Description

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What are the methodologies for assessing and improving governmental policy in light of well-being? The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary treatment of this topic. The contributors draw from welfare economics, moral philosophy, and psychology and are leading scholars in these fields.

The Handbook includes thirty chapters divided into four Parts. Part I covers the full range of methodologies for evaluating governmental policy and assessing societal condition-including both the leading approaches in current use by policymakers and academics (such as GDP, cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, inequality and poverty metrics, and the concept of the "social welfare function"), and emerging techniques. Part II focuses on the nature of well-being. What, most fundamentally, determines whether an individual life is better or worse for the person living it? Her happiness? Her preference-satisfaction? Her attainment of various "objective goods"? Part III addresses the measurement of well-being and the thorny topic of interpersonal comparisons. How can we construct a meaningful scale of individual welfare, which allows for comparisons of well-being levels and differences, both within one individual's life, and across lives? Finally, Part IV reviews the major
challenges to designing governmental policy around individual well-being.

About the Author

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Matthew Adler is Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy, and Public Policy at Duke University. He works at the intersection of law, welfare economics, social choice theory, and normative ethics. Adler previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and the University of Virginia. Marc Fleurbaey is Robert E. Kuenne Professor of Economics and Humanistic Studies and Professor of Public Affairs at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He has widely published in the field of welfare economics, social choice theory, and public economics.