This twentieth-anniversary edition of State of the Nation focuses aptly on quality of life wellbeing, and comes at a critical moment as South Africa commemorates 30 years since our first democratic elections. As highlighted by the volume editors, State of the Nation: Quality of Life and Wellbeing connects in a serendipitous manner to the two previous editions that analysed and dissected poverty, ethics and politics. A constant thread running through those volumes, and through the current volume, is the notion of 'inequality', or what I would term inequity, as the latter term has a social justice components.