Abstract:

Israel scores very high internationally in the reported happiness of its Jewish inhabitants, and government politicians make much of that survey result. On the face of it there is a paradox: the country does not score high on other quality-of-life indicators and is not an easy place to live in. I will report on the construction and record of quality-of-life indicators more generally, on what they tell us about Israel, on currently ongoing research about well-being in the country, and on how the paradox might be understood and resolved.

About the speaker:

It was the original forever war, which went on interminably, fuelled by religious and constitutional disputes, personal ambition, fear of hegemony, and communal suspicion. It dragged in all the neighbouring powers. It was punctuated by repeated failed ceasefires. It inflicted suffering beyond belief and generated waves of refugees. This description could apply to Syria today, but actually refers to the Thirty Years War (1618-48), which turned much of central Europe into a disaster zone. The Thirty Years War is often cited as a parallel in discussions of current conflict in the Middle East.

Economies represent moral and political choices that vary across time and place. We are now witnessing the fraying of the political economic framework that guided action for decades and that created bases for social cohesion. With unravelling comes contestation of the values that undergird the framework and antagonism against those perceived as violating the social compact. Periodically, it is necessary to update the political economic framework, including its embedded moral economy.

As the nature of conflict evolves, new questions are being asked about how individual safety and the rights of civilians are affected. Who is responsible for protecting the human right to bodily integrity in a globalised world? How is the transformation of warfare in the technological, political and strategic realms affecting the individual rights of civilians and combatants?

What explains the shift from the moderate to high inflation rates of the Golden Age of post-war capitalism to the low inflation regime of monetarism in the 1970s and 1980s? Conventional views emphasise the rise of monetarism as a new economic paradigm that convinced policy makers to delegate monetary policy to conservative and independent central banks. In contrast to these arguments that ignore politics on the ground, we model and examine the shifts in the inflationary preferences of the median voter and their translation into party politics and economic policies.