Quality in the Balance: On the Adaptive and Mimetic Nature of Subjective Well-Being

which one can built a new and better society. As normative standards, they anticipate an ideal state from which the actual reality of things can be evaluated as deficient. In this light poverty appears as a sore phenome non, an infringement of what the quality of life and well-being are all about. In an attempt to qualify this quality of life, the present article focuses on western poverty and its (lacking) sense of well-being. Turning these notions into norms, one should check if 'quality' and 'well-being' are transparent i.e., referring to unambiguous evaluations that can be assessed objectively. While common and moral sense supposes so, sci ence has to doubt this assumption. The following is based on empirical research in different fields and some theoretical reflections. Bringing these together we try to identify the subjective mechanisms that trouble the notions of quality and well-being. Indeed, there are distorting forces at work, which create and abort the subjective experiences of quality and well-being and thereby nullify their evaluative potential. 1. The Scientific Demarcations of Poverty The West rediscovers poverty in the late 1960s and 1970s. Notwithstand ing economic progress, the institutionalisation of a welfare state and the democratisation of opportunities, social inequality persists and results in conditions that still exceed tolerable limits. The observation of that real