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No point summarizing here. If you’re interested in the relationship between economic growth and personal happiness (an area we’ve written quite a bit about, see this post, e.g.), just go read this post at Angry Bear.

A recent report (pdf) shows that incomes have risen more slowly in British Columbia than in the rest of Canada in the past two decades. In one article, economists offer the usual suspects of low investment in productivity-raising equipment and a shift towards the low-paying service sector. But, citing a more laid-back “West Coast lifestyle”, they also suggests that some BC residents are deliberately choosing jobs that pay less in...

Feeling overworked? Join the Take Back Your Time movement at the national conference in Seattle this week. The people at Take Back Your Time want to challenge the notion that success should be primarily measured in economic terms and bring work and life back into balance. (Good thing, because research in the growing field of happiness economics suggests that the link between money and happiness is weak.) As it is,...

Imagine a kingdom where the benevolent ruler declares that Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product, and devotes more of the country’s budget to education, and environmental and cultural health, than to economic development. There is such a country: the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and the first movie ever to be filmed there, “Travellers and Magicians,” is currently showing in Seattle one week only, at the Varsity...

Economics is often called “the dismal science.” But as we’ve mentioned before (e.g. here), a handful of dismalscientists are taking a closer look not at what makes the economy hum, but at what puts smiles on our faces. Research on moods and well-being has traditionally been in the domain of psychologists. But economists are increasingly drawn to these topics because, as this this Financial Times (UK) article details, traditional measures...

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine highlighted what is, to my mind, one of the most important economic insights to come out of the past year: even as our material wealth has grown over the past 30 years, our incomes have become less secure. More so than in the past, families find that a year of high income can be followed by a financial bust. Seen from above, “the economy” appears...

A week or so ago, we mentioned a recent study published in the journal Science (subscription only) about a new method for measuring happiness.  The study, by Nobel economist Daniel Kahneman and colleagues, attempted to quantify which activities are most enjoyable, and which ones people find least gratifying.  (Kahneman is a pioneer of "behavioral finance,"  a discipline that mixes economics with psychology in order to understand why people don’t always...

The article itself is a ho-hum repeat of things we’ve been saying for a while. But it’s a sweet headline in today’s Post Intelligencer Economists now agree: ‘You can’t buy happiness’ Buying ‘stuff’ doesn’t do it, survey shows

In this article, David Francis of the Christian Science Monitor does a decent job of poking holes in a recent study that shows European nations lag the United States in gross domestic product. Here are a few examples he cites of why GDP is a poor indicator of societal performance. – Defense budget: In 2004, the US GDP will be boosted by close to $800 billion spent on defense. (“Counting...