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Business Day (SA):
UNDERCOVER ECONOMIST - Happiness is easy to venerate but much harder to generate

4 March 2019

Just as with GDP, it is only when we move to the specifics that gross national happiness becomes useful. Richard Layard, a leading happiness researcher, argues mental illness is a leading cause of misery, and it can be treated very cost-effectively. That seems useful enough. What is not useful is the sense that measuring GDP is the problem, and measuring gross national happiness the solution. Few societies have really focused on either. We should be happy about that.