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This volume gathers the thoughts of reputed academics in economics, social policy, philosophy, and the social sciences as they scrutinize contentions regarding quality of life and the way in which it is, it can be, and ought to be measured. Such debates roughly boil down to the merits and shortcomings of measuring the quality of human life in terms of utility, as well as to the advantages and pitfalls of alternatives to the utilitarian approach. Philosophical inquiries concerning what constitutes thriving human life, engage with concrete policy‐making and economic considerations in this work, bridging the customary schism between theory and practice. This book is catered not only to professional academics but also to policy‐makers and the general public who are interested in the question of the quality of life.

Pelagic plant life draws its principal supply of dissolved or undissolved nitrogen either from the coasts or from localities where warm and cold currents meet."J. Hjort "Where cold and warm currents meet at the surface of the ocean there is a rise of temperature for the animals of the cold current and a fall of temperature for the animals of the warm current, which results in a plentiful destruction of organisms."Sir John Murray "We are well acquainted with the stream in our pursuit of whales, which keep to the sides of it but are not met within it."..

As people live longer, ages at death are becoming more similar. This dual advance over the last two centuries, a central aim of public health policies, is a major achievement of modern civilization. Some recent exceptions to the joint rise of life expectancy and life span equality, however, make it difficult to determine the underlying causes of this relationship. Here, we develop a unifying framework to study life expectancy and life span equality over time, relying on concepts about the pace and shape of aging. We study the dynamic relationship between life expectancy and life span equality with reliable data from the Human Mortality Database for 49 countries and regions with emphasis on the long time series from Sweden. Our results demonstrate that both changes in life expectancy and life span equality are weighted totals of rates of progress in reducing mortality. This finding holds for three different measures of the variability of life spans. The weights evolve over time and indicate the ages at which reductions in mortality increase life expectancy and life span equality: the more progress at the youngest ages, the tighter the relationship. The link between life expectancy and life span equality is especially strong when life expectancy is less than 70 y. In recent decades, life expectancy and life span equality have occasionally moved in opposite directions due to larger improvements in mortality at older ages or a slowdown in declines in midlife mortality. Saving lives at ages below life expectancy is the key to increasing both life expectancy and life span equality.

introduction | bottlEs and curvEsA camera captures a bottle at three points in time.It is filled with Drosophila, also known as fruit flies, an organism that is born, reproduces, and dies in a flicker.In the first photo, the sparsely populated bottle, rich in food, finds generations of happy fruit flies reproducing and living long lives.In the second snapshot, the busy fruit flies multiply rapidly, sharply increasing their numbers until, in the third image of the bottle, the fruit flies are so numerous the container can no longer support them, a point in time when death rises, birth declines, and population growth stagnates.The bottle becomes a container of mass death.Looking at images of this jar today, I want to reach back, pluck open the lid, and release the fruit flies to other fates.Or I could take responsibility for feeding the flies, bred as dependent laboratory creatures by the scientific practices I care so much about.Or better yet I could smash the bottle, breaking the illusion that it is the container that conditions how the flies live or die.I want to imagine other ways of understanding aggregate life that do not demand a contained existence that ends in extermination.What would it take to smash the container?This book is a history of two aggregate forms of life being modeled in this bottle of fruit flies: population and economy.Together population and economy have rearranged worlds over the twentieth century.New ways of valuing of life have been tied to their fates.Population and economy have been built into the architectures of nation-states where practices of quantification have helped to install economy as our collective environment, as our bottle, as our surround.How does capitalism know and dream its own conditions through numbers and data?I hope that this book will leave readers feeling and thinking differently about population and economy as adequate analytic containers for assembling life toward other futures.Population became a new kind of experimental concern in the work of Raymond Pearl, the prominent and prolific American biologist who claimed that his 1920s experiments with fruit flies in bottles captured a law

ABSTRACT This article explores the assumption that the goals on which an individual works structure the experience of daily life. One set of important goals are those consensual tasks that reflect the age‐graded expectations of a living environment (e.g., the task of being on one's own at college). Whereas most members of a common age group share these consensual life tasks, individuals in a group differ in the relative importance they place on different tasks and in their appraisals of them. In the present study of 54 women living in a college sorority, the importance of a life task was associated with increased relevance of the task to daily life events, as revealed in experience sampling. The women were more emotionally involved in events that they saw as highly relevant to their life tasks than in less relevant events and, for each person, positive affect and emotional involvement in task‐relevant events were related to her initial life task appraisals.

The intestinal microbiota has become a relevant aspect of human health. Microbial colonization runs in parallel with immune system maturation and plays a role in intestinal physiology and regulation. Increasing evidence on early microbial contact suggest that human intestinal microbiota is seeded before birth. Maternal microbiota forms the first microbial inoculum, and from birth, the microbial diversity increases and converges toward an adult-like microbiota by the end of the first 3-5 years of life. Perinatal factors such as mode of delivery, diet, genetics, and intestinal mucin glycosylation all contribute to influence microbial colonization. Once established, the composition of the gut microbiota is relatively stable throughout adult life, but can be altered as a result of bacterial infections, antibiotic treatment, lifestyle, surgical, and a long-term change in diet. Shifts in this complex microbial system have been reported to increase the risk of disease. Therefore, an adequate establishment of microbiota and its maintenance throughout life would reduce the risk of disease in early and late life. This review discusses recent studies on the early colonization and factors influencing this process which impact on health.

Being happy and finding life meaningful overlap, but there are important differences. A large survey revealed multiple differing predictors of happiness (controlling for meaning) and meaningfulness (controlling for happiness). Satisfying one’s needs and wants increased happiness but was largely irrelevant to meaningfulness. Happiness was largely present-oriented, whereas meaningfulness involves integrating past, present, and future. For example, thinking about future and past was associated with high meaningfulness but low happiness. Happiness was linked to being a taker rather than a giver, whereas meaningfulness went with being a giver rather than a taker. Higher levels of worry, stress, and anxiety were linked to higher meaningfulness but lower happiness. Concerns with personal identity and expressing the self-contributed to meaning but not happiness. We offer brief composite sketches of the unhappy but meaningful life and of the happy but meaningless life.