Human Well-Being and Economic Goals (Volume 3)

by Frank Ackerman (Editor), David Kiron (Editor), Neva R. Goodwin (Editor)

What are the ends of economic activity? According to neoclassical theory, efficient interaction of the profit-maximizing "ideal producer" and the utility-maximizing "ideal consumer" will eventually lead to some sort of social optimum. But is that social optimum the same as human well-being? Human Well-Being and Economic Goals addresses that issue, considering such questions as:


Does the maximization of individual welfare really lead to social welfare?
How can we deal with questions of relative welfare and of equity?
How do we define, or at least understand, individual and social welfare?
And how can these things be measured, or even assessed?

Human Well-Being and Economic Goals brings together more than 75 concise summaries of the most significant literature in the field that consider issues of present and future individual and social welfare, national development, consumption, and equity. Like its predecessors in the Frontier Issues in Economic Thought series, it takes a multidisciplinary approach to economic concerns, examining their sociological, philosophical, and psychological aspects and implications as well as their economic underpinnings.

Human Well-Being and Economic Goals provides a powerful introduction to the current and historical writings that examine the concept of human well-being in ways that can help us to set goals for economic activity and judge its success. It is a valuable summary and overview for students, economists, and social scientists concerned with these issues.

458 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1997

About the author

Frank Ackerman received a BA in mathematics and economics from Swarthmore College in 1967. After serving for two years as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, he entered graduate school, and received a PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1975.

He was a founder of Dollars & Sense magazine, where he worked as a writer, editor, and business manager from 1974 to 1982. After two years as a visiting professor (at the University of Massachusetts’ Amherst and Boston campuses) and one year as a computer programmer, he joined Tellus Institute, where he studied the economics of energy systems, and of solid waste and recycling, from 1985 to 1995.

From 1995 to 2007 he worked at Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute (GDAE). He was an editor of GDAE’s Frontier Issues in Economic Thought book series, a coauthor of GDAE’s macroeconomics textbook, and director of the institute’s Research and Policy program. For several of his years at GDAE, he also taught in the Tufts Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning.

From 2007 through 2012 he was at the Stockholm Environment Institute’s U.S. Center, also at Tufts University, where he directed the Climate Economics Group.

In late 2012 he is joining Synapse Energy Economics, a public interest-oriented consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He was a co-founder, and is a member of the steering committee, of Economics for Equity and Environment (E3 Network). He is a member scholar of the Center for Progressive Reform, an organization offering progressive scholarship and writing on environmental law and regulation.

In addition to his day job, he is a (very amateur) trumpet player in the Second Line Social Aid & Pleasure Society Brass Band (SLSAPS), playing New Orleans-style and other music at community events and good causes in the Boston area.