1.      First, list your current professional title. Second, describe your background, experience, and research as it relates to Quality-of-life studies. 

Dr. Annie Tubadji

Assistant Professor in Economics, Economics Department, Swansea University

I am a cultural and regional economist who studies the effect of cultural bias in economic choice. I have pioneered the Culture Based Development (CBD) paradigm. CBD is a paradigm in the field of New Cultural Economics that precisely quantifies and theoretically models the complex dynamic impact of the cultural context on individual value formation and the way that this individual value impacts aggregate socio-economic development.

Topic-wise, the Culture Based Development (CBD) paradigm sees humans as social animals who need their society to feel happy and who largely shaped according to the understandings of this society manage to feel the quality of their own existence as fulfilling. All societies always have their culture that describes and obliges its members to behave within certain parameters. In a neo-Weberian sense, the cultural differences in behaviour across space determine the socio-economic disparities across space. And this is so because culture rules the cooperation modes and investment decisions around otherwise identical capitals and inputs in every society. This is in a nutshell the Culture Based Development (CBD) worldview, which naturally clearly fits the domains of several disciplines that flow as rivers in the domain of quality-of-life studies.

Methodologically, the CBD’s philosophy is that the proper study of culture and economic choice requires in-depth interest in both rigorous economic modelling and genuine understanding of the causal links that drive the formation of utilities, preferences and rule their transitivity across time and space. In other words, it requires the best of the academic worlds that have tried to study human choice as mechanisms and in context, understanding homo-economicus and homo-sociologicus as the same agent able and willing to account for one’s own material interest in agreement and with concern for the social wellbeing of both oneself and one’s surrounding co-humans. Methodologically, this requires mechanism design that reflects the cultural theory about human choice.

Thus, the CBD paradigm uses multidisciplinary sources and focuses on the interaction between emotional intelligence and rational choice. It studies the role of culture as a filter for emotion, a filter that informs facts of life with meaning and transforms emotions into feelings that affect the way in which the decision maker values every option for choice at stake (see Tubadji and Huang 2023). The CBD paradigm recombines Max Weber, Pierre Bourdieu and Thorstein Veblen’s takes on culture and reinterprets them on regional level (see my ORCID for full list of over 50 CBD-related publications). The logical links from these sources inform the CBD causal inference with empirical data and econometric techniques and inspires the CBD precise game-theoretical modelling of the mechanism of choice that an individual uses as a member of and factor for one’s context.

Applying the CBD approach, I have contributions that have shed further light on the role of culture in the field of regional economics and social wellbeing in the domains of: economic growth, labour economics, migration, economics of innovation, knowledge and entrepreneurship, mental health, loneliness, religion and social welfare. My current research interests include economics of happiness, artificial intelligence and labour, narrative economics and socio-economic inequalities.

The CBD research paradigm has been awarded on three notable occasions. In 2021, I received the Dillwyn Medal (Social Sciences, Education and Business) for my CBD work on cultural bias, inequality, and discrimination. The Dillwyn Medal is awarded by the Learned Society of Wales for research excellence and my interview is available to see here. Earlier, CBD was awarded the Shackle Scholarship, University of Cambridge the UK in 2016 and the CBD Hypothesis was awarded by the Association for Institutional Thought (AFIT) at the Western Arts Federation Congress in Reno, Nevada, 2010.

The main benefits from CBD outside of academia are for local policymakers to be equipped with most advanced toolkit for conducting a value-free analysis of values. This CBD methodology allows to reveal hidden pockets of inequality due to various sources of cultural discrimination – from the classical structural educational inequality by design to modern COVID-shock or AI-generated inequalities. CBD is also a tool to empower the creative industries and cultural heritage world for joint directed action and evidence-based justification of their impact on the socio-economic development of people and places. Clearly, all this is in the core of the domain of quality of life studies – covering the full spectrum from economic to social and accounting for the wellbeing of people and places, i.e. different levels of aggregation of this economic and social well-being. One can say, in summary, that my CBD paradigm can be seen as essentially a multi-disciplinary structured framework for conducting quality of life studies in a culturally sensitive manner.

 

2.  What initially attracted you to the field of quality-of-life studies?

I finished International Finance and Trade in my bachelor studies, and I finished it with flying colours and 1^st honours. And all in all, I was horrified how people and their sentiments did not figure anyhow in the whole system that we had so meticulously studied. Then I started work for the United Nations, and my then boss, the Resident Representative Neil Buhne, pointed me to the works of Amartya Sen, who was working with the UN at that time, and to developmental studies too. Then a friend who was a US Peace Corps Volunteer lent me Sen’s book “Democracy as Freedom”. And that is how my quest for the moral sentiments in economics (as Adam Smith calls it) started. And then I kept reading and reading from Bentham through Rawls, from JS Mill to contemporary Mariana Mazzucato – all lovely thinkers. And what I saw between their lines was that in the core of humans’ economic choices were their culture programming not their cognition only but their feelings that really drove them into action. And we all know that cognition and feelings are different things. Psychologists and sociologists seem to care for them and understand them much better than economists. Economists thanks to some exceptional people like Tibor Scitovsky, Herber Simon, and Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky started conversations between sociology, psychology and economics, but mostly the bounded cognition was the best economics managed to learn from its sister sciences. On the other side, emotions still spook an economist more or less as badly as they spooked the church in pre-Renaissance times or even Spinoza who thought imagination and desire are to be run away from rather than understood. Yet, emotions are, I think, what we are all living for, feelings are the celebration of living – I feel therefore I am and therefore I at all can think in categories and choose between them – because through culture I decide for which categories to feel good and for which bad. That is how my Culture Based Development synthesized the wisdom from psychology on emotions and culture and all those inspirational readings that I would broadly class as the roots of quality of life studies.

So – to reiterate – I found out between seminal classical economic and cultural theory studies that well-being, happiness, they are not an add on to knowledge and survival – they are the quintessence of knowledge and survival – we want to survive and know how to be in order to flourish, in order to live a happy life. Thus, in short, in my own search for meaning I found out that the study of well-being comes closest to what my intellectual being most agrees to see as worth studying.

Then on, if you think a bit longer about well-being, you start seeing that wellbeing and happiness are just the macro and micro aspect of the same question – what is a meaningful and fulfilling human life. But I don’t see these questions as separate from economics or reserved for other non-economic domains. Just the opposite – the very definition of economics is that it is a science about the behaviour of people and how they live their life. The questions about the quality of living indeed were fundamental questions in the dawn of economics, dating as early as the works of Adam Smith and Mandeville’s fable of the bees.

Hence – I believe studying wellbeing on macro and micro level with the most modern economics tools of quantitative and qualitative analysis in combination. By doing so, we can accomplish the proper continuation of the mission left to us to carry on by the founding fathers of the discipline such as Bentham to Mills and alike would have hoped us to do. And studying quality of life with modern econometrics and theoretical economic modelling is very different from satisfy with doing just maths and focusing on cognition, when the spirit is left out, because the spirit is equally important to the economic question. The church long pushed us to focus on the spirit rather than the body. Maybe that explains why in the Renaissance racio was over emphasized – because it was what was deficient in attention. But today it is the spirit and wellbeing that have seriously slipt out into being deficient in attention. And this has been the case for a while. Max Weber – one of my heroes – said “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved” (Weber, 1905: 183); and this was written about the people from his own age: I hope we wont stay stuck into this same aged condition but we shall move forward by studying and understanding a bit better the spirit and meaning of human happiness, wellbeing and flourishing through the powerful tools of mixed methods – the best from all disciplines.

That’s my dream. And some, not enough in number but very valuable in my understanding, economists are already doing this – many of them in the ISQOLS family.

3. What are some areas of quality-of-life studies you feel are lacking attention? Any advice for future QoL researchers?

The advice I would give to QoL researchers is the same advice that I am giving to myself and my PhD students.  I am still a relatively young scholar, so I am not searching to pass wisdom to others yet – but I can offer as a form of ‘advice’ the very sharing of my approach for quality-of-life studies. This is the best I can share with and offer to those walking shoulder to shoulder with me – and I hope they grow in numbers as we are speaking.

My ‘advice’ is thus two-fold: (1) Always challenge yourself to do things better, more precise, more versatile, experiment with your tools and adopt and learn new ones. All tools are imperfect. Truth is so elusive – all we can hope is come somehow closer to it but we can never know it – so careful and dedicated ahead – it is not about us – it is about IT – doing it and understanding it as close as we could get. (2) Stay open – no matter how good things turn for you in one group of scholars, no matter how good you learn one thing – do not sink into it with blinkers for the world outside it just because it is more comfortable and feels rewarding remaining inside the safe circle – there is nothing more rewarding of the pain of learning new by confronting the insecure unknown – because it gives the birth of better and wider awareness what might be the truth like – that’s the way to enjoy being constantly surprised – by keeping open for the unknown and the unexpected. And a semi advice – or survival kit – just do it, no matter who says what. If you have it in your mind and heart – follow it till the end of the world. That’s what life is for – to live it in the genuine search of meaning. And that is what science is about – bringing understanding beyond where others see it up to. So – the uncomfortable unknown unknowns as my beloved G.L.S Shackle was calling them – being curious about them, brings the sweetest joy that only those who dare shall know. To surprise yourself by learning something about the unknown to you at the expense of having no one to clap along.

Topic-wise – I think what is very much needed in quality-of-life studies is to see wellbeing studies to fuse with public choice and game theory, RTCs and behavioural experiments, machine learning and philosophy. These streams have devised their own tools and paradigms, but they all hold a piece of the puzzle that ISQOLS tries to put together and we all will benefit as humanity when these streams find their path to each other much more than they speak to each other today.

4. How long have you been a member of ISQOLS? Why did you choose to be a member of ISQOLS? How has your involvement in ISQOLS impacted your career/research/advancement in your knowledge of QoL studies?

My relationship with ISQOLS started slowly and has been evolving over the years in very different forms and dimensions and has always been growingly more and more satisfactory and engaging and rewarding as a feeling for me. Since Innsbruk 2017, I have been learning that ISQOLS is a very diverse place where excellent people from different disciplines coexist happily and share their insights. There is a sound feeling that the work is done for the cause and not for the ego, which I find refreshing in the academic rat race which sometimes forgets the nobelty of its own quest. The ISQOLS still keeps the flags high and I love this community for this reason. It is also a very curious society – novel methods, machine learning, AI are all very welcome and very much part of the academic life of its members together with qualitative studies and I find this balance so healthy and so needed. So, at ISQOLS 2019 Conference, I was charmed by the grand opportunity to talk with no other but my long-years hero Christian Welzel – by this time I already knew the World Value Survey (WVS) databases inside and out, the WVS questions, its waves, its little tricks and bolts and there he was chatting with me – the fresh starter in science. He came to my presentation, gave me a genuine good, engaged advice. I loved it - after this meeting I felt I became part of the academic family the way I dreamt about it. But he was not alone at ISQOLS for making me feel so – the whole community was embracing. At the same meeting it was Martijn Burger and Dimitris Ballas – two wonderful colleagues from ISQOLS community – who cheered for me at this same presentation of mine, Dimitris took my picture while presenting, and put it on Tweeter that I was still shying to use back then. Even better, while I was talking with Welzel in the lobby and was trying to invite him at my presentation, I didn’t have the programme in hand to show him where I will be presenting. A girl from the organizing committee – still a student – seeing what was going on – just thrusted the programme open on the page where my presentation was in the very right moment to make sure I catch my lift-talk-moment. I am still deeply moved by her gesture then and I will always be eager to thrust the programme in someone’s hands in the right moment remembering her kindness. The next year I came again, and I saw the ISQOLS working more from the inside. I saw the special sessions of EHERO where the one of the economists’ streams gathered at ISQOLS – I remember I watched the presentation by Kelsey O’Connor which was part of this session and I almost cried at how beautifully methodologically clean it was. I praise clean methodology and I remember it was a classical detailed data decomposition analysis but so cleanly executed and explained that you can rarely see it in more standard economic applications let alone wellbeing related ones. I invited both him and Martijn Burger a few years later to be my guests at the staff seminar at my university that I was organizing for my own Economics Department. And during the social programme, for the first time, I grew to know the wonderful human beings they both turned out to be. People who reflected on the meaning of life, on the cultural differences, who genuinely strove to be good human beings in a reasoned and felt way. And I think without such values people cannot be good scientists and good specialists of any sort. I felt good being around. And this year, 2023, the ease and simplicity and friendliness with which I became part of the Managing Board of ISQOLS, after years of presenting and collaborating with these people, is yet another indication of the healthiness and aliveness of this community. My newest addition of ISQOLS treasures are of course also the two wonderful lady scientists with whom I work on papers about AI-driven sentiment analysis of big data from Twitter – these are Talita Greyling and Stephanie Rossouw. It is inspiring to have female leading figures and ISQOLS does have them. These two ladies are bringing in not only excellence but they are part of the editorial teams of the main economic publication outlets such as the Journal of Happiness Studies for example. And the female in science is all-over ISQOLS in all parts of the association. Jill Johnson – the executive director of ISQOLS – who indeed is the personal Titan of ISQOLS – or so is my very vivid impression since 2017. Ever since I know of ISQOLS, Jill is the person who seems to hold the sky on her shoulders. Yes, they all labour around but you know female power when you see it – it is incomparable – she cares motherly for the ISQOLS, young as she is, totally dedicated – and such people – dedicated and working with their heart – they build the team of ISQOLS and they make the feeling of this community being alive, pulsing and moving ahead. There is a lot of life in ISQOLS for science and academic creation. And last but not least – there are some top professors in modern happiness economics from the UK, the USA and Paris 1, who are all around – and they all are around by caring for the society, by loving it as their creation and the participants as their children and partners in crime of thinking differently. While every year I discovered something new about ISQOLS, what was always solidly there was this very healthy fresh feeling of sound good intentioned genuine care for what is being done on the academic scene and how it then translates to practice. Serious since criteria with genuine care of the implications for life and wellbeing and policy engagement – ISQOLS has it all. And none of this is a box-ticking exercise – the ISQOLS people burn into it. And thus, it becomes a joy for all involved.

 

5. Feel free to include any other important comments or things you'd like to share with the ISQOLS community.

You see, I participate in many different networks, some international scientific communities, some policy and practice networks, some other young policy insight oriented solid scientific associations, yet ISQOLS is truly deeply in my heart. And the reason for this is its wonderful balance that almost all other groups can learn from ISQOLS – the combination of striving for the use of best methods but being open to qualitative and quantitative work with equal interest and still very actively working for bridging science with practice and policy making. And of all the networks above, I do believe ISQOLS has the most to offer both in the field of novel scientific research and policy advice – on wellbeing and values and meaning – these topics were all left at some point out of economics main focus because it was very difficult to deal with them. In ISQOLS they are kept like a sacred grail cared for and ready to pass on to who cares. Now that the rest technical bit is sorted out in core micro and macro, we are obliged to take economics back to the questions left over and to try solving them with the new tools and grown wisdom over the decades. ISQOLS seems determined to do just that and the product will be a shift of paradigm, a step ahead in the scientific understanding of human economic and social behaviour (I dare say as a function of culture, or at least Culture Based Development expects the latter to be the finding we will all ultimately converge on). More importantly, UNESCO Bridges and similar policy advisory relate activities demonstrate that policy making is growingly interested in expert advice on the topics of ISOLS. But we need each other to go the long way to the answers – only a pluralistic co-travelling to the answers can teach us about our current blinkers regarding these still open quality of life questions. And in the context of AI, changing reality and attempts to create consciousness when we are not very much aware of our own consciousness and meaning-making mechanisms – the ISQOLS is most certainly needed and central with its input both to scientific advancement and the practical policy making that needs evidence to base its pressing wellbeing interventions on. Together in our diversity as scholars we can do this well! Go ISQOLS!