Introduction

Summary

In March 1980, slightly over 42 years before I found myself writing this Introduction – one of the last tasks in preparing this book – I started working as Director of Essential Needs in COPLAMAR, an agency attached to the President’s Office in Mexico and responsible for improving the living conditions in the country’s poor areas and among groups designated as marginalised. My role was to coordinate a research team of around 20 professionals working on the unsatisfaction of essential needs in Mexico. This team was the largest part of the agency’s General Direction of Socioeconomic Studies. I started studying poverty from the standpoint of unsatisfied needs, which has been the central element in my conception of poverty since that time. COPLAMAR was shut down in December 1982 with the arrival of a new federal government; however, understanding and fighting poverty has been my vocation and main occupation ever since. Although from the beginning of this century I have broadened my look and started aiming at the more ambitious purpose of human flourishing (to which I added, in the second decade of this century, the fashionable topic of well-being (WB), including subjective WB, poverty remains among my core tasks. I am aware that achieving human flourishing and generalised WB is impossible, or is only possible for a reduced elite, if poverty is not overcome first.

I have worked with international organisations (particularly UNDP and CROP); in Mexican left-wing political parties; in the Mexican Congress; in the Mexico City government; as a journalist in the critical national newspaper La Jornada, writing a weekly column called Moral Economy since 1995; and primarily in the academic world as a full-time researcher and Professor at El Colegio de México – a postgraduate and research institution devoted to the social sciences and the humanities in Mexico City – since 1992, and also as a visiting professor at the British Universities of East Anglia, Bristol, and Manchester. My work in all these institutions has largely focused on poverty, social policy, and human flourishing.

The intention to put this book together grew out of my awareness that my work on poverty and human flourishing was scarcely known among people who don’t read Spanish, since around 95% of my published work is in Spanish and very few texts are in English.