The Human Flourishing Program
ELO has partnered with the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University to bring together this year's Leadership Program in Boston. This partnership allows for holistic and all-encompassing teaching of healthy leadership, strong entrepreneurship, and exemplary management.
Founded in 2016, the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science aims to study and promote human flourishing, and to develop systematic approaches to the synthesis of knowledge across disciplines. Many topics that are fundamental to human well-being such as happiness itself, virtue, religious community, meaning, and purpose have traditionally been viewed as principally falling within the purview of the humanities, often of philosophy or theology. However, a robust empirical research literature on these topics has now developed from sociology, political science, economics, education, psychology, medicine, public health, and other empirical sciences. The program’s research contributes to the broad question of how knowledge from the quantitative social sciences can be integrated with that of the humanities on questions of human flourishing and how best to carry out this synthesis of knowledge across disciplines.
The program hopes to bring greater unity to the empirical social sciences and the humanities. The program produces research publications and sponsors educational activities, such as courses, seminars, and conferences, for the Harvard University community all aimed at bringing knowledge together across disciplines and reflecting upon how knowledge from different disciplines might form a coherent whole.
Research staff at the Human Flourishing Program seek to employ some of the most rigorous approaches to quantitative empirical analysis while also integrating this work with scholarship from the humanities. The Program’s work has in fact helped pioneer new methodological approaches and some of these have arisen precisely from engagement with trying to study flourishing more comprehensively (such as outcome-wide studies) or from engagement with humanities scholarship (such as new approaches to measurement).