▪ 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

Famines often take place in situations of moderate to good food availability, without any significant decline of food supply per head. The paper presents an alternative approach to famines, which does not concentrate on availability, but on people's ability to command food through legal means available in the society (including the use of production possibilities, trade opportunities, entitlements vis-a-vis the state, etc.). The approach is explained, focusing on exchange entitlement mappings, fluctuations in which can lead to big shifts in the intergroup distribution of food command. The approach is then applied to the Bengal famine of 1943, the Ethiopian famine in Wollo in 1973, and the Bangladesh famine in 1974, and some general conclusions are drawn about the nature and classes of famines.

Ingredients of Famine Analysis: Availability and Entitlements

Real national income comparison is one of the most frequently performed exercises in empirical economics. While the welfare implications of such comparisons are often not spelt out, there is little doubt that the significance that is attached to comparisons of real national income depend greatly on their implicit welfare content. This also influences the statistical procedures that are chosen, and as has been observed, " the basic conventions that have been adopted by the statisticians of most countries for purposes of GNP-measurement are still founded on some notion of what measure of economic activity can best represent the contribution of that activity to welfare ". (Beckerman [2], p. 80). The welfare theory of real national income comparisons is, however, incomplete in several important ways, despite outstanding contributions by several distinguished economists, including Hicks [17], [18], Scitovsky [40], Kuznets [24], Samuelson [38], [39], Little [26] and Graaff [12], among others. Perhaps the most serious difficulty is with the treatment of income distribution. The starting point of thispaper lies in treating the same commodity going to two different persons as two different goods. The weighting of " goods ", thus defined, will incorporate distributional judgements. (The approach presented in this paper is best seen in the context of Graaff's [12] analysis of the need to " dispense with the time-honoured device of drawing a distinction between the size and the distribution of the national income and saying that welfare depends upon them both ", and his penetrating observation that welfare "depends (if we must use the term) on size only-and we do not know what the size is until we know the distribution" ([12], p. 92).) This will permit a welfare interpretation of real income comparisons without the usual restrictive assumptions, e.g. leaving out distributional considerations explicitly (cf. Hicks [17], [18]), or making the peculiarly unrealistic assumption that distribution is made " optimal" by lump-sum transfers (cf. Samuelson [38], pp. 28-29, [39]). The important point to note is that typically social welfare can be seen to be a function of the vector of " goods " as defined here, but not as a function of the vector of commodities in the usual sense (i.e. irrespective of who gets them). Another departure lies in the explicit recognition of the fact that real national income comparisons involve different groups of people.' In this, these comparisons differ from traditional welfare economics (e.g. the use of " Pareto Optimality " or of " Compensation Tests "), collective choice theory, (e.g. the use of Arrowian " social welfare functions "), and the standard theory of national planning (e.g. " cost-benefit analysis ", or " optimal growth theory "), which are concerned with comparing alternative positions of the same group of people. One way of avoiding the complex problems of inter-group contrasts is to confine real income comparisons to contrasting the actual position of a group with what its position " would have been " if it were plhced in the position of another group. (Cf. Pigou: " If the German population with German tastes were given the national dividend of England, . . ." [34], pp. 52-53.) But this problem is ill-defined. For two groups of n people each, there are n! different ways of placing one group in the position of another. And, for two groups of different sizes, the interpretation of such " as if" comparisons is totally ambiguous.

Real National Income

Rights and Agency

Social choice theory is concerned with the evaluation of alternative methods of collective decision-making, as well as with the logical foundations of welfare economics. In turn, welfare economics is concerned with the critical scrutiny of the performance of actual and/or imaginary economic systems, as well as with the critique, design and implementation of alternative economic policies. This being the case, it goes without saying that the origin of social choice theory can be traced back all the way to antiquity. Indeed, as soon as multiple individuals are involved in making decisions for their common cause, one or other method of collective decision-making cannot but be invoked. As a reflection of this obvious fact, there are numerous examples in classic writings on the use and usefulness of alternative methods of collective decision-making. Suffice it to quote Aristotle in ancient Greece, and Kautilya in ancient India; they both lived in the fourth century B.C. and explored several possibilities of collective decision-making in their books entitled, respectively, Politics and Economics. 1 Likewise, as soon as any collective body designs and implements an economic mechanism and/or an economic policy, paying proper attention to the costs and benefits accruing to its constituent members, one or other social welfare judgements cannot be avoided. In this sense, Joseph Schumpeter (1954, p.1069) was certainly right when he emphasized “the hallowed antiquity of welfare economics.” He observed that “a large part of the work of Carafa and his successors as well as of the work of the scholastic doctors and their successors was welfare economics. We also know that the welfare point of view was much in evidence in the eighteenth century .... For Bentham and the English utilitarians generally this point of view was, of course, an essential element of their creed. Hence, the positive spirit of Ricardian economics notwithstanding, we find it also in the English ‘classics,’ particularly in J. S. Mill. So far as this goes, modern welfare economists merely revive the Benthamite tradition.” It was

Amartya Sen

Papers

Ingredients of Famine Analysis: Availability and Entitlements

Real National Income

Rights and Agency

Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare

Human Development Index