{"id":13465,"date":"2014-01-18T13:44:26","date_gmt":"2014-01-18T12:44:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=13465"},"modified":"2014-01-18T13:51:48","modified_gmt":"2014-01-18T12:51:48","slug":"do-you-really-want-to-be-happy-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=13465","title":{"rendered":"Do you really want to be happy? (2)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this week, I attended a packed-out seminar at the London School of Economics&#8221; entitled\u00a0<em>&#8220;Measuring Happiness?&#8221;<\/em>\u00a0which was addressed by four experts on this subject. \u00a0The second speaker was Anthony Oswald who is professor of economics at Warwick University.<\/p>\n<p>In a fascinating 10 minutes with lots of slides, some of the points he made were:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Simon Kuznets was the originator of the notion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) but he had pointed out that GDP is not the only measure of a nation&#8217;s progress<\/li>\n<li>The <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Commission_on_the_Measurement_of_Economic_Performance_and_Social_Progress\">Stiglitz Report<\/a> commissioned by the French President Sarkozy had set out the case for a wider measure of a nation&#8217;s progress<\/li>\n<li>Following David Cameron&#8217;s support for the idea, the UK now measures happiness through surveys commissioned by the Office of National Statistics (ONS)<\/li>\n<li>Out of score of seven, most UK citizens rate their happiness as around six<\/li>\n<li>There is a pronounced U curve in the relationship between happiness and age &#8211; generally peak happiness occurs in one&#8217;s early seventies<\/li>\n<li>The probability of experiencing depression and taking anti-depressants relates to age in a similar way<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>He posed the question: What makes countries happy? He identified the following factors as among the important variables:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Higher social spending<\/li>\n<li>Unemployment insurance<\/li>\n<li>Clean air and access to countryside<\/li>\n<li>Low unemployment and low inflation<\/li>\n<li>Low crime and low corruption<\/li>\n<li>Openness to global trade<\/li>\n<li>Genetic factors<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this week, I attended a packed-out seminar at the London School of Economics&#8221; entitled\u00a0&#8220;Measuring Happiness?&#8221;\u00a0which was addressed by four experts on this subject. \u00a0The second speaker was Anthony Oswald who is professor of economics at Warwick University. In a fascinating 10 minutes with lots of slides, some of the points he made were: Simon [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13465"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13487,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13465\/revisions\/13487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}