Mark D. White

Writer, editor, teacher

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about

I’m a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, where I teach courses in philosophy, economics, and law, and the author/editor/co-editor of several books.

Category: Happiness

  • There Is Little Happiness to Be Found in Happiness-Based Policy

    Mark D. White Governments around the world are starting to measure happiness (or subjective well-being) with the goal of a more humane process of policymaking. According to supporters, happiness-based policy will focus governments’ attention on what really matters to their citizens, their essential well-being, better than economic measures such as gross domestic product or national…

  • The arbitrariness of well-being measures: family mealtimes and Facebook enrollment

    Mark D. White Last week I submitted the manuscript for a book that argues that all measures of well-being or happiness are arbitrary and reflect the judgments of those who designed them, rather than the interests of the people whose well-being is ostensibly measured. (A precis of sorts for the book appeared in this article,…

  • Have economists ignored clinical depression?

    Mark D. White A recent issue of Science (October 5, 2012) is a special issue on depression, and senior editor Peter Stern's introduction lays out the reason for it (emphasis mine): Depression is a devastating disease. It affects not only the directly afflicted but also the people around them, their families, and their closest relations.…

  • Much (More) Ado about Happiness

    Mark D. White In this morning's Wall Street Journal, James Bovard pokes a little fun at the US government's plans for measuring gross domesic happiness (of which Nicolas Sarkozy was a leading advocate), pointing to how well they currently measure the myriad economic statistics regarding things that aren't entirely subjective. Many economists take this very seriously,…

  • I may suck, but not as much as you

    Mark D. White Please excuse the flippant title, and get ready for a bit of a rant. (Listen–it's almost Friday, and it's been a rough couple of weeks.) I'll start with a old joke: Two campers are in the woods when they spot a bear heading toward them. One camper starts running while the other…

  • When economics and philosophy divorced…

    Mark D. White In a recent "The Shrink and the Sage" piece in the Financial Times Magazine, Julian Baggini (prolific popularizer of philosophy) and Antonia Macaro discuss the pursuit of happiness, which is very interesting in itself, but I was particularly amused by how Baggini started his half of the discussion: When psychology and philosophy…

  • Much Ado about Happiness

    Mark D. White Carl Bialik at The Wall Street Journal has an article in today's edition and a blog post from last night, both very evenhanded, about the attempts by governments to measure the happiness of its citizenry, and the skepticism of some regarding the efficacy of this. For a critical look at the theory behind happiness studies,…