Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy

What are the methodologies for assessing and improving governmental policy in light of well-being? <em>The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy </em>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. <p/>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.<br>