Comparative Gain - in What Sense?

It is conventional wisdom that the reply you receive depends on the question you ask. The question can often efficiently set the frame around the subject you are treating. An example of such questions is "How can we make the world economy as efficient as possible?". I believe this is base question for most if not all economic theory.
But what if. What if the question is not correctly posed? All of these politicians constantly focusing on how to increase the growth of their country, all of these company leaders constantly asking themselves how they can restructure their company to get a higher leverage on invested money. But what if you would take these actions and these incentives and try to plug them in to a bigger "entity", a bigger question. Like "How can we make our society a better society?". You would notice that once you take the question of economics and plug it in to this larger context the question becomes more complex. It is great if you wish to try your fantasy. And who knows, maybe also important if we wish our society to develop.
What makes a good society? There is an aphorism saying that how civil a country is is determined by how it treats the lesser of its people. It is one way of seeing things, I'm sure you can find others. The following factors are interesting to consider though:

• In Spain, a free trade country part of the efficient economy, the number of unemployed young people is huge, they are even labelled "the lost generation". When the need for these people to step up and take responsibility for the country, they might no longer be able.
• The huge gaps in income between rich and poor are in part an explanation of the riots both in London and in Paris. I believe it can be considered a side effect of an efficient economy.
• When in Sweden we had a scandal of telephone salesmen tricking old people to buy expensive phone subscriptions originally aimed at companies, it was only one scandal in a long line of similar incidents. The efficient economy is giving us "rational" jobs that really most people wish wouldn't exist.
• When the capital is fleeing Greece, among other things the health care is collapsing, this might very well lead to the super bacterias that have developed through an economically efficient animal industry (using antibiotics to feed animals) to spread to the rest of Europe. The social cost of other European countries is a factor that is probably not part of the calculation when European leader are letting Greece deteriorate.

I'm sure you can find other factors that are interesting when thinking about economics and its relationship to society, if you do, please leave a comment. But these are all things found just when asking "How can we make our society a better society?". You could also ask "How can we make our society a sustainable society?". Or any other question you would like. Just remember that the answers you get depend on the question you ask.