Commentators discuss David Cameron's countrywide consultation to assess the nation's happiness.
The Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts tries to clarify in the Times [subscription required] the difference between measuring happiness and what the government intends to do, measuring wellbeing:
“It 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.
“The ONS is not, therefore, going to try to find out how happy we are.”
Alexander Chancellor says in the Guardian that he likes Mr Cameron for wanting to find out what makes everyone happy, but suggests that we all know anyway:
“We 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.”
Michael Babad at Canada’s Globe and Mail questions the prime minister's timing:
“The British government may not have picked the best time to begin testing the national mood…
“It'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.
“Britain, 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.”
Melanie Phillips says in the Spectator that efforts may be futile:
“Measuring happiness, eh? Even defining the thing has taxed philosophers and other thinkers since time immemorial. As I suggested here, never since the attempt to extract sunbeams from cucumbers on Swift’s Island of Laputa has there been such a preposterous conceit...
“It 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’s ability to resist tyranny but actually himself substituting a soft despotism in its place.”
BBC trustee Diane Coyle argues in her personal blog Enlightenment economics that measuring happiness is nonsense:
“It 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.”
Finally, Andrew Gimson suggests in the Telegraph that David Cameron may have done well to get comedian Ken Dodd to introduce him, given the intellectual debt Mr Cameron owes him:
“Dodd’s 1964 hit song, Happiness, went unmentioned. The core of Dodd’s message, or of Doddism as it will become known, is found in the lines: ‘I hope when you go to measuring my success, That you don’t count my money count my happiness.’
“Mr Cameron is a less radical thinker than Dodd, and wants to go on counting the money too.”
No comments:
Post a Comment