Last year, French president Nicolas (tippy-toes) Sarkozy hired Nobel-winning economists Armatya Sen and Joe Stiglitz to work on a happiness indicator for France. The Economist sneered:
Suppose you’re a country’s leader, and your economy is doing pretty lousy. How can you distract attention from the politically dangerous ongoing failure? Measure happiness instead!
Now the report(pdf) is out (HT: NZ Herald) and it sounds fairly sensible to me. Here are the first few recommendations:
1. Shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being
2. When evaluating material well-being, look at income and consumption rather than production
3. Emphasise the household perspective
4. Consider income and consumption jointly with wealth
5. Give more prominence to the distribution of income, consumption and wealth
6. Broaden income measures to non-market activities
Not much to disagree with there IMO, and there seems to be lots more good stuff in the report. Well worth a read, and some potentially very useful lessons for NZ inside I suspect.