Firstly, I have to say I agree with ‘So Much For Subtlety’ and ‘Surreptitious Evil ’s comments, and as far as I am aware Costa Rica has an above average murder rate of 7.68 per 100k of population (2006) when the last global average availible is 7.6 (2004).

Secondly I have been lucky enough to live in both Denmark (No. 1 in the World Map of Happiness in the University of Leicester) and Vanuatu (No. 1 in HPI 2006) and have to say I like both experiences. But given a choice I’d rather grow up in Denmark with all the advantages of a developed western country and retire to Vanutau to enjoy the weather, laid back life style.

Danes I still know gruble about there high tax income burden effecting their retirment portfolio in 20 years, while Vanut’s just worry about tomorrow’s weather effecting the fishing tomorrow (and have a happier life for it).

So unless happiness increases 1-for-1 with GDP (and I don’t know anyone who would claim it does), economic growth is almost guaranteed to reduce a country’s score. Right now, most countries’ scores are improving, of course, because of the recession. Whoopee.

If you plot nef’s reported life satisfaction scores against the ecological footprint you actually get a pretty good positive relationship. Pollution makes people happier? No: economic growth makes people happier. On the nef’s own figures, just the opposite of their own conclusion.

Actually, this time round the country with the highest HPI score also happens to have a very high happiness measure. So very conveniently for the nef, they don’t have to rush to correct headlines that say “Costa Rica is best place to live” (as no doubt they otherwise would, being careful and objective researchers).

But it needn’t have come out that way: being just a bit miserable but utterly shit-poor is another way to get a good score.

Stop press. Just done the regression. A 10% increase in ecological footprint increases happiness by 4.1%. The t-stat on the independent variable is 9.98 which means the relationship is statistically significant at a level I can’t even be bothered to work out (the rule of thumb is if it’s more than 2 it’s OK): more than 99.999% certainty. So there you have it: nef proves that dirty growth makes people happier.

More pollution please.

I don’t know about India, but China does not have particularly high tariffs. Their tariffs are also largely notional – they are collected by local Governments, not by the Central Government. So as long as the local authorities get their quota they don’t much care about anything.

The point about China’s SOEs is that they are bankrupt. China does not have such a large state sector, but what it has is largely a disaster. They are massively loss making. Even the ones they have cleaned up and tried to make profitable like Haier are probably operating at a loss. China’s real economic growth is taking place totally outside the State’s control or authority.

“They have moved rightwards but only from the far left. They do a lot more for List than Smith.”

Really? Ever tried to get State aid for health care in China?

“If you look at countries which have had open borders to good and capital you see a record of poor growth. Africa’s borders are wide open, it is still the broken continent.”

Actually Africa, as you would expect, has some of the highest tariffs in the world last I checked. I could be wrong but I doubt it.

At least, they like it theoretically. When it comes to actual practice, the situation is vastly different. Talk of shared work loads is presently all but absent in academia. Those of us who are unemployed are simply thought of us being less talented than those who are employed, so we deserve our unhappy fate. It sounds very much like the conservatives.

In addition, projections for the future should be balanced by what could go wrong, and while I mostly skimmed this piece, it doesn’t seem like they did that. What if lowering the level of economic activity makes bikes super expensive? It seems like they are inadvertently pushing us back to the horse-and-buggy era, and not many today have much experience with horses. Where will we end up? What if many of us end up as servants on the vast estates of wealthy liberals like Gore?

So far, the track record of environmentalists in helping the poor is not a good one, and I just don’t think they’re going to change over night. I don’t see any good reason to sign on to this future, as there are too many unknowns, too many ridiculous assumptions (about climate change, etc.), and too little appreciation for the huge benefits that better technology has brought to us.

What glorious writing! No, seriously, there should be a prize for this sort of stuff. Absolutely no mention at all of the fact that the last few decades have seen the greatest reduction in poverty in the history of the entire species. Hundreds of millions of people have risen up out of that $2.50 a day poverty. Global inequality has fallen, whether you measure Concept II (by country, weighted by population) or Concept III (global population as a whole).

It does seem odd for them to ignore that, especially when it proves the opposite of what you want it to.

The biggest shifts in income in the last 3 decades have come from India and China. Although these countries have moved closer to liberal capitalism they are still following “left-wing” development patterns. They both have high tariffs and run large state run industries.

They have moved rightwards but only from the far left. They do a lot more for List than Smith.

If you look at countries which have had open borders to good and capital you see a record of poor growth. Africa’s borders are wide open, it is still the broken continent.

Smith did note the ease of using cash in mediating markets: but he certainly didn’t try to say that gift exchanges were not markets. This is a fairly desperate grasping at straws by these people.

In fairness it sounds as though they heard of Polanyi and just tried to name drop. Polanyi had some fairly major things to say about the mixture of different economic forms in a society.

In short, the main classes are reciprocity, redistribution, exchange and household economic activity. Gifts come under reciprocity and the NHS would come under redistribution. His main argument was that the 19th Century saw the first attempt to subsume all the above within a market caused the inevitable collapse into protectionism or Bismarkian welfarism (short and terrible summary alert, read The Great Transformation).

NEF sound a bit mad saying his main point was “look tropical islands, how nice!”

Btw, what ever happened to the measure being that of those living on $1/day?

It was rubbish, it was $1.08 of 1996 dollars if I’m correct and wasn’t terribly good when it was introduced in the first place. It was based on an American basket of minimum goods needed but it was easy to market and conceptualise.

With potentially more time on our hands, might we think of a future in which we invest more in civil society – perhaps by volunteering or participating in democratic decision-making?

Btw, what ever happened to the measure being that of those living on $1/day?