Whatever reason or justification is given for the outsourcing or selling of public services, the object of policy is to find outlets for surplus capital and deliver a return to investors, and in that sense privatisation has been a bonanza for thousands of corporations around the world.
But a major motivation for thinking happiness the wrong object of policy is that neither happiness nor well-being are the appropriate focus of a theory of justice.
A related sort of objection to happiness-based policy argues that happiness, or even well-being, is simply the wrong object of policy, which ought instead to focus on the promotion of resources or capabilities (Rawls 1971, Nussbaum 2000, Sen 2009).
"Children are the object of policy and those investments determine the nature of future society," said Professor Stiglitz.
What happens when women who are the objects of the policy are neither consulted nor required to be informed in any systematic way about the policy?
On the other hand, questions about the reasons and the ways in which certain issues, and not others, have become objects of public policy, how and as a result of whose action has this happened and what kind of society are we trying to achieve through current innovation priorities are prevented from emerging as key issues in technology assessment procedures.
In 1892, A. W. Ward wrote for the Dictionary of National Biography that James was "obviously a political and religious bigot", although never devoid of "a vein of patriotic sentiment"; "his conversion to the church of Rome made the emancipation of his fellow-catholics in the first instance, and the recovery of England for catholicism in the second, the governing objects of his policy".
So the object of social policy should be "to keep the entire community intermarriageable".
The object of the policy introduced in 2009 is to encourage greater organisational focus on specific serious safety issues.
