Inspirational Media ArticlesExcerpts of Key Inspirational Media Articles in Major Media
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Whether revealed in a post on social media, a short video on TikTok, or the latest piece of news on Fox or NBC, it is hard to ignore political divisions in the U.S. We ... conducted a survey of over 2,400 Republicans and Democrats in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential elections. We included questions about each person's moral and sociopolitical attitudes and beliefs. We found considerable similarity in their moral and political attitudes. At least 75% of responses overlapped. Both groups endorsed the importance of considering how fair or harmful their actions are for others, and they both believed that upholding democracy and finding bipartisan solutions is important for the U.S. In a series of subsequent experiments involving more than 4,400 participants, we presented our findings to people who had not participated in the survey. Participants all saw the same findings, but they were randomly assigned to see the information described in different ways. For some participants, our results were described as showing small differences between Democrats and Republicans, whereas for others they were described as showing a high degree of similarity between the two groups. When findings were described as showing similarities, participants thought that their political opponents had attitudes and beliefs that were more similar to their own group. They were more willing to find common ground with their political opponents on major social issues like gun control and abortion. Focusing on group differences might inadvertently contribute to political tension.
Note: Our latest 7-min video explores the importance of healing the polarization that's poisoning our conversations and sabotaging democracy. For more, read our recent article on healing the culture wars and explore more positive stories like this on healing social division.
Brandon, Jackie and Julie meet for dinner every Thursday, sitting at their regular table. As they leave, there's no check to pay for this generous meal. The pop-up cafe at a church hall in Chelmsford, England is one of 80 held across the country throughout the week. They're an initiative of FoodCycle, the UK's largest community dining organization, which turns produce that supermarkets would otherwise throw out into a free meal for anyone who wants to attend. In 2022, FoodCycle's pop-up cafes served nearly 500,000 meals to 62 communities across the UK, saving 209 tonnes of food from going to waste. Forty-three percent of people who attend FoodCycle meals, like Jackie and Julie, live on their own, with 68 percent of them feeling lonely, according to a survey of 910 FoodCycle guests in 2022. Loneliness is considered to be a significant mental and public health issue in the country, affecting over half the population, with the Mental Health Foundation linking it to depression and declining physical health. Sixty-eight percent of FoodCycle guests worry about affording food, and 92 percent are concerned about the increasing price of food, to the extent that 75 percent regularly skip meals. "These issues are intertwined and interlinked. We know there's a correlation between people who are facing food poverty, and feeling isolated and disconnected from their communities," says Sophie Tebbetts, FoodCycle's head of programs and incoming CEO.
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In most of Europe, fitting a heat pump is one of the most powerful actions a person can take to reduce their carbon footprint. But in Norway, where clean-yet-inefficient electrical resistance heaters have long been common, upgrading to a heat pump is often a purely financial decision. Two-thirds of households in this Nordic country of 5 million people have a heat pump, more than anywhere else in the world. For many years, Norwegians and their neighbours heated their homes with fossil fuels. But during the 1973 oil crisis, when prices shot up, the country's political leaders made a conscious choice to promote alternatives. "Norway ensured early on that fossil-fuel heating was the most expensive option, making heat pumps cost competitive," said Dr Jan Rosenow from the Regulatory Assistance Project, a thinktank that works to decarbonise buildings. "They did this by taxing carbon emissions from fossil heating fuels. That's been the key to incentivise heat pump adoption." Norway also trained up a workforce to install them. Heat pumps' efficiency has been increased over decades, partly because of the early adopters in Nordic countries who tinkered away to the point where a modern version can deliver three to five units of heat for every unit of electricity used to power it. An efficient gas boiler, on the other hand, can only produce as much heat as the energy contained in the fuel being burned. A heat pump will have a smaller carbon footprint than a gas boiler even when plugged into an electricity grid.
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On the snowy shore of the northern Swedish city of LuleĂĄ, bathers are lowering themselves into a rectangular hole in the frozen seawater. "It's like a happiness rush afterwards," says Katariina Yliperttula, 44, who is taking a dip before work. While many have their own hobbies that keep them going through the cold dark winter months here – ice swimming, cross-country skiing, walking on the "ice road" out into the archipelago – one thing remains a problem: loneliness. In an attempt to counter that, authorities in LuleĂĄ have launched a campaign to ease that social isolation, ever so slightly, by encouraging people to say hello to one another. The Säg hej! (say hello!) campaign says it aims to create a friendlier city by nudging people towards small but significant social interactions. Adverts are running on buses, and workshops are being held in schools. Recent research found that among 16- to 29-year-olds, 45% of people in LuleĂĄ were experiencing problems as a result of loneliness. Ă…sa Koski, who works for LuleĂĄ municipality, came up with the idea for the campaign. She wants the city, which is undergoing a period of rapid growth as it tries to attract tens of thousands of new people to work in "green" industry ... to not grow more atomised as a result. "We don't just want that LuleĂĄ is going to grow as a city; we want LuleĂĄ to be a pleasant and safe and friendly city," says Koski. Being greeted by strangers makes people feel "more seen and a bit more like you belong", she adds.
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A New York City woman who died of ovarian cancer has raised enough money to pay off millions of dollars in other people's medical debts. In a social media post she arranged to be posted after her death, Casey McIntyre, 38, asked followers to consider donating to her cause. She said she planned to pay off other people's medical debt as a way of celebrating her life. She wrote on social media: "if you're reading this I have passed away." "I loved each and every one of you with my whole heart and I promise you, I knew how deeply I was loved... to celebrate my life, I've arranged to buy up others' medical debt and then destroy the debt." She added that she was lucky to have access to high-quality medical care while battling stage four ovarian cancer and wanted others to have the same. McIntyre and her family ... raised over $170,000 (Ł136,000) for her campaign with non-profit RIP Medical Debt. The organisation pays off a dollar of medical debt for every penny that is donated, meaning McIntyre's campaign has helped erase up to $17m in unpaid medical bills. The organisation says it buys medical debt "in bundled portfolios, millions of dollars at a time at a fraction of the original cost". "On average, whatever you donate has 100x the impact," it says on its website. In the social media post announcing her own death, McIntyre's family included a note that they would have a memorial service ... where they would celebrate her life by anonymously purchasing and forgiving other's medical debt.
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Northwestern University's Prison Education Program welcomed its inaugural graduating class of incarcerated students on Wednesday, marking the first time a top-ranked U.S. university has awarded degrees to students in prison. Evanston, Illinois-based Northwestern ... runs the program in partnership with Oakton College and the Illinois Department of Corrections. It was a moving commencement ceremony for the 16 graduating men and their loved ones at the Stateville correctional facility in Crest Hill. "I have no words for this, (it's) otherworldly. Coming from where I came from, the things that I've been through and to be here is indescribable," said graduate Michael Broadway after the ceremony. Broadway attained his degree despite several setbacks, including battling stage 4 prostate cancer. "I'm just so proud of him," said his mother Elizabeth. "I really am. He looks so good in that gown." Due to ill health, she had not seen Broadway since ... 2005. Professor Jennifer Lackey is the program's founding director. "Twenty years ago, some of these guys were in rival gangs, and here they are swapping poetry with each other and giving critical engagements on sociology assignments," said Lackey. "The love and growth that we see in the community is really unlike anything I've experienced at the on-campus commencements." Around 100 students are enrolled in the Northwestern program across Stateville and the Logan Correctional Center, a women's prison.
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Microplastics – solid plastic particles up to five millimeters in size that are not biodegradable – are pretty much everywhere. They have been detected in over 1,500 different marine animal species. They also find their way into our bodies via the water cycle and the food chain. In fact, the average person consumes up to five grams of microplastics per week. The European Union has now banned intentionally added microplastics. This applies to plastic glitter or polyethylene particles used as abrasives in scrubs, shower gel and toothpaste (these have been banned in the US since the 2015 Microbead-Free Waters Act). Under the terms of the ban, some products, such as plastic glitter found in creams or eye shadow, have been granted a transitional period to give manufacturers a chance to develop new designs. LUSH and The Body Shop are among the companies that have long been offering natural alternatives, using ground nuts, bamboo, sea salt and sugar. Beiersdorf AG ... has not used microbeads for exfoliation purposes since 2015. Instead, it has used, for example, cellulose particles or shredded apricot kernels. Since the end of 2019, all Beiersdorf wash-off products have been free of microplastics. Before the EU ban, Germany stopped providing public funding for artificial turf pitches with granules containing a high proportion of microplastic. As a result, the country already has hundreds of pitches that are filled with cork and sand instead of microplastics.
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Dutch sewage waste is being seen as a reliable heat source for millions of homes that the government wants to be unhooked from the country's gas system by 2050. Lieven de Key, a housing corporation in Amsterdam, is planning what is believed to be the first sewer warmth project that will tap into a main district sewage pipe to warm 1,600 existing social and student homes. "We have a photo of the street covered with snow, and the manhole covers all without snow," says Jeroen Rademaker, the project leader. "Even when there's snow in the winter, the sewer is warm. Warm sewage water flows 24 hours a day and we should capture it. This can happen wherever there is a big sewage pipe." "The warmth comes from showers, the toilet, wastewater from washing, from the dishwasher, from the washing machine," says Postuma. "Together it all gives, throughout the year, a temperature between 15 and 18 degrees. And we are going to make a bypass around the main sewer, put a heat exchanger around it and bring it to the houses in insulated pipes. We place it in an electric heat pump, and the water is heated up to 60 or 70C – medium temperature." The heat exchanger transfers that source heat from the drain to a working fluid that can be transported to the buildings without needing to circulate the actual sewage waste. Then the blocks' heat pumps, fired by solar energy, can amplify that heat in the opposite way to the workings of a refrigerator.
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The power's out. But on a street in India, there's a cash machine still happily dispensing banknotes. Thanks, in part, to burnt cotton. For this cash machine has a backup battery inside it – a battery that contains carbon from carefully combusted cotton. "The exact process is secret," says Inketsu Okina, chief intelligence officer at PJP Eye, the Japanese firm that made the battery. "The temperature is secret and atmosphere is secret. Pressure is secret," he continues. Okina does say that a high temperature is required, above 3,000C (5,432F). And that 1kg (2.2lbs) of cotton yields 200g (7oz) of carbon – with just 2g (0.07oz) needed for each battery cell. PJP Eye also touts the possibility of improving battery performance as well as making batteries greener. "Our carbon has a bigger surface area than graphite," says Okina, describing how the chemistry of the anode in their Cambrian single carbon battery allows for a battery that charges very quickly, up to 10 times faster than existing lithium ion batteries, he claims. The battery's cathode is made from a "base metal" oxide. Although Okina won't disclose exactly which one, these metals include copper, lead, nickel and zinc. The company claims to be working on a dual carbon electrode battery, where both electrodes are made from plant-based carbon. Other researchers are looking at using materials as diverse as corn waste and melon seed shells to generate new types of electrodes for use in batteries.
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Duberney López Martinéz was only 13 when he joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2003. Today, Duberney, 33, lives with his wife and young son after spending more than a decade fighting in the FARC 32nd Front and two years in jail. As part of his reintegration into society ... Duberney got involved in the ecological restoration of the Colombian Amazon. He and another 23 ex-FARC members are promoting the ecological restoration of the Colombian Amazon. The Communitarian Multiactive Cooperative of the Common (Comuccom) ... aims to plant and care for 1 million native trees in order to counteract deforestation from illegal gold mining, cattle ranching, coca-growing and illegal logging. Despite the peace agreement, the conflict is still present in daily lives and memories, according to Kristina Lyons, professor of anthropology ... who has been working in the region. "In Putumayo, armed conflict and antidrug policies heavily impacted bonds among people, communities and their relations with the region's ecosystems," Lyons [said]. "The ecological restoration of the Amazon has deep significance for healing relations between humans ruptured by the conflict and among people and their territories. It can be understood as a form of reparation for war crimes and other kinds of violence in the wake of the peace agreements." "To me, restoring the Amazon is the same process needed for healing the heart of a person," [said Aroca Sanchez with Comuccom].
Note: Read how tourists in Colombia can now take jungle hikes with ex-FARC guerilla guides. Explore more positive stories like this about healing the war machine.
Tim Phillips, a veteran conflict-resolution expert, helped negotiate some of the most fraught conflicts in modern history – ceasefires of religious clashes in Northern Ireland and the establishment of what became South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission after apartheid. Defusing an escalating situation ... first requires releasing a brain hijacked by defensive emotion. Phillips says it means saying to your opponent, for example: "I understand how important this is to you; I understand this is core to your identity and your community, and I respect your sacred values." It means reflecting your opponent's humanity back to them. A similar approach, he says, can help reduce toxic polarization. It's effective because in the heat of argument, people tend to demonize one another; counteracting that can neutralize assumptions of negative intent. Phillips says he's seen people emotionally disarm the opposition in a disagreement simply by recognizing their humanity. It can bring together fierce adversaries, and change history. Shirley Chisholm, the first Black congresswoman in the U.S., was battling for the Democratic presidential nomination with political rival ... George Wallace, a fierce segregationist. After he was shot in an attempted assassination, Chisholm visited him in the hospital and prayed at his bedside. "Wallace's daughter later said that that gesture of compassion completely changed her father," Phillips says. Wallace reportedly wept openly, and shifted his stance on racial segregation.
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[Loretta] Ross has worked at the forefront of the movement for reproductive justice. But recently she has become better known for championing "call-in culture," a philosophy that approaches someone's wrongdoing with accountability and, most importantly, love. In the summer of 2020 ... I felt myself crumbling. I called out snide comments by alumni of my college about Black Lives Matter protests, demanded people boycott the college newspaper ... and used Twitter to call out the behavior of fellow students. Each tactic left no room for discussion. Calling in, by contrast, asks us to always be the bigger person, even in the most hateful and painful situations. I ask Ross: Whose well-being are we prioritizing here? And why isn't it our own? Ross tells me about another Black woman who asked the same question. "I'm confused," Ross recalls the woman saying. "I don't want to fall into the stereotype of the angry Black woman. But I feel like if I embrace the calling-in strategies you're talking about, then I'm ... giving a pass to all this injustice. What should I do?" Ross responds with a question of her own: "Well, who are you inside? Go deep inside and find out who you are. What's the emotion that you feel is true to you?" "Inside, I feel like I'm filled with love," the woman replies. "Then, why aren't you leading with your authentic self?" Ross asks her. Accountability and love are not mutually exclusive, Ross explains.
Note: Smith College Professor and civil rights activist Loretta Ross worked with Ku Klux Klan members and practiced restorative justice with incarcerated men convicted or raping and murdering women. Watch Loretta Ross's powerful Ted Talk on simple tools to help shift our culture from fighting each other to working together in the face of polarizing social issues. Explore more positive stories about healing social division and polarization.
As the Monitor's chief culture writer, Stephen Humphries stays open to a sprawling landscape of story ideas. Lately that has meant exploring empathy gaps – situations where, in some cases, groups hail the misfortune and losses of those whom they view as their ideological foes. No-tolerance side-taking has emerged over everything from the Mideast conflict to stances on policing or vaccines. That got Stephen talking to a solution-seeker on the matter of fraying human connections: Alexandra Hudson, author of "The Soul of Civility." "I am hopeful," she says, "because I've spoken to thousands of people who are working to be part of the solutions in their every day." Through the power of connection, she says, "we can reclaim the soul of civility and heal our broken world." As these traditional touchstones of meaning in life, family, faith, friendship, community, have been on the [decline] in recent decades, more and more people have found their ultimate meaning in public life, in political issues. Now it's easy for people to feel like their very identity is being assaulted because of that disagreement, because their identity has been misplaced in a public and political issue. Democracy depends on reasonable, deliberative discourse and conversation and debate. And if people are constantly being thrown into fight or flight mode, we're not doing our public issues well, we're not doing democracy well. We're not doing life together very well. We live in this era of a strange perfectionism. We take one aspect of who a person is and extrapolate that: "OK, that's all I need to know about who you are and what you stand for." But that's so reductive and it's degrading to the dignity of the human person. Unbundling people is seeing the part in light of the whole, seeing someone's mistakes even in light of the dignity and an irreducible worth they have as human beings.
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They are both bereaved fathers, of young daughters. Somehow, against the odds, both have resisted the urge for vengeance. Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, and Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, were once united by their anger and grief. Elhanan lost his 14-year-old daughter Smadar when she was killed in a Palestinian suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 1997. Aramin's daughter Abir was 10 when she was shot in the head and killed in 2007 by a bullet fired by an Israeli soldier as she stood outside her school with some classmates. Now they are close friends, refer to one another as "my brother" and share the belief that no amount of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians will lead to peace, just more killing in a "circle of blood." With Israel embroiled in a war with Hamas ... "We have the moral authority to tell people this is not the way," said Elhanan, 74, a former solider in the Israeli army whose father was an Auschwitz survivor. Elhanan has said he still struggles to explain his conversion to a "peace warrior." It coincided with a meeting of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families he was invited to by Yitzhak Frankenthal, one of the co-founders of the Parents Circle. "I saw an amazing spectacle. Something completely new to me," Elhanan said. "I saw Arabs getting off the buses, bereaved Palestinian families: men, women and children, coming towards me, greeting me for peace, hugging me and crying with me. ... From that day on ... I got a reason to get out of bed in the morning." For Aramin, the journey to nonviolence began as he was being beaten by Israeli prison guards. One day ... he was stripped naked and beaten until he could hardly stand. "As I was being beaten, I remembered a movie I'd seen the year before about the Holocaust. At the time I'd been happy that Hitler had killed 6 million Jews," Aramin has previously recalled. "But some minutes into the movie, I found myself crying and feeling angry that the Jews were being herded into gas chambers without fighting back," he said. "It was the first time I felt empathy."
Note: War destroys, yet these powerful real-life stories show that we can heal, reimagine better alternatives, and plant the seeds of a global shift in consciousness to transform our world.
The influential idea that in the past men were hunters and women were not isn't supported by the available evidence. Women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons. This advantage bears on questions about hunting because a prominent hypothesis contends that early humans are thought to have pursued prey on foot over long distances until the animals were exhausted. Furthermore, the fossil and archaeological records, as well as ethnographic studies of modern-day hunter-gatherers, indicate that women have a long history of hunting game. Females are ... dominating ultraendurance events such as the more than 260-mile Montane Spine foot race through England and Scotland, the 21-mile swim across the English Channel and the 4,300-mile Trans Am cycling race. In 2018 English runner Sophie Power ran the 105-mile Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc race in the Alps while still breastfeeding her three-month-old at rest stations. Observations of recent and contemporary foraging societies provide direct evidence of women participating in hunting. The most cited examples come from the Agta people of the Philippines. Agta women hunt while menstruating, pregnant and breastfeeding, and they have the same hunting success as Agta men. They are hardly alone. A recent study of ethnographic data spanning the past 100 years ... found that women from a wide range of cultures hunt animals for food.
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ManifestWorks [is] a unique program that guides people from homelessness, incarceration and foster care directly into entry-level jobs in film and TV. "When I started the ManifestWorks program, it was more than just learning the steps. It was really therapeutic for me," says Leslie. "It was uplifting during a time when I was really not in a good place." By the third week of classes, Leslie had secured her first gig as a production assistant. The same person who hired her brought her back for the next two years and seeded additional relationships that led to more work. Today, Leslie works in a sound department as a union member, has consistent work at a living wage and has been able to upgrade both her housing and her car. The nonprofit ManifestWorks has more than 270 alumni currently working in the film industry, and purposely recruits its students from populations that face barriers to success. According to ManifestWorks, 25 percent of foster care youth end up incarcerated within two years of turning 18, and unemployment impacts the formerly incarcerated at a rate 12 times higher than the national average. Some 71 percent of ManifestWorks' trainees are on welfare when they start the program – after a year, that number drops to seven percent on average. And 92 percent of ManifestWorks alumni are employed full time with an average annual income of $62,000, up from the average of $12,500 when trainees first start.
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While the sad reality of violence and division dominates the media, countless grassroots organizations are working tirelessly to bring peace and reconciliation to the Israel-Palestine conflict. As the region continues to be ravaged by violence, Standing Together, Israel's largest Arab-Jewish grassroots organization, brings together Jewish and Palestinian volunteers. They labor relentlessly to assist victims of continuous violence while also campaigning for peace, equality, social justice, and climate justice. Their message is clear: the future they envision is one of peace, Israeli and Palestinian independence, full equality, and environmental justice. The Parents Circle – Families Forum, which includes over 600 families who have lost loved ones in the conflict, is a symbol of reconciliation. This joint Israeli-Palestinian organization encourages conversation and reconciliation through education, public gatherings, and media participation, presenting a ray of hope for a future of coexistence. Integrated schools in Israel, where Jewish and Palestinian children attend classes together, serve as an example of a more inclusive future. Hand in Hand promotes understanding by bringing parents together for debate and shared study of Hebrew and Arabic. They are sowing seeds of oneness. Jerusalem Peacebuilders brings together Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans with the goal of developing tomorrow's leaders. Their work highlights the futility of violent war and the critical need for nonviolence.
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Someday soon, in addition to prescribing medication or therapy, doctors may begin directing patients to visit a museum or join a choir. The growing practice of "social prescribing" is a way for healthcare providers to address patients' health and wellbeing by connecting them to a range of nonclinical services, often taking the form of community arts and cultural activities. Attention on the healing power of the arts grew during the COVID-19 pandemic. A UK study found that during lockdown in 2020, individuals who spent 30 minutes per day on arts activities had lower rates of depression and anxiety, as well as greater life satisfaction. The first social prescribing pilots in the United States are kicking off on the heels of research demonstrating the long-term health benefits of arts engagement. Adolescents who regularly engage in arts activities have lower odds of behavioral problems, criminalized behaviors, and substance use and higher odds of maintaining strong social support networks. Creatively engaged older adults have 20% lower odds of depression and are more likely to have better memory, life satisfaction, and overall aging experiences. One particularly striking study found that older adults with frequent cultural engagement are less likely to use inpatient healthcare or nursing home stays. In a study of people experiencing chronic pain, doing monthly arts activities is associated with better physical wellbeing, specifically less difficulty with everyday activities.
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A growing women-led restorative justice system ... operates within the territory of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), also known as Rojava, a revolutionary social experiment involving more than 4.5 million people. The system features a network, autonomous from the AANES, of more than 60 Mala Jin, or "women's houses," which allow people to solve disputes at the community level, instead of through courts or police, by offering reconciliation and mediation processes for domestic and family situations. Activist and independent researcher Clara Moore ... recently returned from spending two years in the region, working at both the Rojava Information Center and at Mala Jin. "Essentially, they're trying to build a system around the political philosophy of Democratic Confederalism, which was initially inspired by the ideas of [the American intellectual] Murray Bookchin and theorized by [Kurdish leader] Abdullah Ă–calan from prison in Turkey," [said Moore]. "It's based on ideas of pluralism, direct democracy, decentralization, gender equality and self-defense. In practice, this means that all communities have the ability and right to defend themselves and provide for their own needs. The idea of the justice system in Rojava, in North and East Syria in general, is that it's possible to solve a dispute without going to court. There are laws in Rojava and courts. Ideally, those only become relevant when people can't come to a resolution together outside of court."
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Economists love things they can measure objectively, like the number of deaths in a village or the number of dollars in an account. So over the past century, they've focused on measuring health and wealth. The best policy programs for society are deemed to be the ones that save the most lives, say, or increase gross domestic product (GDP) by the widest margin. And there's a good rationale for using a metric like GDP as a shorthand for well-being: There is a very high correlation between a nation's GDP per capita and its self-reported life satisfaction. But a strong predictor is not a perfect predictor. As we've gathered more data on the happiness of different populations, it's become clear that increasing wealth and health do not always go hand in hand with increasing happiness. By the economists' objective measures, people in rich countries like the US should be doing great – and yet Americans are only becoming more miserable. A growing chorus of experts argues that helping people is ultimately about making them happier – not just wealthier or healthier – and the best way to find out how happy people are is to just ask them directly. It's a revolution in thinking that's gathering force in policy and charity circles alike, and it's starting to upend conventional wisdom about the best ways to do good. Part of the virtue of the subjective approach is that people can bring whatever matters to them into their assessments. So, how much meaning you have in your life could be an input into that.
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Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.