Long was committed to a depiction of Jamaica as a successful ‘commercial society’ where white people could live comfortably on the labour of the enslaved. He mapped the island for his readers in such a way as to reassure them that the boundaries between the free and the unfree were secure. His picture provided a full account of island defences, against both external and internal enemies. He drew on his favourite English poets and writers to inspire poetic renditions of the beauties of this tropical paradise in which art and nature combined their glories. The island’s fecundity was there to be harnessed for profit. His racialized cartography utilized maps, engravings, tables and listings of commodities to illustrate boundless potential. Nature could be improved, tamed and catalogued, as people were. Alarming tales of colonists’ mortality could be challenged, mosquitoes kept at bay. White settlers could live a healthy life if only they would embrace moderation in all things. As an Enlightenment man and an enthusiastic reader of natural histories, Long was keen to represent the island as en route to a more civilized and ordered state, with more roads, more maps, more barracks, more settlements. But, he had to admit, it was a society sorely in need of more public virtue.

This chapter introduces the basics of the economic approach to understanding decision-making. This is done using examples drawn from consumer decision-making in the context of healthcare. Topics include how to think about preferences, different types of costs, optimization, and the importance of perceptions. The end of chapter supplement discusses how to use price indexes.

This chapter focuses in on how individuals invest in or harm their health. This is done using the concept of the health production function. Various inputs to the function such as medical care, illness and injury, lifestyle choices, age, genetics, and environmental factors are discussed along with their interactions with each other. Key health economics concepts such as the flat of the curve, the tradeoff between health and utility, and the role of technological innovation in medical care effectiveness are discussed, as well as the key economic concept of the margin. The end of chapter supplement introduces the concept of standardized units for measuring effectiveness of care.

Why people do or do not change their beliefs has been a long-standing puzzle. Sometimes people hold onto false beliefs despite ample contradictory evidence; sometimes they change their beliefs without sufficient reason. Here, I propose that the utility of a belief is derived from the potential outcomes of holding it. Outcomes can be internal (e.g., positive/negative feelings) or external (e.g., material gain/loss), and only some are dependent on belief accuracy. Belief change can then be understood as an economic transaction, in which the multidimensional utility of the old belief is compared against that of the new belief. Change will occur when potential outcomes alter across attributes, for example due to changing environments, or when certain outcomes are made more or less salient.

How do people judge the sizes of things? What determines people’s evaluations of quantities such as prices or wages? People’s judgements and evaluations are typically relative; the same quantity will be judged or evaluated differently when it appears in different comparison samples. This chapter describes a simple psychological account – the Decision by Sampling model – of how sample-based judgements and evaluations are made. According to the model, what matters is the relative ranked position of an item within a comparison sample. For example, an income of $50,000 a year will be evaluated more favourably within a context of four lower and two higher incomes than in relation to one higher and five lower incomes. According to Decision by Sampling, estimates of the relative ranked position of items within comparison contexts are made by simple sampling and ordinal comparison processes. These estimates are assumed to underpin choice and valuation. The chapter reviews the Decision by Sampling model, relates it to other models such as Adaptation Level Theory and Range Frequency Theory, and shows how it can explain the shape of utility curves and probability weighting functions. The relation of coding efficiency to rank-based models is also discussed.

Mainstream economics portrays individual agents as choosing rationally. Many of its generalizations concerning how people actually choose are also claims about how agents ought rationally to choose. Chapter 1 focuses on the conception of rationality that is incorporated in contemporary economics and is central to it. It begins with the concept of preferences, which is the central concept in mainstream economics, and with the theory of rationality that focuses on preferences. The fact that a normative theory lies at the foundation of economics raises philosophical questions. What are requirements of rationality doing in what purports to be a scientific theory of economic phenomena? After presenting the axioms of ordinal utility theory, it offers an account of preferences, a critique of revealed preference theory, and an introduction to expected utility theory. It argues that if one wants to understand economics, the modeling of rationality is the place to begin.

Academics and policy makers in several countries have been advocating for measures of utility and happiness to replace income as indicators of development, and the paternalism that has dominated behavioural public policy to date is justified in that people often fail to choose in accordance with their own well-being. Yet the notion of utility has a somewhat confused history, meaning different things to different people at different times. Hume, for instance, aligned utility with public usefulness, Bentham with pleasure and pain, and Mill and modern welfare economists with pretty much anything. A possible reason why there are many different meanings attached to the concept of utility is because many people, much of the time, are not driven to maximise utility at all. That is, the pursuit of utility does not drive desires, but rather desires are antecedent. Moreover, desires are multifarious and vary across people. The policy maker’s role over the private realm of individual decision-making should not therefore be to strive to maximise utility, but rather to put in place conditions that facilitate people in the pursuit of their own conception of a desired life.

Platonic love has often been attacked – notably by Vlastos – as fundamentally selfish. The basis of this argument rests on the claim that love for Plato is little more than a form of utility in which the beloved is exploited to enable the philosopher’s ascent and is simply the object of love to the extent to which he exhibits desirable qualities and not as an individual. This reading ignores the elements of erotic reciprocity found in both the Symposium and Phaedrus, in which the beloved is not merely a passive object, but rather an active participant with the lover in a mutually beneficial project defined by shared values, with both parties attempting to become as godlike as possible. The erastes is shown to care genuinely for the eromenos in the course of the philosophical pedagogy which Plato advocates. In the Phaedrus, the tripartition of the soul seems to be a further move towards non-individuality and the significance of the beloved’s individuality is regularly downplayed. Yet the abstraction inherent in Platonic love is revealed to be both beneficial as a mechanism for avoiding the negative aspects of interpersonal love, as well as a natural feature of the human condition: the striving after Beauty.

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This chapter presents Grotius’ ars politica that deals with what is useful in practice, different from the ars iuris that deals with issues of justice.Philosophically eclectic, descriptive and non-perfectionist, Grotius’ ars politica is directed at understanding and guiding the organisation of power (potestas) and interest (utile) in human live, on two levels: a. the metalevel of theoretical discussion comparing and integrating different approaches to the topic, and b. the practical level of providing answers to political challenges. As agency is central, so is autonomy, and sovereignty.

The utility of a norm is central to its adoption and this utility is generative of a norm’s adherents: the ‘norm circle’. Regional organisations provide excellent arenas to witness normative contestation between norm circles, as well as to understand how a ‘successful’ norm is selected. Within a regional organisation, specific domain rules apply, and these provide the criteria for the successful passage of a normative proposal. The three broad criteria suggested are the control of the initiative, the mastery of existing shared norms, and ‘metis’, the ability to identify opportunities for influence and expand the norm circle. The chapter ends with a review of suitable cases in the OAU/AU and ASEAN.

This chapter reviews the model set out in the theoretical framework to examine the degree of congruence the six cases had with the relevant factors of controlling the initiative, the mastery of shared norms, and opportunities for influence, particularly the ability to bring other states into the favoured norm circle. It also examines the model’s inferences against the observed outcomes to examine the degree of significance each factor had in the respective regional organisation.