We need a term that touches science, which is to say touches measurement, for building “life” in a society, which is to say a felt sense of belonging, purpose and pleasure; the things, in other words, which contribute to happiness when present and subtract from it, in most people, when absent.
One idea: what percentage of people in a society are glad to meet the day and go out in the world to live their lives, to do their things? HOW glad? Or how filled with dread?
Let us say an average person greeting the day with average but not enormous happiness is one LEU. That person will grow a little, contribute a little, and have a little something yo look back on at the end of the day.
How, we can ask, does any given policy affect LEU’s at large and in aggregate. Teaching people Positive Psychology, or Kum Nye, would almost certainly generate vastly more LEU’s than giving them huge raises and more work.
What got me thinking about this, and I am mostly playing, is this question: how do we measure the lost pleasure, the lost purpose, the lost connection which necessarily attend all these lockdowns, all these imposed constraints? Saving objective lives cannot and should not be the only consideration. The Swedes have pointed this out well.
In America everything is measured. Perhaps we need an acronym that purports to be scientific to recover our basic humanity.