OH HAPPY DAYS

BOOK NOTES

OH HAPPY DAYS

Happiness: Lessons From a New Science By Richard Layard,Penguin Press

DO NATIONS place too much emphasis on Gross National Product, the creation of wealth, when they should be more concerned with GHQ: the gross happiness quotient? British economist Richard Layard in a new book,"Happiness: Lessons From a New Science,"argues that a half century of amassing wealth and doubling incomes hasn't made the developed world any happier. Surveys reveal people are more depressed than ever. And with richer societies have come increases in divorce, alcoholism, and crime. So. Money really doesn't buy happiness. And the economic treadmill most of us are on rarely satisfies us; it just wears us out. Governments should worry less about making people richer and concentrate more on cheering them up, he says. Well-being indices that track happiness levels within a population the way financial ones chart economic growth should be key tools for forging public policy, Layard says. It's not the economy, stupid. It's the feel good factor. -TG

Copyright American Society for Engineering Education Summer 2005
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