Human well‐being and climate change mitigation

Climate change mitigation research is fundamentally motivated by the preservation of human lives and the environmental conditions which enable them. However, the field has to date rather superficial in its appreciation of theoretical claims in well‐being thought, with deep implications for the framing of mitigation priorities, policies, and research. Major strands of well‐being thought are hedonic well‐being—typically referred to as happiness or subjective well‐being—and eudaimonic well‐being, which includes theories of human needs, capabilities, and multidimensional poverty. Aspects of each can be found in political and procedural accounts such as the Sustainable Development Goals. Situating these concepts within the challenges of addressing climate change, the choice of approach is highly consequential for: (1) understanding inter‐ and intra‐generational equity; (2) defining appropriate mitigation strategies; and (3) conceptualizing the socio‐technical provisioning systems that convert biophysical resources into well‐being outcomes. Eudaimonic approaches emphasize the importance of consumption thresholds, beyond which dimensions of well‐being become satiated. Related strands of well‐being and mitigation research suggest constraining consumption to within minimum and maximum consumption levels, inviting normative discussions on the social benefits, climate impacts, and political challenges associated with a given form of provisioning. The question of how current socio‐technical provisioning systems can be shifted towards low‐carbon, well‐being enhancing forms constitutes a new frontier in mitigation research, involving not just technological change and economic incentives, but wide‐ranging social, institutional, and cultural shifts

Scripts people live in the marketplace: an application of script analysis to Confessions of a Shopaholic

This paper shows how Script Analysis can produce new marketing theory by applying it to contemporary shopping behaviour via British novelist Madeleine Wickham’s novel, Confessions of a Shopaholic. We show how Becky Bloomwood, the central character, is a Scripted Shopaholic for whom shopping is the activity around which everything else in her live falls in and out of place. In presenting a Scripted Shopaholic Racket System, we theorise: how shopping is used to structure time and relationships with others; the role of injunctions and attributions and related discounting in fulfilling shopping scripts; and, the possibility of freedom from excessive shopping scripts. We therefore bring together psychoanalysis, literary texts, and shopping theories to generate new insights about why people shop (and often shop too much), and how such behaviours might be transforme

Student participation in sporting activities

Given that many universities spend large sums of money supplying sports facilities for student use, comparatively little is known about the factors that influence the quantity of student sporting participation. This paper presents evidence which suggests that the quantity of student sports participation is adversely affected by greater hours of work and increased by greater sports literacy and the decision to augment social capital. Effective investment in sports facilities by Universities would meet students’ demands and not simply increase the range of sports facilities available to students

Allocation mechanisms, incentives, and endemic institutional externalities

Whether an economic agent’s decision creates an externality often depends on the institutional context in which the decision was made. Indeed, in orthodox economics, a technological or exogenous externality occurs just in case one agent’s economic welfare or production possibilities are directly affected by the market decisions of other agents. A pecuniary externality occurs just in case one consumer’s economic welfare or producer’s profit is affected indirectly by price changes caused by changes in other agents’ decisions. Similarly, an institutional or endogenous externality may arise whenever allocations are determined by a mechanism that is not strategy proof for some agent. Then even a resource balance constraint creates an institutional externality except in special cases such as when no individual agent’s action can affect market clearing prices — i.e., there are no pecuniary externalities

Tariffs

Northern Indiana Public Service Co. (NIPSCO) is collaborating with a group of municipalities to initiate a program to replace all fixtures in its service territory with LED fixtures. In this presentation we discuss this program and its timing, results, and tariff impacts