scholarly journals THE ECONOMICS OF HAPPINESS IN ROBERT MICHELS BETWEEN BENTHAMIAN UTILITARIANISM AND CIVIL ECONOMY

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina MONTESI ◽  

The paper thematizes the problematic relationship between economy and happiness covered by economist Robert Michels (1876-1936) in his book “The Economics of Happiness” written in 1918. In this book Michels, as a true frontier scholar, provides, well in advance of the acquisitions of the modern “science of happiness”, an interdisciplinary reading of the different determinants of happiness and of their interactions, courageously refuting the monistic and reductionist paradigm of neoclassical economy dominant in his epoch. The hedonistic conception of happiness conceived by Michels echoes that formulated by Jeremy Bentham, but Michels, unlike the Utilitarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gives it an unexpected twist, by postulating heretically that happiness is the ultimate goal of economy and that wealth is only a means to achieve it. In establishing the primacy of happiness as the main purpose of economic activity, Michels follows in the footsteps of Neapolitan and Milanese Civil Economists of Enlightenment with whom he had other theoretical points of consonance which the paper highlights. However Michels’ conception of happiness differs from Civil Economists’ notion because it is primarily based on individual pleasure and not on relational goods, because it is disconnected from those components of gratuitousness which are immanent to sincere relational goods, because it is detached from the search for Common Good. Finally the paper illustrates the multidimensional and innovative public policies which Michels suggests for the achievement of happiness by invoking a wide range of integrated interventions to be carried out by the State and by the workers’ unions. Keywords: Happiness Economics, Benthamian Utilitarianism, Civil Economy

2012 ◽  
pp. 94-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
O. Antipina

The article contains a review of the contemporary research in the field of economics of happiness. Economics of happiness deals with correlation between the subjective notion of well-being and happiness with ones life (happiness level) and economic indicators. The author considers the correlation of economic and noneconomic factors. The last ones —  such as education and health — also affect the level of happiness. The author dwells upon the following questions: research methodology in economics of happiness, correlation between subjective notion of well-being and happiness with ones life and economic performance on micro- and macrolevels.


2017 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-601
Author(s):  
Dan Paul Stefanescu ◽  
Oana Roxana Chivu ◽  
Claudiu Babis ◽  
Augustin Semenescu ◽  
Alina Gligor

Any economic activity carried out by an organization, can generate a wide range of environmental implications. Particularly important, must be considered the activities that have a significant negative effect on the environment, meaning those which pollute. Being known the harmful effects of pollution on the human health, the paper presents two models of utmost importance, one of the material environment-economy interactions balance and the other of the material flows between environmental factors and socio-economic activities. The study of these models enable specific conditions that must be satisfied for the economic processes friendly coexist to the environment for long term, meaning to have a minimal impact in that the residues resulting from the economic activity of the organization to be as less harmful to the environment.


2021 ◽  
pp. 54-59
Author(s):  
Md. Mahidy Hossain ◽  
Nadim Khandaker

In every aspect of Engineering more advanced, efficient and progressive solutions are required. The modern age of science requires innovative minds. The field of environmental engineering is also advancing with modern science and technology innovations. Measuring of methane concentration and flow rate is nothing new, yet a complicated process. The need for more accurate measurement is a necessity in proper operation of bio digesters for methane generation. The traditional process of the measuring methane content in biogas is time consuming yet complicated. The need for development and application of methane measurement techniques is not only limited to biogas but has other monitoring value as well in other health and safety applications in built environments. Winsen Electronics and Hanwei Electronics are two of the leading sensor-manufactures of China who are providing a wide range of gas detecting sensors that are locally available in Bangladesh and yet has not been applied to methane content measurement in biogas operations. In This paper we are reporting on the application of a purpose-built propane, butane detector for methane gas detection within the range of accuracy for it to be applied in methane detection in a biogas stream. This paper, reports on application and calibration of the methane detecting sensor MQ-4 with promising result. Based on the study we postulate that the sensor can be used to detect methane for an on-line monitoring of many environmental, industrial purposes such as bio digesters, integrated waste management facility. The cost of fabrication of the sensor system is only $18 making it a viable sensor with respect to cost for application in Bangladesh.


2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-193
Author(s):  
Jung Lee

In pre-modern Korea, paper was renowned for its white glossy surface and cloth-like strength, becoming an important item in both tributary exchanges and private trade. The unique material of the tak tree and related technical innovations, including toch’im, the repeated beating of just-produced paper that provides sizing and fulling effects, were crucial to this fame. However, the scholar-officials who integrated papermaking into the state production system in order to meet administrative and tributary needs initially made toch’im corvée and then penal labor, thereby dismissing it as simple toil. They were not alone, though, in denigrating a form of manual labor. Historiographies of modern science and technology are generally silent about such work, focusing instead on how we invented the human out of drudgery. However, papermakers in late Chosŏn Korea (the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) chose to identify their artisanship with toch’im and eventually succeeded in securing recognition for that technique as a highly paid specialty. By examining this skilling of toch’im, this paper seeks to change the historiographical silence about toil. It overcomes the archival silence that accompanies manual skills by tracing toch’im’s contours through its changing locations and associations in society’s changing social and material networks, revealing paper artisans’ social techniques, or everyday politics that eventually dignified their laborious technique. Paper artisans’ changing relationships with tak barks, tools and facilities, central and local authorities, farmers, merchants, and scholar-officials reveal how such social skilling was made in late Chosŏn Korea, where papermaking became a most successful industry. This tracing of toch’im re-situates creative toil and everyday politics of artisanal hands in the interconnected transformation of social relations, craft, and knowledge practices.


Author(s):  
Pierluigi De Felice ◽  
Luisa Spagnoli

In the archive of the Abbey of Montecassino there is a judicial affair between the monks of the Abbey and the Duke of Mignano stored. The quaestio of the dispute is for the sowing of rice by the Duke who, despite several orders of prohibitions (1661, 1665), persists in cultivating it, causing, according to the Benedictine monks, “great damage to the universities of St. Vittore, St. Pietro Infine, Mignano” because “it affects the wholesomeness of these lands”.  An unpublished large-scaled cartography is attached to this judicial dispute, whose graphic signs clarify and define the places of the diatribe also providing further information: we are in the Terra di Lavoro bathed by the river Peccia which is used and partly diverted to irrigate the Duke’s rice.  The case study offers a lot of food for thought starting from the problematic relationship between the values of the environment and water resources, defended by the Benedictine monks, and the economic and productive needs of a local aristocracy with an entrepreneurial vocation. This contrast connects, recalling and confirming it, to the wider one that developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries linked to the spread of rice where doctors, agronomists, politicians have widely debated the problems raised by the spread of rice fields in the Peninsula.


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Allaman Allamani ◽  
Franca Beccaria

Allamani, A., & Beccaria, F. (2016). Editorial: Discussing conflicts of interest during a Kettil Bruun Society symposium, June 2014, Turin (Italy). The International Journal Of Alcohol And Drug Research, 5(1), 1-3. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.7895/ijadr.v5i1.226Human beings have always sought after truth and made efforts to define and measure objects and events outside and inside themselves. In the last four centuries, since the time of Galileo, scholars came to agree more and more on a scientific method that could be shared in order to obtain replicable results that could become a common good for humanity. The results of a study can in fact lead to technological applications in various sectors of human life, like education, commerce, industry, and health.The search for scientific truth and its relationship with the economy has always had a complicated life: first, because in any given moment there will be different ideas about truth, and second, because researchers need both the means and the time to conduct their work. This is why a researcher must either support him- or herself and/or be financially supported by someone that may have different expectations about the research results.Thus, this involves the integrity of both the individual researcher and his/her referral network—the "scientific community"—that can call into question their ethical sphere by a potentially problematic relationship with truth, economy, and utility.


2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-11
Author(s):  
Valentina A. Maslova ◽  

The article deals with the status of the speech genres theory (SGT) and its contribution to the development of modern linguistics. In his polemical article Professor V. V. Dementyev argues that SGT is characterized by the wide range of research problems, a close connection with such academic domains as the theory of speech acts, colloquial studies, discourse analysis, linguistic personology and other areas that study a human and their language. This thesis does not raise objections, as the 21st century is considered to be the century of syncretism and interpenetration of sciences, which has become one of the main features of the entire post-non-classical science. This approach provides a holistic reflection on the object of study, in this case, on the language. It is called syncretism, integrity, interdisciplinarity, polydisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity. In general, these terms are synonymous, because they are based on the idea of holism of everything in the world. In this sense, SGT is in line with modern science. The thesis of V. V. Dementyev on the diffusion of genres. Diffusion can be considered as the most important trend not only in science, but also in the entire modern culture, which is shown with the help of examples. However, some statements of V. V. Dementyev’s article seem debatable: the problem of the pervasiveness of SGT in linguistics in its entirety, which can give rise to a dangerous tendency – the absorption of linguistics by SGT. Their interests do often overlap, but each of the named areas solves the problem of personal communication in a social environment in its own way, and each of them has its own subject and its own history. Today SGT cannot take into account many of the processes occurring in discourse, but this is a relatively new science with a great future.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Caroline Meziere ◽  
Lili Yu ◽  
Erik Reichle ◽  
Titus von der Malsburg ◽  
Genevieve McArthur

Research on reading comprehension assessments suggests that they measure overlapping but not identical cognitive skills. In this paper, we examined the potential of eye-tracking as a tool for assessing reading comprehension. We administered three widely-used reading comprehension tests with varying task demands to 79 typical adult readers while monitoring their eye movements. In the York Assessment for Reading Comprehension (YARC), participants were given passages of text to read silently, followed by comprehension questions. In the Gray Oral Reading Test (GORT-5), participants were given passages of text to read aloud, followed by comprehension questions. In the sentence comprehension subtest of the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT-4), participants were given sentences with a missing word to read silently, and had to provide the missing word (i.e., a cloze task). Results from linear models predicting comprehension scores from eye-tracking measures yielded different patterns of results between the three tests. Models with eye-tracking measures always explained significantly more variance compared to baseline models with only reading speed, with R-squared 4 times higher for the YARC, 3 times for the GORT, and 1.3 times for the WRAT. Importantly, despite some similarities between the tests, no common good predictor of comprehension could be identified across the tests. Overall, the results suggest that reading comprehension tests do not measure the same cognitive skills to the same extent, and that participants adapted their reading strategies to the tests’ varying task demands. Finally, this study suggests that eye-tracking may provide a useful alternative for measuring reading comprehension.


Author(s):  
Kurt Sartorius ◽  
Benn Sartorius ◽  
Dino Zuccollo

Background: The ability of the Baltic Dry Index to predict economic activity has been evaluated in a number of developed and developing countries. Aim: Firstly, the article determines the primary factors driving the dynamics of the Baltic Dry Index (BDI) and, secondly, whether the BDI can predict future share price reactions on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange All Share Index (JSE ALSI), South Africa. Setting: This article investigates the dynamics and predictive properties of the BDI in South Africa between 1985 and 2016. Methods: The article uses a review of a wide range of published data and two time-series data sets to adopt a mixed methods approach. An inductive contents analysis is used to answer the first research question and a combination of a unit root test, correlation analysis and a Granger causality model is employed to test the second research question. Results: The results show that the BDI price is primarily driven by four underlying constructs that include the supply and demand for dry bulk shipping, as well as risk, cost and logistics management factors. Secondly, the results indicate a break in the BDI data set in July 2008 that influences a fundamental change in its relationship with the JSE ALSI index. In the pre-break period (1985 to 2008), the BDI is positively correlated with the ALSI (0.837, α = 0.05) before sharply diverging in the second period from August 2008 to 2016. In the first period, the BDI showed an optimal lag period of 6 months as a predictor of the ALSI index, but this predictive ability ceases after July 2008. The article makes a two-part contribution. Firstly, it demonstrates that the BDI is a useful predictor of future economic activity in an African developing country. Secondly, the BDI can be incorporated in government and industry sector planning models as a variable to assess future gross domestic product trends. Conclusion: The study confirms that the BDI is only a reliable indicator of future economic activity when the supply of shipping capacity is well matched with the demand.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 191-211
Author(s):  
Hero Abdulrahman Mustafa ◽  
Idrees Abdulla Mustafa

Style and stylistics are two critical terms, that they exceed Kurdish modern criticism in the spread of researching modern critical literature of people and modern Kurdish literature. Style is a wide range of using language, stylistics is a researchable science and it is the detail of the styles.           Modern linguistics that (Bale) invented, paves the way for the emergence of this modern science for studying style, how modern linguistics studies (speech) and likewise stylistics studies styles of speech. This research sheds light on these two terms.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document