly indicates that those right are not universally enjoyed: they may be ‘widely’ enjoyed, or enjoyed by a lucky few, but not by ‘all’.

2. Practical realities, the ‘no’ answer, and Q2

If we tried to carry out our thought experiment, we would immediately run into difficulties. Some include:

1. It is not easy to translate Q1 from English into the native language of each person in the world. A word with the same denotation and connotation as ‘wellbeing’ may not exist (more on this shortly).
2. ‘Yes’ and ‘no’ responses may not be very natural in each language.
3. The questioner and respondent inevitably stand in some social relationship to one another. Social desirability, power dynamics, and other well-known forms of response bias would interfere in obtaining a genuine answer from each person.
4. It would be very expensive to ask every person directly and collate the data. I'll come back to this in section 5, below.
5. Even if we did collect all x₁…x_N, this would be only a snapshot at a certain point in time; and we would not have information on changes to each individual x_i.

Another practical reality we would quickly meet is that many people would answer Q1 with a ‘no’, and that a ‘no’ answer, on its own, is not readily actionable. Surely we also want to know: what it is that prevents a person from feeling that they have wellbeing? Are they not empowered? Do they not have food, water, health, sanitation, mobility, enjoyment of certain rights? This supports our virtuous intent to help them address those barriers, and in so doing enable them, and eventually all, to have wellbeing.

So, we add a second question, Q2: “Why not?”

3. Subjectivity and objectivity

Q2 leads directly into a vast and murky swamp where things get very complicated. Q1 is constructed to, as far as possible, get a Boolean answer. In contrast, valid answers to Q2 must include the entire scope of human experience. Consider a very short selection of possible answers (for an exercise, write 10 or 100 more of your own):

1. No—I do not have wellbeing, because I am hungry and thirsty.
2. … I am cold.
3. … I am sick and can't get health care.
4. … my child is sick and can't get health care.
5. … my neighbour's child is sick and can't get health care.
6. … I hate my neighbour and wish to kill him, but the law forbids me and he remains alive.
7. … I want to own a sports car, but I don't.
8. … I want to own a private jet, but I don't.
9. … the slender-billed curlew is extinct, and I am inconsolably sad about this.

The core idea here is that every person has a subjective notion of their own ‘wellbeing’. When we ask Q1 to measure x_i and compute W¹(X), this is what we measure: whether every person has what they consider to be ‘wellbeing’.

Here's a passage from Max Horkheimer in a “Seminar on Needs” in 1942, translated by James Crane:

Thesis I. The juxtaposition of material and ideal needs proves untenable upon closer inspection. The unchanging adherence to such cissions [Scheidungen] leads to serious theoretical and political errors.

[…]

Thesis II. To speak generally, the ideal needs one might strive to fulfill are nothing other than the social form, the manner and mode, in which material needs are to be satisfied. When the demand for a pint of milk is raised, even from the mouth of a government official, it contains a number of “formal” elements, which are not expressly stated: that the milk is delivered in a clean container, that it contains no dangerous bacteria, that it has a certain fat content, etc. If one stuck strictly to the wording, the demand could be fulfilled; nevertheless, the child would be cheated. Dialectics recognizes that it is not only [elements such as] the nutritional value, the kind of container, and so forth, which play a role in whether the child is cheated. It is also crucial, for instance, that the father and mother do not suffer under the burden of senseless labor, and the child under the fear of losing them to it; that the child lives in an orderly house, that they have a good family doctor, that there is no exploitative [and terroristic] domination—which would necessarily be reflected in the very faces and being of the parents, and throughout the child’s whole environment, and which, in the long run, would spoil the milk so much more than a dirty container ever could. The social order is as much a part of the milk as its fat content.

In the drafting of our paper up through December 2024 we discussed for many hours very similar questions. This translation was published later, in March 2025. Our focus was on the needs-and-satisfiers frameworks of Max-Neef, Doyal & Gough, and others from the 1970s and 1980s, but these authors were informed directly or indirectly by, and attempting to elaborate, the earlier work of Horkheimer and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School.

The researcher/questioner in our thought experiment might face the temptation to depart from X and W¹ when they hear a Q1 ‘no’ and Q2 “…because my milk was not delivered in a clean container.” They might want to respond: “Well, this matter of the cleanliness of milk containers is too complicated; I'm mainly trying to gather Q1 data and that's hard enough already. I am going to put you down as ‘yes’ on Q1, and I'll make a little asterisk here and a note: ‘adequate nutrition, but doesn't like the smudges on the bottle’.” In this case, the researcher has not measured x_i. They have chosen to substitute something else that we can call z_i: “wellbeing—notwithstanding food container cleanliness.” They use this to approximate x_i. In many cases may have the same value…but not always.

I'll come back to alternates and approximations in the next section. For now, let's focus on what the researcher has done. Lists of fundamental human needs or rights often include ‘autonomy’ or related terms and concepts. Surely one essential aspect of autonomy is the autonomy to choose what matters to us; to construct meaning, including the meaning of ‘wellbeing’. People who lack the capability or freedom to do this —who are told to be satisfied, even though they do not have wellbeing— would surely answer Q1 with ‘no’, and might say to Q2 “…because I am denied the right to my own subjectivity and perception of my own wellbeing.”

This also is why we pose Q1 and Q2 to every person: if we asked a dictator to give us data x_i for each of his subjects, he could give ‘yes’ for every one without consulting them. If asked directly, many of them would of course say to Q1 ‘no’ and to Q2 “…because I live under a dictator!”

Every possible answer to Q2 falls on a spectrum from unobjectionable to unconscionable. From the list of 10 answers above, few would object to (1), especially since the stated unmet needs align with some of the widely (not to say universally!) agreed SDGs. At the far extreme, accepting (6) would lead to a world of unpunished murder and assault in which the victims would certainly not have wellbeing. In this case, hopefully few would object to the researcher/questioner overruling the respondent. In the middle, (7) might inspire a fierce debate: do we accept that a person who has everything except a sports car can not be well? Do we psychoanalyze them and say, “What you actually lack is self-esteem; we can give you another way to achieve that, one that's less destructive. If that's you're only complaint, we judge you to be otherwise well.”

My claim 3 is simply that reckoning with this spectrum is unavoidable. No matter how ‘objective’ or morally appropriate an approximation z_i is claimed to be, it encodes a value judgement on the part of the researcher; one that data subjects and readers are asked to accept. At the very least, I hope, we can do better to acknowledge, name, enumerate, and debate these judgements. To paraphrase another recent paper, “[acknowledging] subjectivity is a feature, not a flaw”.

4. Approximations and usefulness

Let's imagine a couple more kinds of alternates and approximations. One is:

…that is, the share of people in the world for whom x_i = 1. This is a different function from W¹, computed on the same data, with a continuous value in the range (0, 1).

A second kind of approximation is to replace the infinite space of Q2 answers with a small, finite set of variables that express necessary conditions of wellbeing. (This is the link to the literature on fundamental/universal human needs.) For instance, suppose:

• b_i = 1 if a person has adequate nutrition (even milk from a clean bottle!)
• c_i = 1 if a person has access to health care.
• d_i = 1 if a person has access to clean water.

Then define another variable a_i = b_i∧c_i∧d_i. We can either compute W¹(A), which is 1 if and only if all b_i = c_i = d_i = 1, or W²(A), the share of people for whom a_i = 1.

These approximations can certainly be more convenient and useful than x and W¹. For instance, W¹ will remain 0 until universal wellbeing is achieved; when the last person (the Omelas child) finally has wellbeing, W¹ will suddenly flip to 1. This makes it not much help as an ‘indicator’ or ‘metric’ for measuring progress, or to examine claims like “Action P will do more towards W¹ than action Q.” In contrast, it is much more helpful and tractable to be able to say: “Currently, W²(A) = 0.456. With Action P, W²(A) could increase to 0.6 in 10 years. With Action Q, W²(A) could increase to 0.7 in 20 years.” For this reason it is valid and valuable to establish, measure, and compute these alternate measures.

However, can be W²(X), W¹(A), or W²(A) be a “measure of [universal] wellbeing”? For W²(X), trivially yes: this function has the value 1.0 iff every x_i = 1, which then directly implies W¹(X) = 1. But suppose every a_i = 1, such that every person has water, health care, and calories, and thus W¹(A) = 1 and W²(A) = 1.0. Is universal wellbeing necessarily achieved? Just as trivially, no: every human in a pod in the world of The Matrix has water, health care, and calories, but that is a dystopia, not a world of universal human wellbeing.

To avoid confusing readers and one another, here are some simple practices that researchers can adopt:

• If the topic of research is “wellbeing” but X and W¹ are not used, Define clearly which measures (data Y, Z, … and/or functions W³, W⁴, …) are used.
• Cite or provide evidence about how the chosen measures relate to X and W¹.
• If possible, give quantitative relationship(s) with specific parameters.
• If such evidence does not exist or cannot be obtained:
  • Don't refer to the alternate measures as measures of “wellbeing.”
  • Choose a descriptive name.
  • At least give some qualitative discussion: In what ways might the measures depart from X and W¹?
  • What real or imaginable conditions might exist such that, for instance, W²(X) is low, but the chosen alternate W³(Y) is high?
• Acknowledge the subjective judgements encoded in researchers' choice of alternates. Discuss other possible choices, and if possible test robustness of conclusions against these.

5. Convenient data and lock-in

We acknowledged in section (2) that N > 8×10⁹ is a large number. Even for subpopulations, like smaller countries or cities, it would be difficult to talk to every person in order to collect all x_i and compute W¹ for that population. In section (4) I noted how it is valuable to seek approximations. However, this doesn't mean that any chosen approximation is valid or helpful. It's entirely possible for such choices to be bad. At one end of a spectrum of resolution, aggregate economic statistics such as GDP have been taken as measures related to wellbeing, directly or via functions with similarly coarse resolution. As we noted in our paper, the early literature on fundamental human needs was pointing to the inadequacy of this approach nearly 50 years ago.

At the far extreme of resolution, ‘big data’ have gained popularity in recent years because of their convenience: they afford to researchers the possibility of getting a large number of data points at a relatively low cost (to the researcher). Particularly, access to such data seems to remove any need for researchers to have direct contact with “data subjects.”

Anyone who has worked with such data can attest that there is a trade-off between the number of data points and fitness for whatever purpose(s) a researcher has in mind (here, measuring individual and collective wellbeing). The data have usually been amassed through a system, constructed and controlled by some other entity (often a large, for-profit company) that has a purpose different from the researchers. For example, the goal of Alphabet/Google in collecting map data and users' location data is ultimately to make a profit by selling advertisements, for instance to businesses in the same area. They collect data that can be used to this end, or to attendant ends like drawing in ad-viewers with free services. In some cases, researchers can overcome this divergence in purpose with methodological creativity, deriving measures for quantities of interest in ways that can be validated and tested. In other cases, researchers abandon their original goals and questions, and instead devise new ones that are answerable with the data offered to or obtained by them. For instance, Q1/Q2 above might get replaced with “Has this user visited a McDonald's in the past N days?” Sometimes these choices are later rationalized, more or less weakly: “visiting McDonald's might mean eating; eating is part of getting adequate nutrition; and this is a fundamental human need and a component of wellbeing.”

Even if (a big if!) valid and empirically grounded of measures of wellbeing can be constructed from such data, there is substantial risk of lock-in. If wellbeing is chiefly measured through the particular form of location data collected and provided by Alphabet (or whomever), and methods built on those data, then it is constructed as a thing that is both (a) not measurable without Alphabet's system of data collection and cooperation, and (b) knowable without actually asking any person Q1. Both of these would seem to be immense flaws: (a) because it creates total dependency on the data-gathering apparatus and the people who control it; and (b) because the subjectivity of “data subjects” is entirely alienated. [1] Researchers risk becoming cheerleaders for total surveillance and its practitioners, even if—like the dictator in section (3) above—the existence and harms of such systems would be cited by many as the reason they lack wellbeing.