Yahoo! UK and Ireland:
Happiness and housework are as important as economic growth
25 January 2018
A third problem with GDP is that it doesn’t tell us anything about whether or not people are satisfied with their lives. Nobel Prize-winners Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen have long argued that we should measure “general wellbeing”, GWB — alongside GDP. In practice, this means asking the public how happy they feel. This might sound soppy but it’s actually something that the Office for National Statistics now does on a regular basis to help inform government policy. And there’s good reason for ministers to pay attention. According to researchers at the London School of Economics, the happiness of a nation is a much better predictor of election results than GDP. If voters are glum, then governments will tend to be booted out of office.
Related publications
The Origins of Happiness by Andrew Clark, Sarah Flèche, Richard Layard, Natavudh Powdthavee and George Ward is published by Princeton University Press, January 2018