Replies to post #64807 on Your Economy (No Politics) (YE1)

[EarlyOne]

Federal Government Spends Money Trying to Measure ‘Happiness’
Posted on March 30, 2012 at 9:30pm by Mytheos Holt

The Post picks up the story from here:

According to proponents, a measure of happiness could help assess the success or failure of a range of government policies. It could gauge the virtues of a health benefit or establish whether education has more value than simply higher incomes. It might also detect extremes of inequality or imbalances in how people divide their time between work and leisure.

“The phrase ‘pursuit of happiness’ is in the Declaration of Independence, so it’s not a huge stretch to say we might want to measure life satisfaction,” said panel member Carol Graham, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of a book on the topic.[...]

In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron has embraced the idea, and last year the government began asking survey respondents things like “Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?” and “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?” The U.K. Economic and Social Research Council is also funding the U.S. panel’s $370,000 budget. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008 launched a commission including two Nobel winners, Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, which opined that the “time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being.”

[bbotcs]

fugeguy: Fed buying U.S. debt

Then they are suckers. If the U.S defaults on its debt, that would end the Fed! Yipeee!