Mini-symposium on the future of history of economics: young scholars' perspective [Introduction]

International audienceThis symposium invited early-career scholrs to discuss the state of history of economics as a field and to propose possible directions for future research. Co-organized by Paola Tubaro and Erik Angner, this symposium took place at the Annual Meeting of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET) in Porto, Portugal, on April 29, 2006. Three of the papers presented on that occasion were subsequently published in a special section of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought

Review of The Oxford Handbook of Happiness

The Oxford Handbook of Happiness is the most comprehensive single volume on the subject of happiness. This long-anticipated landmark collection, along with the similarly ambitious Encyclopedia of Quality of Life Research (A. Michalos, ed. 2013, Springer) shows happiness scholarship coming of age and spreading outward into new themes and disciplines as well as forward into policy and practice. The book takes a broad definition of happiness and its contents span positive psychology and interdisciplinary (but psychology-focused) happiness studies. On the whole, the handbook is a remarkable achievement in that it covers most of the basic contemporary knowledge about happiness as well as giving glimpses of more advanced and specific findings

Subjective Measures of Well-Being: A philosophical examination

Over the last couple of decades, as part of the rise of positive psychology, psychologists have given increasing amounts of attention to so-called subjective measures of well-being. These measures, which are supposed to represent the well-being of individuals and groups, are often presented as alternatives to more traditional economic ones for purposes of the articulation, implementation and evaluation of public policy. Unlike economic measures, which are typically based on data about income, market transactions and the like, subjective measures are based on answers to questions like: "Taking things all together, how would you say things are these days - would you say you're very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy these days?" The aim of this dissertation is to explore issues in the philosophical foundations of subjective measures of well-being, with special emphasis on the manner in which the philosophical foundations of subjective measures differ from those of traditional economic measures. Moreover, the goal is to examine some arguments for and against these measures, and, in particular, arguments that purport to demonstrate the superiority of economic measures for purposes of public policy. My main thesis is that the claim that subjective measures of well-being cannot be shown to be inferior to economic measures quite as easily as some have suggested, but that they nevertheless are associated with serious problems, and that questions about the relative advantage of subjective and economic measures for purposes of public policy will depend on some fundamentally philosophical judgments, e.g. about the nature of well-being and the legitimate goals for public policy

An Attempt to Understand the Nature and Origin of Hayek's Transformation

Although the work of F. A. Hayek (1899-1992) has attracted a good deal of attention in recent years, many important questions about the nature and origin of his thought remain unanswered. This is particularly true regarding his so-called "transformation," during which he all but abandoned technical economics and instead decided to pursue broader questions in political and social philosophy. In this dissertation I examine the system of beliefs that guided his thought, and argue that a number of important questions can be usefully addressed by seeing Hayek in the light of the Natural Law tradition. I argue that there are important reasons to consider Hayek part of this tradition. Many of the central ideas of Natural Law doctrine (especially as they appear in the classical liberal philosophers of the 18th century) are clearly present in Hayek's work, and he was, as a matter of fact, under the governing influence of the Natural Law tradition for most of his life. The Natural Law connection helps account for a number of otherwise mysterious features of Hayek's work, for instance, why he adopted a theory of natural selection at the level of the group as the centerpiece of his mature theory. Moreover, the link with Natural Law doctrine goes a long way toward accounting for the immense rhetorical power of his theory. Meanwhile, I claim, Hayek's reliance on central tenets of Natural Law doctrine had important unintended, unanticipated and unwelcome consequences

The Evolution of Eupathics: The Historical Roots of Subjective Measures of Wellbeing

<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; mso-line-height-alt: 1.1pt;"><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 10pt;" lang="EN-GB">This paper traces the historical roots of subjective measures of wellbeing, that is, measures designed to represent happiness, satisfaction, or other “positive” or desirable mental states. While it is often suggested that these measures are a modern invention, I argue that they have a long and rich history that conforms to Theodore M. Porter’s general account of measurement in social and behavioral science. Subjective measures emerged in marital success studies, educational psychology, and personality psychology in the 1920s and 30s, and were further shaped by the epidemiology of mental health, gerontology, and the social indicator movement in the 1960s and 70s. Consistent with Porter’s account, these measures emerged in applied rather than theoretical branches of social and behavioral science, and they did so not as a result of physics envy, but rather as a result of a moral impulse to improve society; quantification was intended to make up for perceived deficiencies in unaided human judgment; and radical disagreements about the nature of wellbeing did not impede efforts to measure it – indeed, in time, there was considerably more agreement about how to measure wellbeing than about how to define it.</span><span style="font-family: "Palatino Linotype","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;" lang="EN-US"></span></p&gt