Educating for Public Happiness and Global Peace: Contributions from A Portuguese UNESCO Chair towards the Sustainable Development Goals

For a positive global future, it is fundamental to tackle the existing web of psychological, economic, sociological, and cultural processes reflected in current education systems. Confronted with complex issues that are essential to the stability of civilizations, we need more voices addressing a critical analysis of education in its key role. This can result in more people participating as happy, informed, and engaged citizens. This paper introduces the argument for education to promote public happiness (Felicitas Publica) and support global peace, addressing the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) #3, #4, and #16. It begins by mapping the landscape of promising education-related practices supporting these SDGs and provides recommendations for research and actions. In addition, it presents the work of the UNESCO Chair on Education for Global Peace Sustainability, based at the Universidade de Lisboa, in Portugal, as an illustrative example. With this paper, we hope to convey the input of different branches of psychology that have the common good as their aim and address the positive transformation of our current educational processes.

Public Happiness through Manufacturing and Innovation

This article uncovers the theory of industrialization of the eighteenth-century German Cameralist Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, who was the most important figure in German Cameralism. This topic is highly under-examined. This article finds that Justi proposed four reasons for industrialization in order to promote economic development: (1) manufacturing had a highly differentiated division of labor; (2) manufacturing was an innovation-intensive activity; (3) manufacturing was a science-based activity; and (4) manufacturing cultivated people’s psychological qualities which were required to realize economic development. Based on these findings, this thesis argues that Justi’s theories of industrialization and innovation contemplated a model of economic development similar to what is known today as “Schumpeterian growth.” This article aims to deepen our understanding of the significance of manufacturing and innovation in the early modern mercantilist and Cameralist economic theories.

Signs of Happiness

Although it has been argued that Cameralism had a prominent place in the formation of the modern economic mind and that public happiness was a crucial intersection of early modern economic discourses, its (re) discovery by mainstream economics has been considered partial and unconvincing. Therefore, it is crucial to understand that it was in the aftermath of the political and economic crisis of the Thirty Years’ War that happiness was established at the core of the foundations of Spanish Imperialism in the 1650s and then again in the 1760s. The text Signs of Happiness by Francesc Romà i Rossell (1768) is the best thread to reconstruct the evolution of Spanish imperialism. It spins the thread from the 1650s when happiness expanded the public sphere until the publication of his proposal where happiness is defined as the ability to recover from the decline through internal development and the improvement of agriculture, industry, and commerce. It is then when happiness and Cameralist teachings came together to sharpen Romà i Rossell’s science of government to transform the monarchy and underpin the creation of the Spanish nation.

Mind Genomics With Big Data for Digital Marketing on the Internet

This chapter sheds light on one very important application in the domain of digital economy – mind genomics. Mind genomics is an approach to targeted marketing which reaches each prospect with a different personalized message. This application requires acceleration coming from a data flow accelerator connected to a control flow host. It stresses equally the basic concept and its many applications. Innovation process is a step-by-step process. Once an important step up front is created and a new innovation finds its way into the commercial world, it is difficult to imagine that another dramatical step/leap forward is possible. However, such steps keep happening. Mind genomics is an example of one such step, unthinkable of until only a few years ago. Needs of the users could be served much more effectively not only in business domains or other lucrative domains, but also in the domains of public health, public happiness, public and individual quality of life, public and individual understanding of the environment around, etc.