A program on American Public Media’s Marketplace on Saturday morning caught my attention as APM’s Heidi Moore presented the pros and cons of using the GDP and consumerism as a means of measuring how “well” we’re doing. I’ve always thought it was a bit of a conundrum that as we try to reuse as much as we can (right now to the current obsession with vintage clothing) we’re still measuring ourselves on how much we’re consuming. It’s the same when I hear that unemployment is high, but the number of startups is rapidly increasing. Does anyone not see the correlations between these things? I can’t tell you how many of my friends have started their businesses while on unemployment. (Frankly I don’t see anything wrong with that and I’m happy to pay taxes to fund my friends’ and others’ dreams.)
I don’t agree with a lot of what happens in the UK but I was intrigued by the new Gallup-Healthways Wellbeing Index. It’s an index of how well UK residents are doing in terms of their health and well-being. The reporter went on to talk about “why don’t we have one here” and so I looked it up. We’ve had a
Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index in the US since 2008. (Shame on you, Heidi Moore that was super easy to find.)
Basically, here’s what it does:
