World happiness, ranked

David Blanchflower and  Alex Bryson in this voxeu article:

Economists have shown increasing interest in using wellbeing metrics to refine public policies. This column combines data from a poll covering two million individuals in 164 countries and a survey of two and a half million Americans focusing on eight measures of wellbeing, both positive (life satisfaction, enjoyment, smiling, being well-rested) and negative (pain, sadness, anger, worry. The US does surprisingly well, with nine of the list’s top ten ‘happiest’ places, while the Nordic countries, which traditionally rank highly using life satisfaction measures, do not rank as highly with other measures.

University of Chicago Booth School’s 125th Anniversary

Booth School celebrating its 125 anniversary in 2023

In celebration of the 125th anniversary of Booth’s founding in 1898, the Booth community celebrates our transformative approach to business education, the innovative ideas of our faculty, our culture of diverse perspectives and collaboration, and the global impact of our entire Booth community.

Beginning now, and throughout 2023, we are celebrating our 125th anniversary. From events across the globe to an oral history project for our alumni to activities on social media and retrospective features, join us as we showcase the impact of Booth over the past 125 years, celebrate this important milestone as a community, and present to you how Booth is poised to continue to impact the future.

Amartya Sen as a neoclassical economist

Antonis Ragkousis of Kings College in this paper argues that Sen is a neoclassical economist in Veblenian sense:

Amartya Sen is often described as an insightful critic of mainstream economics, and in particular, his work in development economics, alongside the construction of the capabilities approach, has been associated with endeavors to revisit both the theory and practice of the discipline.

Despite his in-depth criticisms of certain aspects of mainstream economics, Sen’s extensive use of formal methods is suggestive of an ontological tension, one identified by Thorstein Veblen when commenting on some of his contemporaries and originally introducing the term “neoclassical”.

Veblen coined the term to highlight the ontological inconsistencies in the work of a particular group of economists, including Alfred Marshall and John Neville Keynes. Veblen argued that their work involved both an implicit recognition of a causal processual social ontology he associated with modern, thoroughly evolutionary, approaches and a commitment to a taxonomic conception of science – the latter relying on a set of methods that presupposed an associationist ontology of event regularities. For Veblen, the adherence to taxonomic methods was the classical feature of the work of the relevant group, and the commitment to an evolutionary viewpoint was the neo aspect.

This paper argues that the same tension runs through Sen’s contributions and that he is neoclassical in this specifically Veblenian sense. The assessment of the ontological inconsistencies in Sen’s work is shown to shed light on its reception within the economics academy.