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Mark Pack

The Challenge of Affluence

By Mark Pack | Tue 1st February 2011 - 10:25 am

Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence starts with certainty and ends with doubt. “Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines well-being”, states Offer at the start of Chapter 1. That theme runs through the book to his conclusion, but the lessons he draws from it are not as simple or confidently stated: “Well-being is more than having more. It is a balance between our own needs, and those of others, on whose goodwill and approbation our own well-being depends … I present these findings in the hope that they will make our choices appear not simpler and easier, but as …

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