One rare piece of good news from the Tory-led government was Nick Clegg’s decision to block the so-called ‘Snoopers Charter’, a draft piece of fundamentally illiberal legislation which would have allowed the security services to monitor emails, text messages and internet browsing.
Trying to understand wellbeing though national wellbeing figures is like trying to understand what Britain is like by looking at Google Earth’s snapshots of it.
The persistence of David Cameron’s happiness agenda has undermined the left, providing an illusion of progress while infuriating neoliberals, says Craig Berry.
Simon Kuznets, the Nobel Prize winning economist who helped develop GDP, recognised such flaws when warning the US Congress in 1934: “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of the national income.”
