Governments and voters rely on experts to tell them how things are going. Statistical agencies, economists and international organisations report on whether conditions are improving, what is likely to happen next, and who stands to gain or lose from a proposed policy. Those public appraisals shape public debate and give citizens a way of holding politicians to account.
Historically, public appraisals have been framed by a relatively narrow set of economic metrics and methods. One prominent example is found in public guidelines for evaluating the consequences of major policies, which in Norway and many other countries specify that policies should be assessed by reference to subjective preferences, often operationalised in terms of willingness to pay. A second approach, familiar from the World Happiness Report, asks people how satisfied they are with their lives as a whole.
In his dissertation Public Models of Welfare, Paal Kvarberg argues that neither approach to public appraisal incorporates conceptions of welfare and value that align with the considered judgements of citizens. On the basis of a theoretical framework and methodology that is inspired by the liberal democratic tradition in political theory, the papers that comprise the dissertation develop an alternative.
The introduction traces the history of welfare appraisal in the Western tradition, with particular attention to the concerns that have motivated the rise of the dominant subjective paradigm in the policy-oriented sciences of human welfare, including welfare economics, psychology and medicine. On the basis of an interpretation of these concerns, developed within a practically oriented theoretical framework, Kvarberg argues that an adequate public model of welfare should offer a determinate account of individual well-being that can be represented on an interpersonally comparable cardinal scale, and that is aligned with citizens' values in the sense that it accords with their considered judgements about what welfare consists in.
The papers that comprise the dissertation develop conceptual models of health and well-being that aim to satisfy these formal and practical desiderata. They express a conception of welfare as an objective property that can be measured and quantified scientifically. This implies that we are not always the best judges of how well our own lives are going, and that objective statistics, in addition to subjective evaluations, are relevant to appraisals of welfare. In brief, the view asserts that a life goes well for someone who realises their potential, which requires the fulfilment of their personal values and having their objective needs met, and which results in a stable positive state of mind.
Follow the links below to read the introduction and the first article of the thesis:
Public Models of Welfare: Extended Introduction
Public Models of Welfare: First Article
Trial lecture
Designated topic: Theories of Well-Being.
Time and place: Monday 5 October 2026, 16:15 PM, Arne Næss Aud., Georg Morgenstiernes hus
Evaluation committee
- Professor Dan Haybron, Saint Louis University (first opponent)
- Assistant Professor Parisa Moosavi, York University, Toronto (second opponent)
- Associate Professor Nicholas Howell Hughes, University of Oslo (committee administrator)
Chair of the defence
- Professor Christine Amadou, University of Oslo
Supervisors
- Professor Franco Trivigno, University of Oslo
- Professor Cathrine Holst, University of Oslo
- Professor Roger Crisp, University of Oxford