Andrew Oswald
speaker
46 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2011
last heard Apr 2013
Andrew Oswald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Many people had outside toilets.
There weren't many automobiles.
There was a real shortage of food for some of our citizens.
But now...
Many of those things have been turned on their head.
I want to see us move away from measuring gross domestic product to measuring the happiness and mental health of our citizens.
That seems to me logical and the next step for the coming century.
In 50 years from now, I can't see GDP being very valuable.
And a key reason for that is something called the Easterlin paradox, where there's a strong lack of link at this point in history.
Our richness as a country between extra GDP and extra happiness, it appears that happiness is running flat.
Once politicians and researchers grasp that, say over the next 10 or 20 years, then GDP as a measure of our overall well-being and contentment, that's going to look increasingly out of date, maybe even useless.
A kind of smooth transition from the old obsession with income measures, that's what GDP is, to wealth.
Our new concern for measuring mental well-being, that ought to happen steadily.
We can't just jump straight away to well-being measures.
So I think there'll be a slow change and that's a sensible step.
It's not enough to ask people just how happy they are, though I've been surprised how persuasive some of the data patterns are, even from very simple kinds of questions like that.
We're trying to blend subjective answers, how happy am I today, with objective and in some cases physiological measures.
The latest incarnation of research is going to blend subjective answers with cortisol readings, for example, the stress hormone.
is going to blend them with objective measures.
How clean is the air?
Showing 21–40 of 46 · page 2 of 3
← Previous
Next →