In 1932 Associate Justice Louis Brandeis, in the case of New Ice State co. v Liebmann observed, “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”1 The statement had a profound effect on the thinking of the Court and the judiciary in general, and has been cited by Justices both liberal and conservative in some three dozen other cases. I want to invoke that idea to test a social theorem, The Wellness Theorem.

I have written many times in these pages comparing from the individual state to international levels wellness oriented social programs compared to the outcome data of profit as first priority policies. From this, I have developed what I will call the Wellness Theorem. It postulates that programs that have increased wellness as their first priority inevitably are cheaper, more efficient, more effective, more easily implemented, more productive, and pleasanter to live under.

To test the Theorem I want to move down from the international and national to the more granular […]