Download or read book Happiness and Economics written by Bruno S. Frey and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-16 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Curiously, economists, whose discipline has much to do with human well-being, have shied away from factoring the study of happiness into their work. Happiness, they might say, is an ''unscientific'' concept. This is the first book to establish empirically the link between happiness and economics--and between happiness and democracy. Two respected economists, Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer, integrate insights and findings from psychology, where attempts to measure quality of life are well-documented, as well as from sociology and political science. They demonstrate how micro- and macro-economic conditions in the form of income, unemployment, and inflation affect happiness. The research is centered on Switzerland, whose varying degrees of direct democracy from one canton to another, all within a single economy, allow for political effects to be isolated from economic effects. Not surprisingly, the authors confirm that unemployment and inflation nurture unhappiness. Their most striking revelation, however, is that the more developed the democratic institutions and the degree of local autonomy, the more satisfied people are with their lives. While such factors as rising income increase personal happiness only minimally, institutions that facilitate more individual involvement in politics (such as referendums) have a substantial effect. For countries such as the United States, where disillusionment with politics seems to be on the rise, such findings are especially significant. By applying econometrics to a real-world issue of general concern and yielding surprising results, Happiness and Economics promises to spark healthy debate over a wide range of the social sciences.
Download or read book From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities written by Geoffrey M. Hodgson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are humans at their core seekers of their own pleasure or cooperative members of society? Paradoxically, they are both. Pleasure-seeking can take place only within the context of what works within a defined community, and central to any community are the evolved codes and principles guiding appropriate behavior, or morality. The complex interaction of morality and self-interest is at the heart of Geoffrey M. Hodgson’s approach to evolutionary economics, which is designed to bring about a better understanding of human behavior. In From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities, Hodgson casts a critical eye on neoclassical individualism, its foundations and flaws, and turns to recent insights from research on the evolutionary bases of human behavior. He focuses his attention on the evolution of morality, its meaning, why it came about, and how it influences human attitudes and behavior. This more nuanced understanding sets the stage for a fascinating investigation of its implications on a range of pressing issues drawn from diverse environments, including the business world and crucial policy realms like health care and ecology. This book provides a valuable complement to Hodgson’s earlier work with Thorbjørn Knudsen on evolutionary economics in Darwin’s Conjecture, extending the evolutionary outlook to include moral and policy-related issues.
Download or read book Happiness Economics and Public Policy written by Helen Johns (M. Sc.) and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains commentaries by Samuel Brittan and Melanie Powell. In Happiness, Economics and Public Policy, Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod analyse the economic research that underlies politicians' growing preoccupation with measures of 'well-being'. In a lucid and compelling analysis, written for economists and non-economists alike, the authors find that happiness research cannot be used to justify government intervention in the way its proponents suggest.Those who wish governments to take into account measures of well-being when setting policy often point to the fact that increases in income have not led to increases in measured happiness, and thus governments should concentrate on redistribution and improving the quality of life, rather than on allowing people to benefit from economic growth.
Download or read book Measuring Happiness written by Joachim Weimann and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-02-06 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can money buy happiness? Is income a reliable measure for life satisfaction? In this book, three economists explore the happiness-prosperity connection, investigating how economists measure life satisfaction and well-being. --
Download or read book Power Pleasure and Profit written by David Wootton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative history of the changing values that have given rise to our present discontents. We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning—cost-benefit analysis—to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton shows, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the iron cage of instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives. Wootton guides us through four centuries of Western thought—from Machiavelli to Madison—to show how new ideas about politics, ethics, and economics stepped into a gap opened up by religious conflict and the Scientific Revolution. As ideas about godliness and Aristotelian virtue faded, theories about the rational pursuit of power, pleasure, and profit moved to the fore in the work of writers both obscure and as famous as Hobbes, Locke, and Adam Smith. The new instrumental reasoning cut through old codes of status and rank, enabling the emergence of movements for liberty and equality. But it also helped to create a world in which virtue, honor, shame, and guilt count for almost nothing, and what matters is success. Is our world better for the rise of instrumental reasoning? To answer that question, Wootton writes, we must first recognize that we live in its grip.
Download or read book Economics for Humans written by Julie A. Nelson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At its core, an economy is about providing goods and services for human well-being. But many economists and critics preach that an economy is something far different: a cold and heartless system that operates outside of human control. In this impassioned and perceptive work, Julie A. Nelson asks a compelling question: given that our economic world is something that we as humans create, aren’t ethics and human relationships—dimensions of a full and rich life—intrinsically part of the picture? Economics for Humans argues against the well-ingrained notion that economics is immune to moral values and distant from human relationships. Here, Nelson locates the impediment to a more considerate economic world in an assumption that is shared by both neoliberals and the political left. Despite their seemingly insurmountable differences, both make use of the metaphor, first proposed by Adam Smith, that the economy is a machine. This pervasive idea, Nelson argues, has blinded us to the qualities that make us work and care for one another—qualities that also make businesses thrive and markets grow. We can wed our interest in money with our justifiable concerns about ethics and social well-being. And we can do so if we recognize that an economy is not a machine, but a living thing in need of attention and careful tending. This second edition has been updated and refined throughout, with expanded discussions of many topics and a new chapter that investigates the apparent conflict between economic well-being and ecological sustainability. Further developing the main points of the first edition, Economics for Humans will continue to both invigorate and inspire readers to reshape the way they view the economy, its possibilities, and their place within it.
Download or read book Homo Economicus written by Daniel Cohen and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-06-13 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The West has long defined the pursuit of happiness in economic terms but now, in the wake of the 2007-8 financial crisis, it is time to think again about what constitutes our happiness. In this wide-ranging new book, the leading economist Daniel Cohen traces our current malaise back to the rise of homo economicus: for the last 200 years, the modern world has defined happiness in terms of material gain. Homo economicus has cast aside its rivals, homo ethicus and homo empathicus, and spread its neo-Darwinian logic far and wide. Yet, instead of bringing happiness, homo economicus traps human beings in a world devoid of any ideals. We are left feeling empty and dissatisfied. Today more and more people are beginning to recognize that competition and material gain are not the only things that matter in life. The central paradox of our era is that we look to the economy to give direction to our world at the very time when social needs are migrating toward sectors that are hard to place within the scope of market logic. Health, education, scientific research, and the world of the Internet form the heart of our post-industrial societies, but none of these belong to the traditional economic mould. While human creativity is higher than ever, homo economicus imposes himself like a sad prophet, a killjoy of the new age. Drawing on a rich array of examples, Cohen explores the new digital and genetic revolutions and examines the limitations of homo economicus in our rapidly transforming world. As human beings have an extraordinary ability to adapt, he argues that we need to rebalance the relation between competition and cooperation in favour of the latter. This thought-provoking analysis of our contemporary predicament will be of great value to anyone interested in the relationship between what happens in our economies and our personal happiness.
Download or read book What Freud Really Meant written by Susan Sugarman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents Freud's theory of the mind as an organic whole, built from first principles and developing in sophistication over time.
Download or read book The Little Book of Economics written by Greg Ip and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-01-14 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible, thoroughly engaging look at how the economy really works and its role in your everyday life Not surprisingly, regular people suddenly are paying a lot closer attention to the economy than ever before. But economics, with its weird technical jargon and knotty concepts and formulas can be a very difficult subject to get to grips with on your own. Enter Greg Ip and his Little Book of Economics. Like a patient, good-natured tutor, Greg, one of today's most respected economics journalists, walks you through everything you need to know about how the economy works. Short on technical jargon and long on clear, concise, plain-English explanations of important terms, concepts, events, historical figures and major players, this revised and updated edition of Greg's bestselling guide clues you in on what's really going on, what it means to you and what we should be demanding our policymakers do about the economy going forward. From inflation to the Federal Reserve, taxes to the budget deficit, you get indispensible insights into everything that really matters about economics and its impact on everyday life Special sections featuring additional resources of every subject discussed and where to find additional information to help you learn more about an issue and keep track of ongoing developments Offers priceless insights into the roots of America's economic crisis and its aftermath, especially the role played by excessive greed and risk-taking, and what can be done to avoid another economic cataclysm Digs into globalization, the roots of the Euro crisis, the sources of China's spectacular growth, and why the gap between the economy's winners and losers keeps widening
Download or read book Learning Economics written by Arnold Kling Ph.D. and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2004-09-13 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces the subject of economics using clear prose, rather than the graphs and equations common in many textbooks. The focus is on contemporary issues, particularly technological innovation and growth. To browse through the book or read some endorsements of the book, click here. The link below only gives you a brief excerpt.
Download or read book The Insatiability of Human Wants written by Regenia Gagnier and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2000-12 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the relationship between our conception of humans as producers or creators; as consumers of taste and pleasure; and as creators of value? Combining cultural history, economics, and literary criticism, Regenia Gagnier's new work traces the parallel development of economic and aesthetic theory, offering a shrewd reading of humans as workers and wanters, born of labor and desire. The Insatiability of Human Wants begins during a key transitional moment in aesthetic and economic theory, 1871, when both disciplines underwent a turn from production to consumption models. In economics, an emphasis on the theory of value and the social relations between land, labor, and capital gave way to more individualistic models of consumerism. Similarly, in aesthetics, theories of artistic production or creativity soon bowed to models of taste, pleasure, and reception. Using these developments as a point of departure, Gagnier deftly traces the shift in Western thought from models of production to consumption. From its exploration of early market logic and Kantian thought to its look at the aestheticization of homelessness and our own market boom, The Insatiability of Human Wants invites us to contemplate alternative interpretations of economics, aesthetics, and history itself.
Download or read book The Economics of Attention written by Richard A. Lanham and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006-04-21 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If economics is about the allocation of resources, then what is the most precious resource in our new information economy? Certainly not information, for we are drowning in it. No, what we are short of is the attention to make sense of that information. With all the verve and erudition that have established his earlier books as classics, Richard A. Lanham here traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention. According to Lanham, the central commodity in our new age of information is not stuff but style, for style is what competes for our attention amidst the din and deluge of new media. In such a world, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced. For Lanham, the arts and letters are the disciplines that study how human attention is allocated and how cultural capital is created and traded. In an economy of attention, style and substance change places. The new attention economy, therefore, will anoint a new set of moguls in the business world—not the CEOs or fund managers of yesteryear, but new masters of attention with a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts. Lanham’s The Electronic Word was one of the earliest and most influential books on new electronic culture. The Economics of Attention builds on the best insights of that seminal book to map the new frontier that information technologies have created.
Download or read book Foundations of Mathematical Economics written by Michael Carter and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001-10-26 with total page 678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the mathematical foundations of economics, from basic set theory to fixed point theorems and constrained optimization. Rather than simply offer a collection of problem-solving techniques, the book emphasizes the unifying mathematical principles that underlie economics. Features include an extended presentation of separation theorems and their applications, an account of constraint qualification in constrained optimization, and an introduction to monotone comparative statics. These topics are developed by way of more than 800 exercises. The book is designed to be used as a graduate text, a resource for self-study, and a reference for the professional economist.
Download or read book Principles of Economics written by Alfred Marshall and published by . This book was released on 1898 with total page 866 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Reformation in Economics written by Philip Pilkington and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-13 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book carves the beginnings of a new path in the arguably weary discipline of economics. It combines a variety of perspectives – from the history of ideas to epistemology – in order to try to understand what has gone so wrong with economics and articulate a coherent way forward. This is undertaken through a dual path of deconstruction and reconstruction. Mainstream economics is broken down into many of its key component parts and the history of each of these parts is scrutinized closely. When the flaws are thoroughly understood the author then begins the task of reconstruction. What emerges is not a ‘Grand Unified Theory of Everything’, but rather a provisional map outlining a new terrain for economists to explore. The Reformation in Economics is written in a lively and engaging style that aims less at the formalization of dogma and more at the exploration of ideas. This truly groundbreaking work invites readers to rethink their current understanding of economics as a discipline and is particularly relevant for those interested in economic pluralism and alternative economics.
Download or read book Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Economics I Learned from Online Dating written by Paul Oyer and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2013-12-17 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conquering the dating market—from an economist’s point of view After more than twenty years, economist Paul Oyer found himself back on the dating scene—but what a difference a few years made. Dating was now dominated by sites like Match.com, eHarmony, and OkCupid. But Oyer had a secret weapon: economics. It turns out that dating sites are no different than the markets Oyer had spent a lifetime studying. Monster.com, eBay, and other sites where individuals come together to find a match gave Oyer startling insight into the modern dating scene. The arcane language of economics—search, signaling, adverse selection, cheap talk, statistical discrimination, thick markets, and network externalities—provides a useful guide to finding a mate. Using the ideas that are central to how markets and economics and dating work, Oyer shows how you can apply these ideas to take advantage of the economics in everyday life, all around you, all the time. For all online daters—and for anyone else swimming in the vast sea of the information economy—this book uses Oyer’s own experiences, and those of millions of others, to help you navigate the key economic concepts that drive the modern age.
Download or read book The Experience Economy written by B. Joseph Pine and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text seeks to raise the curtain on competitive pricing strategies and asserts that businesses often miss their best opportunity for providing consumers with what they want - an experience. It presents a strategy for companies to script and stage the experiences provided by their products.
