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The method and practice of placing monetary values on environmental goods and services for which a conventional market price is otherwise unobservable is one of the most fertile areas of research in the field of natural resource and environmental economics. Initially motivated by the need to include environmental values in benefit–cost analysis, practitioners of nonmarket valuation have since found further motivation in national account augmentation and environmental damage litigation. Despite hundreds of applications and many decades of refinement, shortcomings in all of the techniques remain, and no single technique is considered superior to the others in all respects. Thus, techniques that expand the suite of options available to the non-market valuation practitioner have the potential to represent a genuine contribution to the field. One technique to recently emerge from the economics of happiness literature is the “experienced preference method” or “life satisfaction approach.” Simply, this approach entails the inclusion of non-market goods as explanatory variables within micro-econometric functions of life satisfaction along with income and other covariates. The estimated coefficient for the nonmarket good yields, first, a direct valuation in terms of life satisfaction and, second, when compared to the estimated coefficient for income, the implicit willingness to pay for the non-market good in monetary terms. The life satisfaction approach offers several advantages over more conventional non-market valuation techniques. For example, the approach does not ask individuals to directly value the non-market good in question, as is the case in contingent valuation. Nor does it ask individuals to make explicit trade-offs between market and non-market goods, as is the case in discrete choice modeling. The life satisfaction approach nonetheless has some potential limitations. Crucially, self-reported life satisfaction must be regarded as a good proxy for an individual’s utility. Furthermore, in order to yield reliable non-market valuation estimates, self-reported life satisfaction measures must: (1) contain information on respondents’ global evaluation of their life; (2) reflect not only stable inner states of respondents, but also current affects; (3) refer to respondents’ present life; and (4) be comparable across groups of individuals under different circumstances. Despite these conditions, there is growing evidence to support the suitability of individual’s responses to life satisfaction questions for non-market valuation. Applications of the life satisfaction approach to the valuation of environmental goods and services to date include the valuation of air quality, airport noise, green space, scenic amenity, floods, and drought.

Organizational happiness is an intuitively attractive idea, notwithstanding the difficulty of defining happiness. A preference for unhappiness rather than happiness in an organization would be out of tune with community expectations in most societies, as would an organization that promoted unhappiness. Some argue that organizational happiness is a misconception, that happiness is a personality trait and organizations cannot have personality. Others suggest that organizational happiness is derived from, or at least dependent on, the happiness of the individuals in the organization. A third approach involves virtue ethics, linking organizational happiness to virtuous organizations. Some discussion of the nature of happiness is needed before consideration of these three approaches to the concept of organizational happiness. If one leaves aside the notion of happiness as a psychological state, there remain three main views as to the nature of happiness: one based on a hedonistic view, which grounds happiness in pleasure, one based on the extent to which desire is satisfied, and one where happiness is linked to a life of virtuous activity and the fulfillment of human potential. Some would see no distinction between all three senses of happiness and what is called well-being. Whether or not organizations can experience happiness is to some extent determined by whether happiness is considered subjective well-being, fulfilled desire, or virtue and to some extent by one’s view of the moral nature of corporations. There are dangers in the unfettered pursuit of happiness. Empirical research is impacted by questions of definition, by changes over time for both individuals and society, and by the difficulty that arises from reliance on self-reported data. Recent decades have seen the publication of quantitative assessments of organizational happiness, despite the difficulty of constructing scales and manipulating data, and the problems of effectively taking into account cultural, organizational, and individual differences in concepts of happiness. Potential research questions fall into two groups, those that seek a better understanding of what happiness is and those that seek to collect data about happiness in pursuit of answers to questions about the benefits of happiness.

Societies around the world are a tapestry of cultural diversity weaved in globalization to narrate the inherent value of pluralism as a panacea for good mental health, happiness, and the good life. The scientific construction of culture is also a mosaic of ethnic and racial proxies; national worldviews such as individualism and collectivism; and construals of the self as independent and interdependent. Similarly, the culture of psychological health has been informed by the ethnocentric Western paradigm of clinical psychology looking at the “dark” psychopathological side of life and positive psychology focusing on the hedonic and eudaimonic traditions of well-being. Nevertheless, cultural pluralism (multiculturalism) and globalization have contributed to unveiling the limits of the Western paradigm in which both clinical psychology and positive psychology have been embedded and the imperative for a paradigm shift beyond the Western paradigm. The revisioning of clinical psychology as cultural clinical psychology and positive psychology as cultural positive psychology has contributed to the emergence of the more inclusive cultural psychological health perspective. Cultural psychological health considers the culture and psychological health interface to bring light on an integrated approach that narrates how mental health problems are conceptualized, expressed, and ameliorated culturally and how positive mental health is understood, desired, pursued, and promoted culturally. In addition to inclusivity, cultural psychological health pursues scientific inquiry and knowledge through both quantitative and qualitative methodologies and invokes a science and practice informed by the ethical imperatives of cultural competence and cultural humility with social responsiveness to local and global suffering, happiness, and flourishing.

Happiness has become an important concept in economics as a target for government policy at the national level. This is mirrored in an increasing understanding of the microeconomic effects of increased happiness. While correlational studies have for many years documented a relationship between individual-level happiness and productivity, more recent work provides causal evidence that a positive shock to happiness can boost productivity significantly. These studies include three strands of research. The first provides a number of longitudinal surveys that have generated evidence linking happiness to productivity but run the risk of confounding happiness with other related variables that may be driving the relationship. The second includes laboratory experiments that simulate a workplace under tightly controlled conditions, and this strand has established a clear relationship between positive happiness shocks and rises in productivity. The third involves examining experimental field data, which sacrifices the control of laboratory experiments but offers greater realism. However, there is still work to be done generalizing these findings to more complex work environments, especially those that involve cooperative and team-based tasks where increases in happiness may have other consequences.

Utilitarianism is inextricably linked to international ethics. The roots of the principle of utility can be traced to the 18th and 19th centuries, when it was employed by thinkers such as David Hume. However, Jeremy Bentham first formulated utilitarianism in detail and carefully studied its implications. According to Bentham, happiness is a condition in which an individual enjoys more pleasure than pain. Because utilitarianism is focused on the welfare of the individual, state boundaries are of little consequence. Its reach is inherently global. There are different varieties of utilitarianism. What sets them apart from other ethical theories is their stipulation that whatever is of value should be maximized for all and whatever of disvalue should be minimized for all. For Bentham, pleasure is the ultimate value. Later, John Stuart Mill distinguished between higher and lower pleasures and argued that higher pleasures should be given greater weight. In the 20th century, authors such as R. M. Hare determined that maximal satisfaction of preferences is the value to be sought. The utilitarian emphasis on maximization of value and its choice of values have generated much criticism from those who espoused human rights theories, such as John Rawls and those influenced by his work. At present, the scholarly literature dealing with issues related to international ethics mostly comes from those who are committed to human rights theory or who are committed to equality of outcomes for human beings.

Daisaku Ikeda (b. 1928), Josei Toda (1900–1958), and Tsunesaburo Makiguchi (1871–1944) are Japanese educators, Buddhist activists, and the progenitors of the global Soka movement for peace, culture, and education. As such, their perspectives and practices shape curriculum in multilingual, multicultural, and multiracial contexts around the world. While each has established his own unique ideas and contributions to curriculum, together they share important commitments and perspectives, introduced by Makiguchi and developed successively by Toda and Ikeda, that have had a remarkable impact on human being and becoming. Arguably the most important among these is the principle of value creation, or “sōka,” and its implications for value-creating approaches to education and the actualization of a meaningful, contributive, and genuinely happy life. Makiguchi was an elementary school teacher and principal who introduced his theory of value and value-creating pedagogy in the 1930 work Sōka kyōikugaku taikei, or The System of Value-Creating Pedagogy. Drawing on decades of his own classroom practice, Makiguchi distinguished truth, or facticity, from value, seeking to clarify the psychological processes of cognition and evaluation. While objective truth matters, he argued, it is not in and of itself the source of value or meaning in our lives. Rather, value is derived from the subjective and contingent meaning we create from that truth. Thus, Makiguchi maintained that creating value in terms of beauty, gain, and good—that is, value that serves oneself and others—is the means of cultivating happiness. Toda was a close colleague of Makiguchi and applied value-creating approaches to great success in his Jishu Gakkan, a tutorial school he founded. If Makiguchi introduced and practiced value-creating approaches at an individual level, and Toda applied them institution-wide, then Ikeda, who was Toda’s direct disciple, must be recognized for distilling them into their crystalline essence, expanding this essence globally, and memorializing it as the foundational ethos and namesake of the Soka schools and universities he founded. Moreover, whereas Makiguchi theorized value creation as a pedagogical concept and, with Toda, broadened it to include the realm of Buddhist humanism, Ikeda has continued and expanded upon these, also characterizing value creation as an ontological orientation for all people in all aspects of life, from children to senior citizens and from civil society to professionals and activists in areas ranging from peace, culture, and human rights to biospheric sustainability and social movements. In all this, value creation and value-creating approaches constitute a curriculum of content, context, engagement, agency, hope, and becoming for oneself and others.

The scientific landscape of wellbeing and mental wellness has developed significantly through interdisciplinary cross-pollination by researchers in molecular genetics, neuroscience, sociology, economics, including traditional and complementary medicine. The public health challenge lies in using this diverse body of scientific evidence to reframe wellbeing and mental wellness within a 21st-century global public health framework that incorporates evidence-based modalities alongside Western biomedical practice. Evidence on modalities, case studies, policy examples, and emerging directions in societal objectives in wellbeing and mental wellness are discussed in the context of a way forward that focuses on individual self-care, development of resilience, lifespan pathways for wellbeing, and a different economic calculus in framing public health priorities and policies.