Which society is considered to be successful?
Answers
There is no simple answer to this question because
decisions about the criteria by which success should be measured inevitably depend on
normative judgments that are contestable and real-world conditions often entail
concessions on some dimensions of success to secure improvements in others. For these
reasons, even the most sophisticated efforts to address this problem, such as Amartya
Sen’s impressive theory of development as freedom, can be frustratingly indeterminate.
As Michèle Lamont and I argue in Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture
Affect Health (Cambridge University Press 2009), however, this question is too important
to ignore. Even when the answers are necessarily incomplete, social scientists should be
asking such questions. Although there is a natural preference for more tractable subjects,
the watchword of social science should not be ‘convenience’. We need to advance our
understanding not only of how societies work but of how they can work better.
The approach to this problem adopted by the Successful Societies volume is to
take the health of the population as a relatively uncontroversial indicator of well-being,
without suggesting it is the only important element of social success and then ask: how
can our understandings of the conditions that advance population health be expanded?
For our initial intuitions, we rely on an important literature in social epidemiology and
then bring to the issues a wide range of observations about the social roles of institutions
and cultural frameworks. Our objective is to show that population health offers fruitful
terrain for the inquiries of social science.
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Explanation:
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