The dumpy gene encodes a gigantic extracellular molecule that we predict to be a membrane-anchored fibre of almost a micrometer in length. Insertion and crosslinking of this fibre within the cuticle may provide a strong anchor for the underlying tissue, allowing it to maintain mechanical tension at sites under stress. This would explain its contribution to tissue morphogenesis through its regulation of mechanical properties.

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How should a survey-based measure of well-being be implemented? How could it be constructed in a systematic and politically neutral way? These questions should be approached by economists with the same level of care that has been taken in the theoretical and practical development of GDP. We focus on two essential requirements for implementation: formulating a list of different aspects of well-being that is theoretically valid and can be measured accurately via surveys, and choosing and interpreting the survey response scales. We discuss progress to date on these issues, remaining challenges, and some possible approaches to overcoming them.

We join the call for governments to routinely collect survey-based measures of self-reported wellbeing and for researchers to study them. We list a number of challenges that have to be overcome in order for these measures to eventually achieve a status that is competitive with traditional economic indicators. We discuss in more detail one of the challenges, comprehensiveness: single-question wellbeing measures do not seem to fully capture what people care about. We briefly review the existing evidence, suggesting that survey respondents, when asked to make real or hypothetical trade-offs, would not always choose to maximize their predicted response to single-question wellbeing measures. The deviations appear systematic, and they persist under conditions where alternative explanations are less plausible. We also review an approach for combining single-question measures into a more comprehensive wellbeing index – an approach that itself is not free of ongoing theoretical and implementational challenges, but that we view as a promising direction.

Although technology-driven economic growth generates gains in consumption and employment opportunities, it may also negatively impact other dimensions of well-being, such as emotional well-being or sense of stability. We study 204 aspects of self-reported well-being among 1,576 US MTurk survey respondents, aggregated into seven themes: evaluative well-being, emotional well-being, positive perceptions of technology or economic growth, autonomy and flexibility, work environment, feelings of calmness and stability, and feelings of belonging and connection. Demographic associations with aspects of well-being vary somewhat across the themes. We highlight the value of a multidimensional approach when comparing well-being across different groups in the United States.