▪ Abstract Well-being is a complex construct that concerns optimal experience and functioning. Current research on well-being has been derived from two general perspectives: the hedonic approach, which focuses on happiness and defines well-being in terms of pleasure attainment and pain avoidance; and the eudaimonic approach, which focuses on meaning and self-realization and defines well-being in terms of the degree to which a person is fully functioning. These two views have given rise to different research foci and a body of knowledge that is in some areas divergent and in others complementary. New methodological developments concerning multilevel modeling and construct comparisons are also allowing researchers to formulate new questions for the field. This review considers research from both perspectives concerning the nature of well-being, its antecedents, and its stability across time and culture.

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On Happiness and Human Potentials: A Review of Research on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being

https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(08)61690-6.pdf

Closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

A doubling in global food demand projected for the next 50 years poses huge challenges for the sustainability both of food production and of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and the services they provide to society. Agriculturalists are the principal managers of global useable lands and will shape, perhaps irreversibly, the surface of the Earth in the coming decades. New incentives and policies for ensuring the sustainability of agriculture and ecosystem services will be crucial if we are to meet the demands of improving yields without compromising environmental integrity or public health.

/pdf/agricultural-sustainability-and-intensive-production-1h98l920tu.pdf

Agricultural sustainability and intensive production practices

We review in detail a number of approaches that have been adopted to try and explain the remarkable observation of our accelerating universe. In particular we discuss the arguments for and recent progress made towards understanding the nature of dark energy. We review the observational evidence for the current accelerated expansion of the universe and present a number of dark energy models in addition to the conventional cosmological constant, paying particular attention to scalar field models such as quintessence, K-essence, tachyon, phantom and dilatonic models. The importance of cosmological scaling solutions is emphasized when studying the dynamical system of scalar fields including coupled dark energy. We study the evolution of cosmological perturbations allowing us to confront them with the observation of the Cosmic Microwave Background and Large Scale Structure and demonstrate how it is possible in principle to reconstruct the equation of state of dark energy by also using Supernovae Ia observational data. We also discuss in detail the nature of tracking solutions in cosmology, particle physics and braneworld models of dark energy, the nature of possible future singularities, the effect of higher order curvature terms to avoid a Big Rip singularity, and approaches to modifying gravity which leads to a late-time accelerated expansion without recourse to a new form of dark energy.

Dynamics of dark energy

Text of Keynote Address to Third Conference of the International Health Economics Association on ‘The Economics of Health: Within and Beyond Health Care,’ York, 23 July 2001. ‘The world ... is not an inn, but a hospital,’ said Sir Thomas Browne more than three and half centuries ago, in 1643. That is a discouraging, if not entirely surprising, interpretation of the world from the distinguished author of Religio Medici and Pseudodoxia Epidemica. But Browne may not be entirely wrong: even today (not just in Browne’s 17th century England), illness of one kind or another is an important presence in the lives of a great many people. Indeed, Browne may have been somewhat optimistic in his invoking of a hospital: many of the people who are most ill in the world today get no treatment for their ailments, nor the use of effective means of prevention. In any discussion of social equity and justice, illness and health must figure as a major concern. I take that as my point of departure – the ubiquity of health as a social consideration – and begin by noting that health equity cannot but be a central feature of the justice of social arrangements in general. The reach of health equity is immense. But there is a converse feature of this connection to which we must also pay attention. Health equity cannot be concerned only with health, seen in isolation. Rather it must come to grips with the larger issue of fairness and justice in social arrangements, including economic allocations, paying appropriate attention to the role of health in human life and freedom. Health equity is most certainly not just about the distribution of health, not to mention the even narrower focus on the distribution of health care. Indeed, health equity as a consideration has an enormously wide reach and relevance. I shall consider three sets of issues. First, I shall begin by discussing the nature and relevance of health equity. Second, I shall go on to identify and scrutinize the distinct grounds on which it has been claimed that health equity is the wrong policy issue on which to concentrate. I hope to be able to argue that these grounds of scepticism do not survive close scrutiny. Finally, in the section dealing with general considerations and particular proposals, I shall consider some difficult issues that have to be faced for an adequate understanding of the demands of health equity. It is particularly important in this context to see health equity as a very broad discipline which has to accommodate quite diverse and disparate considerations.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/hec.762

Why health equity

(1) Much of revealed preference theory has been concerned with choices restricted to certain distinguished subsets of alternatives, in particular to a class of convex polyhedra (e.g., " budget triangles " in the two commodity case). This restriction may have some rationale for analyzing the preferences of competitive consumers, but it makes the results unusable for other types of choices, e.g., of government bureaucracies, of voters, of consumers in an imperfect market. If the restriction is removed, the axiomatic structure of revealed preference theory changes radically. This axiomatic structure is studied in Sections 2-5. In Section 6 the rationale of restricting the domain of choice functions and that of rationality conditions is critically examined.

Choice Functions and Revealed Preference

Critical scrutiny of public health care and medical strategy depends, among other things, on how individual states of health and illness are assessed. One of the complications in evaluating health states arises from the fact that a person's own understanding of his or her health may not accord with the appraisal of medical experts. More generally, there is a conceptual contrast between “internal” views of health (based on the patient's own perceptions) and “external” views (based on the observations of doctors or pathologists). Although the two views can certainly be combined (a good practitioner would be interested in both), major tension often exists between evaluations based respectively on the two perspectives.

The external view has come under considerable criticism recently, particularly from anthropological perspectives, for taking a distanced and less sensitive view of illness and health. 1 2 It has also been argued that public health decisions are quite often inadequately responsive to the patient's own understanding …

https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/324/7342/860.full.pdf

Health: perception versus observation.

AMARTYA K. SEN * University of Delhi T HIS paper has four objects. In the first section the economic equilibrium of a peasant family is studied. In the second section we discuss the theory of surplus labor and disguised unemployment and, more generally, the response of peasant output to a withdrawal of the working population. The third section goes into an analysis of a dual equilibrium of a partly peasant, partly capitalist agriculture. In the last section some observations are made on the efficiency of resource allocation in peasant agriculture and in share-cropping. Illustrations on the working of peasant agriculture come mostly from India, though the general framework might be of somewhat wider interest.

Peasants and Dualism with or without Surplus Labor

Internal consistency of choice has been a central concept in economics, decision theory, and social choice. This idea is essentially confused. We cannot determine whether a choice function is consistent without referring to something external to choice (e.g., objectives, values). The standard results have to be reexamined in this light. Kenneth J. Arrow's general possibility theorem is extended in this paper without demanding any internal consistency of social choice or any notion of 'social rationality.' Copyright 1993 by The Econometric Society.

Amartya Sen

Papers

Why health equity

Choice Functions and Revealed Preference

Health: perception versus observation.

Peasants and Dualism with or without Surplus Labor

Internal consistency of choice