The Quality of Society
The Quality of Society

Author: Adolfo Figueroa

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-01-23

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 3030116565

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This book explores the policy implications of the unified theory of capitalism—how economic growth has led to a new epoch, the Anthropocene, and it presents a new set of economic principles that are needed in this new age. The unified theory of capitalism has been published as a new scientific endeavor, attempting to present new economics for the Anthropocene age that are empirically verifiable and fully consistent with the physical sciences. This book elaborates on the implications of the unified theory for both the science of economics and for public policies. In particular, this book develops in more detail the policy implications, discussing the fundamental economic and societal policy issues of our time—employment, inequality, the environment, and quality of life—in empirical terms.

The Quality of Society, Volume III
The Quality of Society, Volume III

Author: Adolfo Figueroa

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-10-29

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 3031210727

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This book contains another set of essays dealing with the fundamental economic problems of our time: inequality, environment degradation, and social disorder, which are analyzed in light of the unified theory of capitalism. This theory is a scientific endeavor that seeks to explain the capitalist system taken by parts and then taken as a whole, as a unified theory. By parts, the theory analyzes the First World and the Third World and also the short run, long run, and very long run economic processes, showing why and how economic growth has led to a new epoch, with ecological equilibrium disruption, known as the Anthropocene Age. The empirical predictions of the theory are proven to be consistent with the available facts. Therefore, the theory can be accepted as a good representation of the real-world capitalism; moreover, its derived causality relations become inputs for the debate on the needed science-based policies for the new age. Indeed, this book proposes structural policies to change the way capitalism operates, through changes in its basic institutions, mainly the electoral democracy, which would certainly imply a re-foundation of the capitalist system.

The Good Society
The Good Society

Author: Henrik Christoffersen

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-11-26

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 3642372384

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Denmark and Switzerland are small and successful countries with exceptionally content populations. However, they have very different political institutions and economic models. They have followed the general tendency in the West toward economic convergence, but both countries have managed to stay on top. They both have a strong liberal tradition, but otherwise their economic strategies are a welfare state model for Denmark and a safe haven model for Switzerland. The Danish welfare state is tax-based, while the expenditures for social welfare are insurance-based in Switzerland. The political institutions are a multiparty unicameral system in Denmark, and a permanent coalition system with many referenda and strong local government in Switzerland. Both approaches have managed to ensure smoothly working political power-sharing and economic systems that allocate resources in a fairly efficient way. To date, they have also managed to adapt the economies to changes in the external environment with a combination of stability and flexibility.

The Quality of Society, Volume II
The Quality of Society, Volume II

Author: Adolfo Figueroa

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-09-16

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 3030795659

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This book articulates a unified theory of capitalism as an attempt to provide a comprehensive scientific theory of this social system. A unified theory of capitalism is not the combination of the predominant economic theories—neoclassical, classical, and Keynesian—so as to make them compatible. It is not a composite economic theory. It is a new economic theory. Predictions of the theory’s models were consistent with eight basic empirical regularities of capitalism dealing with economic growth, income inequality, employment level, and environment degradation. Therefore, the unified theory can be accepted as a good approximation of the real capitalist world. But the models were constructed at a high level of abstraction. Also problematic was the need to work out more fully the public policy implications of the theory. It is, therefore, no wonder that essays on the unified theory to answer these questions are a natural outcome of a new scientific endeavor attempting to reach a unity of knowledge in economics.

Health and the Good Society
Health and the Good Society

Author: Alan Cribb

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2005-10-13

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0199242739

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The goals of healthcare and health policy, and the health-related dilemmas facing policy makers, professionals, and citizens are extensively analysed and debated in a range of disciplines including public health, sociology, and applied philosophy. Health and the Good Society is the first full-length work that addresses these debates in a way that cuts across these disciplinary boundaries.Alan Cribb's core argument is that clinical ethics needs to be understood in the context of public health ethics. This entails healthcare ethics embracing 'the social dimension' of health in two overlapping senses: first, the various respects in which health experiences and outcomes are socially determined; and second, the ways in which health-related goods are better understood as social rather then purely individual goods. This broader approach to the Cthics of healthcare includes a concernwith the social construction of both healthcare goods and the roles, ideals, and obligations of agents; that is to say it focuses upon the 'value field' of health-related action and not only upon the ethics of action within this value field. This groundbreaking book thus seeks to 'open up' the agendaof healthcare ethics both methodologically and substantively: it argues that population-oriented perspectives are central to all healthcare ethics, and that everybody has some share of responsibility for securing health-related goods including the good of greater health equality. One of its major conclusions is that the rather limited tradition of health education policy and practice needs a complete re-think.

Toward a Just Society
Toward a Just Society

Author: Martin Guzman

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2018-08-28

Total Pages: 548

ISBN-13: 0231546807

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Joseph Stiglitz is one of the world’s greatest economists. He has made fundamental contributions to economic theory in areas such as inequality, the implications of imperfect and asymmetric information, and competition, and he has been a major figure in policy making, a leading public intellectual, and a remarkably influential teacher and mentor. This collection of essays influenced by Stiglitz’s work celebrates his career as a scholar and teacher and his aspiration to put economic knowledge in the service of creating a fairer world. Toward a Just Society brings together a range of essays whose breadth reflects how Stiglitz has shaped modern economics. The contributions to this volume, all penned by high-profile authors who have been guided by or collaborated with Stiglitz over the last five decades, span microeconomics, macroeconomics, inequality, development, law and economics, and public policy. Touching on many of the central debates and discoveries of the field and providing insights on the directions that academic economics could take in the future, Toward a Just Society is an extraordinary celebration of the many paths Stiglitz has opened for economics, politics, and public life.

Pursuing Quality of Life
Pursuing Quality of Life

Author: Leonard Nevarez

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2011-03-29

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1136817476

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From anxieties over work-life balance and entangling technologies, to celebrations of cool jobs and great places to live, quality of life frames the ways we enhance our lives and legitimate social change today. But how does the idea of quality of life envision the greater good, and what gets lost as a result? This book provides the critical framework for understanding the idea’s contexts and tensions that are conspicuously missing in popular discussions, professional activities, and scholarly research on quality of life. With multiple case studies taken across North America and Europe, it provides a sociological perspective on the contradictory ways we talk about and pursue quality of life in relation to technology, consumerism, family, work, public space, rural ways of life, and ultimately the final years of life. Drawing on contemporary and classical social theory, it provides an incisive account of the historical shifts in developed societies over the last half-century that have transformed our views and pursuits of quality of life. Originally a promise to undertake collective effort and pursue social justice at a moment of unprecedented opportunity, quality of life now enshrines a solipsistic ideal with which to accommodate the storms of market forces and political failure.

The Decent Society
The Decent Society

Author: Pamela Abbott

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-14

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1317438280

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The search for ‘the Decent Society’ – a fit place in which to live – has informed policy at both governmental and international level. This book analyses its nature and devises a consistent way of measuring the concept world-wide on the basis of a coherent theory of agency within social structure. Influenced by classical sociology and by the economist Amartya Sen, the book posits that societies need to create (a) economic security, (b) social cohesion, (c) social inclusion, and (d) the conditions for empowerment. The model is interactive and recursive; each component provides the requirements for each of the others. This book outlines the sociopolitical framework underlying ’the Decent Society' and summarises a decade of research, some of which has had a formative impact on governments’ policies. The first half contains studies of social quality based on surveys in the former Soviet Union and sub-Saharan Africa, while the second half describes the construction of a Decent Society Index for comparing very different countries across the world. This book and the index it develops will be of interest both to academics and researchers in sociology, politics, economics, psychology, social policy and development studies and to policy-makers in government, local government and the NGOs.

Resonance
Resonance

Author: Hartmut Rosa

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-07-26

Total Pages: 551

ISBN-13: 1509519920

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The pace of modern life is undoubtedly speeding up, yet this acceleration does not seem to have made us any happier or more content. If acceleration is the problem, then the solution, argues Hartmut Rosa in this major new work, lies in “resonance.” The quality of a human life cannot be measured simply in terms of resources, options, and moments of happiness; instead, we must consider our relationship to, or resonance with, the world. Applying his theory of resonance to many domains of human activity, Rosa describes the full spectrum of ways in which we establish our relationship to the world, from the act of breathing to the adoption of culturally distinct worldviews. He then turns to the realms of concrete experience and action – family and politics, work and sports, religion and art – in which we as late modern subjects seek out resonance. This task is proving ever more difficult as modernity’s logic of escalation is both cause and consequence of a distorted relationship to the world, at individual and collective levels. As Rosa shows, all the great crises of modern society – the environmental crisis, the crisis of democracy, the psychological crisis – can also be understood and analyzed in terms of resonance and our broken relationship to the world around us. Building on his now classic work on acceleration, Rosa’s new book is a major new contribution to the theory of modernity, showing how our problematic relation to the world is at the crux of some of the most pressing issues we face today. This bold renewal of critical theory for our times will be of great interest to students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities.

The Good ICT Society
The Good ICT Society

Author: Gunilla Bradley

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-06-14

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 1351865765

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What is Quality of Life in a society that has embraced information and communication technology (ICT)? What is Wisdom in this kind of society? And what things are helping or hindering us from having both wisdom and a good quality of life in ICT societies? Taking the reader through a quick analysis of the current social and psychological changes in the Information and Communication Society, Bradley challenges us to avoid becoming victims of technology - whether we are professionals, policymakers, parents or citizens. Indeed, she introduces a theoretical model based on four decades’ worth of research to help the reader to understand this complex, technological world. In addition to focusing the reader’s attention on convergence and acceleration, this model describes the interplay between technology, societal structure, organizational design and human roles, thus leading to what Bradley describes as a "good ICT society". Emphasising the necessity of a co-operative parallel between the automation and humanization of society, this innovative volume will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in the subjects such as Information and Communication Technology and Social Change, Psychology and Sociology, Computer Technology and Media Technology.