The Happiness Manifesto: How Nations and People Can Nurture Well-Being (TED series)
Nic Marks
Language: English
Pages: 65
ISBN: 2:00172306
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
ISBN Note: Title has no ISBN. ASIN: B004K1F1W2
It is now overwhelmingly clear however, says Nic Marks in this essay, that the blind pursuit of economic growth has created a whole set of social and environmental issues that are rapidly undermining the potential happiness and well-being of current and future generations.
Synopsis:
Much of modern life is based on the assumption that happiness comes from economic prosperity. Many -- politicians, media and citizens alike -- seem to assume the goal of government is to keep the economy moving. Here, Nic Marks argues that the blind pursuit of economic growth has created an environment that actually undermines our happiness. He offers some bold suggestions on how nations and people can return to a shared common purpose: nurturing well-being.
About the author:
Nic Marks is the founder of the Centre for Well-Being, an independent think tank at the New Economics Foundation in London.
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anticipate that the Office for National Statistics (ONS) will consult with experts about the questions to be used, and then they will be asked systematically in one of the existing, large household surveys. This is crucial as it is only by the regular collection of high-quality data that policymakers will start to gain confidence in this new type of well-being analysis. Cameron is to be applauded, not only for his ambition, but also for his actions so far. The well-being indicators should help
between different goals of society, but if we have no way of jointly assessing their implications, they tend to be ignored. We need a new single indicator as powerful as the GDP that allows us to compare nations and track our own progress. Redefining progress When the Stiglitz Report highlighted that current well-being needs to be placed in the context of sustainability, it was really drawing attention to the fact that there is an inherent tension between them. In fact, it is this
pressure on the planet’s ecosystems. On the vertical axis sits happy life years, our measure of the well-being of nations, where more is good as it represents happier, healthier lives. The global average is shown by the largest circle at 2.3gHa and just over 40 happy life years. All the individual nations of the world are spread out across the graph. Unsustainable nations To the top right lies a series of countries represented by triangles – from right to left: Luxembourg, the US, then
and bottom three. Full details of all nations’ scores are available at the website happyplanetindex.org Progress or regress? Both Figure 1 and the Table 1 are really just a snapshot in time of how nations are doing now. They can highlight good and bad examples, but they tell us nothing about the direction in which we are headed. And this is exactly what we need to know: are we getting better or getting worse? We want to assess whether we are progressing towards a society where good lives
There are also times when to be happy or content would be entirely inappropriate. The negative and positive labels can be thought of as the types of stimuli they are in response to, so threats = negative, and opportunities = positive. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that emotions have evolved as part of a dynamic process of responding to stimuli and galvanizing appropriate actions. At some level it is obvious that our emotions must have evolved for a purpose; having emotions must have enabled
