Includes bibliographical references and index.

Summary and Guide -- Introduction: Means and ends -- Part I: Valuing and evaluating. Prologue ; The notion of well-being ; Ordering social states ; Why measure well-being? ; Constituents and determinants of well-being -- Part II: Measuring current well-being. Prologue ; Theory ; Current quality of life in poor countries -- Part III: Measuring well-being over time. Prologue ; Intergenerational well-being ; Intergenerational conflicts ; Economic institutions and the natural environment ; Valuing goods ; Wealth and well-being -- Part IV: Evaluating policies in imperfect economies. Prologue ; Policy reforms ; Discounting future consumption ; Institutional responses to policy change -- Part V: Valuing potential lives. Prologue ; Some views ; Classical utilitarianism and the genesis problem ; Numbers and well-being under classical utilitarianism ; Actual vs. potential lives ; Generation-relative utilitarianism -- Appendix. Economists' convexities ; Convex utopias ; Valuation and evaluation in imperfect economies. This work concerns measurement of the quality of life, and focuses on the ways in which this is now known to be tied to the natural environment.