More happiness
Part of the British gov't is trying a move that sounds good on paper....

The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, has asked leading civil servants across government to assess the impact Coalition policies will have on the happiness of the population and to consider options for increasing individuals' satisfaction with their lives. ... Last November, Mr Cameron announced that a new wellbeing measure would be developed as an alternative to the traditional economic assessments of national progress, such as GDP.

So far so good. Any public or private service ought to satisfy its customers above all. The Anglosphere govt's have been satisfying super-rich speculators (whose happiness is directly and purely measured by GDP and stock averages) while totally neglecting their actual customers. Any little scrap of attention to the millions of non-speculator customers could improve things!

Plans could include improving the mental health of the workforce so people with depression and other illnesses find jobs, protecting parks and green spaces, and reducing pressure on children and families.

Whoopsie! Already getting silly. Got the causation exactly backwards as always. Working folks are depressed because their accustomed jobs have disappeared forever. Helping them find jobs is pointless; there aren't any jobs. First you need to bring back the jobs.

The economist Lord Layard, who has helped design the wellbeing index survey, warned that successive governments had become too focused on economic competition with rivals such as India and China.

Now we're sounding good again! Free Trade is a competition using the enemy's rules, a competition that we can't hope to win.

He criticised the Coalition’s decision to reduce funding for university courses in the arts and humanities in favour of science and engineering degrees, which are seen as more economically valuable.

Whoopsie again! Dead wrong again. We don't need more arts and humanities. The SINGLE SOLE SOLITARY UNIQUE PURPOSE OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES SINCE 1910 IS TO GENERATE SUICIDAL UNHAPPINESS. PERIOD. PERIOD. PERIOD. IS THAT ENOUGH GODDAMN PERIODS FOR YOU? PERIOD. PERIOD. PERIOD.

After we start to open up more jobs (by removing all environmental laws, imposing tariffs and blockades on China, closing and confiscating Wall Street, and restoring a normal interest-based banking system) the proper step in education is to train working-class people for high-tech manufacturing and artisan work. In the short term, this should involve adult trade schools, some of them leading to more serious university work in science and engineering. Later the training should move down into the last 4 years of public education, which are now utterly wasted by preparing students to study the suicide-generating Arts And Humanities.

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Overall, Lord Layabout does a beautiful job of diagnosing the current problem, but his prescription is poison.
  ¶ 5:05 AM