The publication of Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees in 1714 (73), initiated a long period during which it was believed that the power of the market could convert the greed of those pursuing their own financial interests into well-being for everyone (74). Since then, with few exceptions, economic indicators such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) have been deemed to reflect accurately the level of human well-being, both individually and collectively (75). Despite its obvious flaws, this "economistic" approach maintained its dominance until the late 1920s, when the Great Depression threatened the survival of capitalism and the power of the small group of individuals who held most of the material wealth in the United States at the time. To avoid what appeared to be an imminent revolution, the richest Americans contributed large sums of money to the government to create a system of benefits to enable the less fortunate to receive what they could no longer obtain through the market, including education, health services, relief during periods of unemployment or pensions. This model to protect capitalism was applied and consolidated in Europe after the Second World War through the Marshall Plan. As a result, it became accepted that human well-being was a reflection of the effectiveness of governments to provide social services to the population.

After the oil crisis of 1973, the globalization of the economy in the 1980s, and the financial collapse of 2008, an immense pyramid of debt that had been built over decades was progressively transferred from the private sphere to the public sector, making the general population responsible for covering the financial holes that the financial system had created. This reduced the capacity of governments to provide social services and opened the door to the private sector to take them over, making the population increasingly vulnerable to self-interested actors for whom continuous economic growth was the main driver.

As governments were losing their capacity to pretend that their main role was to protect their citizens, they started to give more prominence to subjective approaches to the assessment of well-being, away from the economic indicators they no longer could control. In 2008, France took the first step to reduce the importance of GDP and search for alternatives that could help the government maintain the illusion that it had the capacity to promote social progress, despite the financial crisis. Something similar happened in the United Kingdom in 2010, where a national project was launched to replace the GDP with general well-being indicators (76). As the financial crisis was gaining momentum, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) initiated The Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies, which became probably the largest effort ever undertaken to take down the GDP from its pedestal (77).

These efforts to divert attention from the material to the psychological revealed something that had been neglected from the outset: the lack of a clear conceptualization of well-being. This lack of clarity has led to a confusing picture in which well-being is often found entangled with other complex and increasingly used terms, such as happiness or quality of life (78-80).