▪ 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

Agency and Well-Being: The Development Agenda

It is argued here that Mary Wollstonecraft's pioneering contributions to the social sciences in general and to feminist studies in particular deserve fuller recognition. Her critiques of the leading conventional philosophers of her time, such as Edmund Burke, bring out the distinctive nature of her approach, in which the deprivation of women is linked with other social deprivations, and the roots of social progress are seen not only in legislatitive change but through societal processes involving the expansion and enrichment of basic education and more public engagement on issues of inequality and neglect.

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary!

World, Mind, and Ethics: Is the idea of purely internal consistency of choice bizarre?

[Up to now, our analysis has pertained largely, if not entirely, to the problems faced by both developed and Eastern European countries. But most of the world's population resides in developing countries elsewhere, where the role and impact of military expenditures is significantly different. In the first of two papers relating to developing countries, Amyrta Sen asks the basic question: how does the preparation for and the execution of wars influence the ability of famine-prone countries to escape mass starvation — a question of perhaps not much significance to highly developed industrialized market economies, but clearly of tremendous significance to developing economies. (eds.)]

Amartya Sen

Papers

Agency and Well-Being: The Development Agenda

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary!

World, Mind, and Ethics: Is the idea of purely internal consistency of choice bizarre?

Wars and famines: on divisions and incentives

Freedom and Agency