Why are people loyal? How do groups form and how do they create incentives for their members to abide by group norms? Until now, economics has only been able to partially answer these questions. In this groundbreaking work, Paul Frijters presents a new unified theory of human behaviour. To do so, he incorporates comprehensive yet tractable definitions of love and power, and the dynamics of groups and networks, into the traditional mainstream economic view. The result is an enhanced view of human societies that nevertheless retains the pursuit of self-interest at its core. This book provides a digestible but comprehensive theory of our socioeconomic system, which condenses its immense complexity into simplified representations. The result both illuminates humanity's history and suggests ways forward for policies today, in areas as diverse as poverty reduction and tax compliance.

Around the world, governments are starting to directly measure the subjective wellbeing of their citizens and to use it for policy evaluation and appraisal. What would happen if a country were to move from using GDP to using subjective wellbeing as the primary metric for measuring economic and societal progress? Would policy priorities change? Would we continue to care about economic growth? What role would different government institutions play in such a scenario? And, most importantly, how could this be implemented in daily practice, for example in policy evaluations and appraisals of government analysts, or in political agenda-setting at the top level? This volume provides answers to these questions from a conceptual to technical level, by showing how direct measures of subjective wellbeing can be used for policy evaluation and appraisal, either complementary in the short-run or even entirely in the long-run. It gives a brief history of the idea that governments should care about the happiness of their citizens, provides theories, makes suggestions for direct measurement, derives technical standards and makes suggestions on how to conduct wellbeing cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analyses, and gives examples of how real-world policy evaluations and appraisals would change if they were based on subjective wellbeing. In doing so, it serves the growing interest of governments as well as non-governmental and international organisations in how to put subjective wellbeing metrics into policy practice.

Why are people loyal? How do groups form and how do they create incentives for their members to abide by group norms? Until now, economics has only been able to partially answer these questions. In this groundbreaking work, Paul Frijters presents a new unified theory of human behaviour. To do so, he incorporates comprehensive yet tractable definitions of love and power, and the dynamics of groups and networks, into the traditional mainstream economic view. The result is an enhanced view of human societies that nevertheless retains the pursuit of self-interest at its core. This book provides a digestible but comprehensive theory of our socioeconomic system, which condenses its immense complexity into simplified representations. The result both illuminates humanity's history and suggests ways forward for policies today, in areas as diverse as poverty reduction and tax compliance.