ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the social sciences and human geography to the lifestyle and policy changes that will be essential to secure sustainable welfare in the future. The international agencies and institutions committed to a sustainable welfare agenda are likely to remain relatively powerless, and very little pressure will be applied on national governments to cooperate in promoting this agenda, unless and until their electorates come to perceive that as being in their own interests. Alternative hedonist frameworks of thinking about the good life can alter conceptions of self-interest among affluent consumers and thus help to set off this relay of political pressures for a fairer global distribution of resources and more sustainable economic order. As academics people's can elaborate upon the essential preconditions of globally sustainable welfare: greater equality, dramatic reductions in work and productivity, the formation of cultures in which money and material acquisition have become subordinate to other objectives and measures of prosperity, and so forth.
