About This Issue

Volume 22 Issue 1, Fall 2007

The Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 issues of the Centerpiece will feature articles and images that celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Written to commemorate this event is a new book, In Theory and in Practice: Harvard's Center for International Affairs, 1958–1983, by David C. Atkinson, and images from the Center's History. The Director's message describes how far the WCFIA has come since its inaugural year.

In our next issue, look for highlights of the Warren and Anita Manshel Lecture in American Foreign Policy featuring Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, and more archival images.

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Features

Successful Societies

By Michèle Lamont

In 2003 the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) asked me to start a project that studies successful societies using a new approach that involved the study of health gradients, which concerns the ways in which inequalities of all types generate inequalities in health outcomes. By pursuing a better understanding of the determinants of societal success, this project aims to provide information that could make public policy more just, efficient, and effective. The Successful Societies project at CIFAR groups epidemiologists with social scientists to try to understand the mechanisms that produced these health gradients. What is a successful society, and how can it be achieved? Many of the scholars who were approached to join the CIFAR research project were initially reluctant to rank societies along a single matrix. What was the principle around which all societies could be ranked? Money? Morality? Religiosity? Certainly societies are too complex to be analyzed in these terms.…

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