Daily View: Measuring wellbeing
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Commentators discuss David Cameron's countrywide consultation to assess the nation's happiness.
The Minister for Universities and Science [subscription required] the difference between measuring happiness and what the government intends to do, measuring wellbeing:
鈥淚t is much more to do with the pursuit of external goals and happiness comes as a by-product of that. The Canadian provinces with the highest life satisfaction are the ones where there is most volunteering. The Harvard psychologist Brian Little has put the point very pithily: what makes life worth living is not the pursuit of happiness but the happiness of pursuit.
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鈥淭he ONS is not, therefore, going to try to find out how happy we are.鈥
that he likes Mr Cameron for wanting to find out what makes everyone happy, but suggests that we all know anyway:
鈥淲e want first of all good health and financial security, and then we want good public services, ideally all of them free. We want people to be kind and polite to us, especially policemen and other motorists. We want nice pubs and corner shops and post offices all over the place. The trouble is we will never be able to have more than a few of these things, and it's the government that has to decide which ones matter most.鈥
the prime minister's timing:
鈥淭he British government may not have picked the best time to begin testing the national mood鈥
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鈥淚t's not that the index is a bad idea, it's that one wonders what the government will find given the state of its economy.
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鈥淏ritain, like other countries in Europe, is hurting. It has unveiled tough austerity measures that include cuts to welfare, it is drowning in debt, and its jobless rate is at 7.7 per cent, with almost 2.5 million people unemployed.鈥
that efforts may be futile:
鈥淢easuring happiness, eh? Even defining the thing has taxed philosophers and other thinkers since time immemorial. As I suggested , never since the attempt to extract sunbeams from cucumbers on Swift鈥檚 Island of Laputa has there been such a preposterous conceit...
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鈥淚t is presumably beyond futile to point out that historically rulers who set out to create Utopia invariably developed into murderous tyrants. So it is that as HMS Ark Royal gives way to General Wellbeing, Prime Minister Pangloss may be not merely destroying his country鈥檚 ability to resist tyranny but actually himself substituting a soft despotism in its place.鈥
主播大秀 trustee that measuring happiness is nonsense:
鈥淚t ought to be obvious that measuring 'Gross National Happiness' is a bad idea simply from the fact that its advocates hold up Bhutan as a model. Bhutan? It's one of the poorest countries in the world, with low life expectancy, poor literacy levels and scant political freedom. I don't care how 'happy' its not-very-free people claim to be when they're asked in a survey.鈥
Finally, that David Cameron may have done well to get comedian Ken Dodd to introduce him, given the intellectual debt Mr Cameron owes him:
鈥淒odd鈥檚 1964 hit song, Happiness, went unmentioned. The core of Dodd鈥檚 message, or of Doddism as it will become known, is found in the lines: 鈥業 hope when you go to measuring my success, That you don鈥檛 count my money count my happiness.鈥
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鈥淢r Cameron is a less radical thinker than Dodd, and wants to go on counting the money too.鈥
