WellBeing News has carried several stories about global happiness (e.g., World Happiness Report), subjective well-being, and happiness research centers. Happiness (and subjective well-being) research is booming, but these are not the only ways to measure global well-being. The Social Progress Imperative is a US-based non-profit...
Tigers, Tigers Everywhere. The USA Tiger Sanctuary Challenge As previously reported in WellBeing International's Saving Tigers in America Part 1, the number of tigers held in the United States of America (USA) began to increase in the 1980s, driven primarily by the profit motive of entertainment...
In October last year, WellBeing International organized two webinars on animal sentience – specifically on the question of invertebrate sentience – as part of a project funded by the Centre for Effective Altruism. We were surprised by the level of interest in the topic. In...
As we bid goodbye to 2021, the world continues its struggles with Covid-19 and its new variants. It is only natural to focus on the present and tempting to reflect on periods in the past – a concept encapsulated in the "back to the future"...
Several well-being and happiness research centers and policy units have been established in the last decade at major universities. For example, Harvard’s School of Public Health established the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness in 2016, while Oxford University launched its Wellbeing Research...
Over the past fifty years, public concern for animals (and “animal sentience”) has prompted significant changes in public policy in many countries worldwide. It is not yet clear what has driven this concern. There had been a similar increase in public concern for animals in...
This video is worth watching simply to feast on the photographs and video images from around the world. The images are stunning, but they are freighted with warnings and eventually with an outline of specific goals that the video argues could help humans change the...
Every now and again, a publication or report comes along that changes how we think about life. In the animal space, Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines (1964) was such a publication. In the environmental space, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and the Club of Rome’s Limits...
Over the last twenty years (that is, this century), there has been an explosion of interest in measuring “happiness” and “subjective well-being.” These measurements are beginning to be used in the development of public policy. Bhutan is commonly regarded as a leader in the field,...
The global growth of the number of internet users is remarkable. According to Internet World Stats, 63.2% of the world’s population used the internet as of October 2020. If children aged 0-4 are removed from the calculation, that percentage increases to 69.3%. If children aged...
