▪ 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.

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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

Poverty and Famines. An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation.

In the course of his distinguished career, Amartya K. Sen has scrutinized the foundations of economic theory and analysis. He has brought into sharper focus such concepts as choice, preference, rationality, aggregation, evaluation, and measurement, and applied these concepts to the economic issues underlying universal social concerns, among them inequality, unemployment, poverty, human welfare, liberty, rights, justice. The twenty essays in this book encompass both these aspects of Sen's economic endeavors.Kenneth Arrow has written that "Sen's mastery in the fields of social choice, the foundations of welfare economics, and, more broadly, distributive ethics and the measurement problems associated with these fields is unquestioned. The selection of articles fully reflects his work in this area ... a number of the papers are already classics."The author has provided a substantial introduction to the book that interrelates his diverse concerns and analyzes the wide-ranging discussions that were generated by the original papers, while stressing the central concepts and underlying issues.His writings are distributed among five topical sections: Choice and Preference, Preference Aggregation, Welfare Comparisons and Social Choice, Non-utility Information, and Social Measurement. The contributions have been collected from many journals in the fields of economics and public affairs and from books that were published between 1966 and 1980.Amartya K. Sen is Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, and Fellow of All Souls College.

Choice, Welfare and Measurement

This book focuses on the causes of starvation in general and famines in particular. The traditional analysis of famines is shown to be fundamentally defective, and the author develops an alternative analysis.

Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation

1. Introduction 2. Economic Development through Social Opportunity 3. India in Comparative Perspective 4. China and India 5. Public Action and Social Inequality 6. Basic Education as a Political Issue 7. Gender Inequality and Women's Agency 8. Well Beyond Liberalization Statistical Appendix

India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity

been repeatedly posed. Should the focus be on "absolute" poverty or "relative" poverty? Should poverty be estimated with a cut-off line that reflects a level below which people are in some sense "absolutely impoverished", or a level that reflects standards of living "common to that country" in particular? These questions-it will be presently argued do not bring out the real issues clearly enough. However, a consensus seems to have emerged in favour of taking a "relative" view of poverty in the rich countries. Wilfred Beckerman and Stephen Clark put it this way in their important recent study of poverty and social security in Britain since 1961: "we have measured poverty in terms of a 'relative' poverty line, which is generally accepted as being the relevant concept for advanced countries."' There is indeed much merit in this "relative" view. Especially against the simplistic absolute conceptualisation of poverty, the relative view has represented an entirely welcome change. However, I shall argue that ultimately poverty must be seen to be primarily an absolute notion, even though the specification of the absolute levels has to be done quite differently from the way it used to be done in the older tradition. More importantly, the contrast between the absolute and the relative features has often been confused, and I shall argue that a more general question about ascertaining the absolute standard of living lies at the root of the difficulty. In particular, it will be claimed that absolute deprivation in terms of a person's capabilities relates to relative deprivation in terms of commodities, incomes and resources. That is going to be my main theme, but before I get to that general issue, I ought to make clear the sense in which I believe that even the narrow

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Amartya Sen

Papers

Poverty and Famines. An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation.

Choice, Welfare and Measurement

Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation

India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity

Poor, Relatively Speaking