Open Access

In der Schriftenreihe „Voneinander Lehren lernen“, die vom LearningCenter der Hochschule Osnabrück herausgegeben wird, werden anwendungsbezogene Beiträge zur Qualitätsentwicklung in Studium und Lehre publiziert. Die Schriftenreihe ist an das hochschuldidaktische Konzept des „Scholarship of Teaching and Learning“ angelehnt. Demnach soll sie insbesondere den Fachlehrenden aller Studiengänge als Plattform dienen, um ihre eigenen Erfahrungen, Ideen und Konzepte zur Lehr- und Studiengangentwicklung systematisch zu reflektieren und entsprechende Erkenntnisse für andere nutzbar zu machen. Ziel ist es, den Diskurs über hochschuldidaktische Themen in die Fächer zu tragen und so nachhaltig zu einer hohen Qualität der Lehr-Lernprozesse in den Studiengängen beizutragen. Ergänzt werden die Texte der Fachlehrenden um Beiträge von Mitarbeiter*innen der im Bereich Studium und Lehre tätigen Organisationseinheiten. Die Schriftenreihe ist eng an das Lehrkolleg der Hochschule Osnabrück gekoppelt. Dabei handelt es sich um ein Angebotsformat des LearningCenters, in dem Professor*innen und Lehrkräfte für besondere Aufgaben die Möglichkeit haben, unter hochschuldidaktischer Begleitung innovative Lehrentwicklungsprojekte in ihren eigenen Lehrveranstaltungen und Modulen umzusetzen. Der erste Band der Schriftenreihe enthält Beiträge von Teilnehmer*innen des Lehrkollegs 2018, in dem verschiedene Entwicklungsprojekte zur Förderung von Kompetenzen für selbstreguliertes Lernen durchgeführt wurden.

Despite decades of empirical happiness research, there is still little evidence for the positive effect of economic growth on life satisfaction. This poses a major challenge to welfare economic theory and to normative conceptions of socio-economic development. This book endeavours to explain these findings and to make sense of their ethical implications. While most of the existing literature on empirical happiness research is ultimately interested in understanding how to improve human lives and societal development, the ethical backdrop against which these findings are evaluated is rarely made explicit. In contrast to this, Professor Hirata focuses on the role happiness should play in an ethically founded conception of good development. Taking a development ethics perspective, this book proposes a nuanced conception of happiness that includes both its affective and its normative dimensions and embeds this in a comprehensive conception of good development. The argument is that happiness should not be regarded as the only thing that determines a good life and that good development cannot sensibly be thought of as a matter of maximizing happiness. Happiness should rather be seen as an important indicator for the presence or absence of those concerns that really matter to people: the reasons that give rise to happiness. This book should be of interest to students and researchers of economics, psychology and development studies.

In 1930 Keynes famously predicted that 100 years later-i.e. in 2030-the “economic problem” would be solved and we would be living in an “age of leisure and of abundance” working only 3 h a day. In the same text, Keynes stated that there are absolute and relative needs (“in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows”), but he thought that relative needs are of minor importance. Richard Easterlin’s work, on the other hand, suggests that relative needs are pervasive and that wellbeing depends much more on one’s relative income than Keynes once thought. It will be argued in this text that Richard Easterlin’s findings, in spite of proving Keynes off the mark in his understatement of relative needs, strengthens the case for working time reductions: the larger the proportion of goods subject to the relative-income effect, the greater are the benefits of working fewer hours. Perhaps the main explanation for why we are still sticking to the 40-h work-week is that the Easterlin paradox has not been widely understood yet.