Category: I. Happiness
-
Tasty, but bad for the environment and health. In @BW.
-
My Optimist column reports on improving global attitudes and behavior.
-
My FP optimist column this week summarizes Bentham from the Crypt Once More.
-
Bentham from the Crypt Once More is a CGD essay. There is a burgeoning academic literature on happiness polls that has used a range of different measures and approaches across countries rich and poor alike to answer the question, “what makes people say they are happy?” The excitement surrounding this work is well justified. These…
-
Laughing all the Way to the Bank, the week's FP column, suggests that money can't buy happiness –but maybe happiness can buy money. Its an updated (short) version of this paper.
-
This is a review of Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence: Self Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain Since 1950. It appeared in the Business History Review vol. 81 no. 2. The book is well worth a read.
-
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility: Happiness in Philosophical and Economic Thought is being published in October, 2006. The book is co-authored with my father, Anthony Kenny. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility relates age-old philosophical discussions of the nature of a worth-while life to the recent growth of interest among economists in…
-
Chapter One of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility discusses the history of the philosophy of happiness. In the light of what Aristotle says, we might offer ‘worthwhile life’ as the most appropriate translation of his word ‘eudaimonia’. For Aristotle, this ‘happiness’ must be an end rather than a means and it must be…
-
Chapter Two of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility looks at what writers have said in the past about the links between the good life, income and institutions. There was a widespread concern in the seventeenth century Dutch Republic that the country had too much wealth, and was having too jolly a time, for…
-
Chapter Three of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility discusses the role of health in philosophical discussions of the good life. Throughout most of the history of thought, philosophers have underplayed the importance of physical health as a constituent of happiness. Aristotle, for example, appears to have believed that the enjoyment of health throughout…