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Toward integrating subjective well-being in environmental health impact assessments for healthy urban living: a conceptual and methodological exploration
No full textIntroduction Environmental Health Impact Assessments (HIAs) can inform decisions about the health effects of policy-related changes in environmental exposures. Conventional health impact metrics, focusing on mortality, morbidity, and disability, neglect subjective well-being. We explored the need and feasibility of integrating well-being indicators such as happiness and life satisfaction into quantitative environmental HIAs. Methods Building on a multidisciplinary expert workshop and existing literature, we addressed (1) definitions and indicators of well-being, (2) pathways linking environmental exposures (air pollution, noise, extreme temperatures, and green space) to well-being, and (3) the strength of epidemiological evidence for these associations. We evaluated the challenges of integrating well-being indicators into environmental HIAs, and provided an exploratory example. Results We argue that including well-being in HIAs offers a more comprehensive view of health, aligning with policy goals focused on enhancing citizen’s well-being. The literature identifies plausible pathways linking exposures to well-being, whilst epidemiological evidence for associations between environmental exposures and well-being is limited, but suggestive. We propose conducting exploratory HIAs integrating well-being, especially for green space (n = 16 epidemiological studies) and air pollution (n = 18). We outline two practical integration strategies: (1) report well-being impacts separately as Well-being-Adjusted Life Years, and (2) incorporate well-being into existing health indicators such as Quality-Adjusted Life Years or Disability-Adjusted Life Years. Conclusions Inclusion of well-being into quantitative environmental HIAs presents a more comprehensive representation of health and well-being beyond indicators focusing on morbidity and mortality. However, the epidemiological evidence base regarding environmental exposures and well-being warrants further expansion
Expertise as contingency-reduction: evidence from interviews concerning Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine on German TV news
No full textThis article analyses interviews with experts on German television news concerning the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine in the context of debates about the public contribution of the social sciences and humanities. Considering the first 13 months of the war, we find that the questions put to experts are mostly not about Eastern Europe or Ukraine. Rather they concern the present and the future with reference to implications for a “we” conceived as the viewing public in Germany. In their answers, academic experts do not draw on research, but they draw on academic knowledge to produce statements, which reduce the range of possible interpretations and outcomes using exclusion, scenarios, and probabilities. Experts work to reduce contingency, a mode of "doing expertise" that cannot be fairly characterized merely as a governance strategy and is not fully captured by debates between scientistic approaches to the social sciences and humanities and their critics
Entrepreneurial state as a creative destroyer: comparison of Hong Kong and Singapore’s creative industries
No full textThis paper explores the limits of mission‐directed entrepreneurial states by drawing on the theory of recombinant innovation and F.A. Hayek's insights on the spontaneous growth of knowledge in society. First, the use of discretionary policymaking curtails the range of knowledge generated in the process of social interaction, limiting the scope for ideas to be fortuitously recombined. Second, by privileging a single overarching mission, the state may foster a social culture that encourages compliance with authority, limiting the epistemic curiosity in individuals necessary for creative innovation. We make this argument through a comparative historical analysis of Singapore and Hong Kong, which adopted divergent approaches to development. Despite rapid growth in both, the former's technocratic governance came at the expense of its creative sectors, while the latter's reliance on spontaneous solutions enabled strong creative industries to develop despite little state support. By using creative performance as a proxy for innovation‐led development, we exemplify the limits of top‐down governance. Rather than fostering creative destruction, the entrepreneurial state may end up being a creative destroyer
The internet of us
No full textSocial Media and the Internet have catalyzed an unprecedented potential for exposure to human diversity in terms of demographics, language, culture, knowledge, opinions, talents and the like. Access to people’s diversity gives us the possibility of exploiting skills and competences that we do not have, that we may not even know they exist, some the so-called unknown unknowns, but which, however, could be exactly what we need when looking for help in the solution to the our current problem. However, this potential has not come with new, much needed, instruments and skills to harness the complications which rise when trying to exploit the diversity of people. This paper presents our vision of the “Internet of Us (IoU),” a new type of online diversity-aware social interactions capable of promoting richer and deeper social relations. We discuss the multiple facets of diversity in social settings as well as the multidisciplinary work that is required to reap the benefits of the IoU, toward a IoU-enabled diversity-aware hybrid human–AI society
A foundational asymmetry: gender, unpaid care work, and the market economy
No full textThe structures of patriarchy are characterized by considerable variety across the world, but they have one feature in common which appears with monotonous regularity across a range of different contexts: an asymmetrical gender division of labour which assigns primary responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work to women and girls within the household while giving men privileged access to material resources and economic opportunities. This asymmetry, and the form that it takes in different contexts, is foundational to the varying patterns of gender injustice we see across the world. This paper focuses on how it shapes various forms of gender disadvantage in the economic domain and its implications for gendered risks of poverty and illbeing
Travelling tales?
No full textThat narratives play a role in how scientific findings make their way into policy spaces is not perhaps surprising. Maybe less obvious is that sometimes it is the narratives that scientists themselves create in order to make sense of their own research work that carry their findings into policy domains. As a further twist, it may well be the ‘surprise factor’ within certain scientific narratives that makes those ones travel well, get circulated, and perhaps end up prompting policy changes
The non-death of Adam Neumann: alt-exiting, serial-founding, and failing up in Silicon Valley venture capital
No full textAdam Neumann surely ranks among the most disgraced corporate leaders of our time. The former WeWork founder and CEO, who was ousted from the company in 2019, became emblematic of the corporate excesses and hollow boosterism of post-dotcom Silicon Valley. In the public imagination his name is synonymous with failure and fraud. But to the outrage of many he is back on the scene, securing unprecedented backing from venture capital titan Andreessen Horowitz for his new real estate venture Flow. This essay unpacks the non-death of Adam Neumann, interrogating why someone seemingly so untouchable is being funded at the highest level by one of Silicon Valley’s most infamous VCs. I argue that, through his atypical ‘exiting’ of WeWork, whereby he extracted billions from the company without initial public offering or acquisition, Neumann attained a level of wealth and power that made him ripe for reinvestment. The case challenges the liberal ‘fake-it-till-you-make-it’ myth of Silicon Valley meritocracy. US tech today increasingly takes the form of billionaire VCs funding already-powerful, deceptive and ruthless repeat founders. It is this increasingly consolidated and cynical system that enables Adam Neumann to ‘fail up’; rewarded rather than punished for his extreme misdemeanors
On the measurement of bank vulnerability
No full textI introduce an index that formulates the vulnerability of the banking sector from a systemic risk perspective. It is expressed in terms of the size-weighted leverage and the illiquidity-weighted Herfindahl–Hirschman Index. The empirical implementation is demonstrated using balance sheet data from U.S. bank holding companies during 2001–2024 and national banks during the Great Depression. The index can be used to monitor financial instability, activate macroprudential capital buffers, and analyse historical banking crises
WHO's essential medicines list: additions for migraine and cluster headache
Get PDFWHO’s essential medicines list (EML) is “the world’s most influential list of medicines”; more than 150 countries (threequarters of the world’s total) base their own lists upon it (1).Historically, people affected by primary headache disorder shave been poorly served by the EML. Until this year, only migraine was featured. Acute treatments were limited toacetyl salicylic acid, paracetamol (acetaminophen) and sumatriptan, with ibuprofen listed only for children. Propranolol was the sole preventative drug. The EML is reviewed biennially, and, since 2007, additions to it have been an unfulfilled ambition of the Global Campaign against Headache. Opportunity arose when, in2023, WHO invited Lifting The Burden (LTB) to submit proposals for the 2025 review. LTB asked the International Headache Society to lead the initiative and include the European Headache Federation in a joint working group(the authors). Three meetings were held to decide which drugs were to be proposed for which disorders. Tasks, which included detailed reviews of the evidence supporting each proposal, and cost-effectiveness analyses, were dele-gated to individual members. Nine proposals were submitted(Table 1), accompanied by letters of support from more than20 patient or scientific organisations (supplemental material).The overall workload was substantial (2)