Textbook: Intro to Human Dev

The textbook itself can be downloaded from the following website (which also has lots of additional materials)

STATA is a statistical package used for data analysis in connection with some of empirical work related to this topic. My student Mumtaz Ahmed has conducted several trainings in STATA, and we could ask him to conduct one for students in this class when they are at a stage where they are ready to do data analysis.

ARIF NAVEED is an expert on this topic and can provide many resources to those who want to learn more:

He sent me a message as follows:

This is in connection with the module on research methods we have been discussion these days. There is a comprehensive training package that you may like to replicate. This is the standard summer school curriculum of the OPHI. The details are available here; http://www.ophi.org.uk/subindex.php?id=teaching5

If you like, we might even use the video lectures available on the site. Moreover, I can contact Sabina to ask for notes not available here.

A paper on well-being, which studies how wealth relates to happiness.

Human Well-being:

Concepts and Conceptualizations

View Download

Des Gasper*

April 2004

Abstract

Economic measures of income have ignored large areas of human well-being and are

poor measures of well-being in the areas to which they attend. Despite increased

recognition of those distortions, ‘GNP per capita continues to be regarded as the

quintessential indicator of a country’s living standard’ (Partha Dasgupta). Well-being

seems to have intuitive plausibility as a concept, but in practice we encounter a

bewilderingly diverse family of concepts and approaches, partly reflecting different

contexts, purposes, and foci of attention. Is there a unifying framework that yet respects

the complexity and diversity of well-being? This paper presents an imperfect

comparative and integrative framework that builds on the contributions by Sen and

others. We move toward the framework gradually, since well-being concepts are in fact

complex entitities which reflect pictures of personhood and of science. Insight grows

through surveying a wide range of relevant experience and views, before risking

blinkering one’s vision in a framework. The paper then uses the framework to examine

conceptualizations of human well-being, by Dasgupta, Sen, Nussbaum, Doyal and

Gough, and Alkire.

Keywords: well-being, welfare, happiness, objective, subjective, measurement