Arthur Grimes

I think, do they not understand what GDP means?

Well, I don't know what they mean with this.

I think it's just a bland phrase, to be honest.

Right.

I don't think I know what they mean.

Yeah, it's weird.

I don't think they've thought about it, to be honest.

Most politicians don't think very deeply, so I think it's just a catchphrase that they use without understanding what they're talking about.

But so do some economists, so it's not just politicians.

I mean, what we're interested in in the end is that people lead sort of happy, healthy lives, and, yeah, greater prosperity definitely helps that, but greater prosperity is better measured than...

with other measures rather than GDP.

You know, life expectancy is a really important one.

Healthy life years is very important.

It's all very well-being prosperous, but if it's a short life, it doesn't count for much.

So we would want to certainly be looking at other things other than just material prosperity.

The literature in this area, in the well-being sort of economics literature,

and for that matter, psychology and sociology, it's more or less come to saying there's three major determinants of how happy people are with their lives.

One is prosperity, so that's important.

One is their family circumstances, being happy with their family and friends.

And the third one is their health.