We have an essay going in our weekend section tomorrow about what looks like it could be a really interesting book: "Happiness - Lessons from a New Science" by Richard Layard.

For those of us who might need such a wake-up call here's some extracts from the review by our columnist Michael Prowse.

"Politicians often talk as though life were an economic assault course. But wealth, freedom and even law are surely means rather than ultimate ends. Economic values now permeate political discourse so deeply that it often seems as though the fundamental goal of nations is to maximise wealth or prevail in a competitive struggle with others. Yet amassing ever more material goods surely cannot be the point of it all."

Promoting freedom under the law is a more promising goal. But suppose freedom made us miserable – would we then rate it as so important?

Richard Layard, a leading British economist and Labour peer, argues persuasively in his new book that the answer is “no”. The most plausible ultimate goal, he suggests, is the promotion of human happiness, where each individual’s happiness is regarded, at least in principle, as equally important. We value freedom because it is a precondition for happiness, rather than vice versa. Nothing is more basic than being happy or feeling good, because we do not need to justify this in terms of anything else."


"If we accept that happiness should be the goal, public policy appears to have failed in recent decades. Gross domestic product has streaked ahead nearly everywhere: in the US, real living standards in material terms have more than doubled in the past 50 years. But the proportion of people who describe themselves as happy has not risen."


Music to my ears, and so not such a hidden message tonight...

Let us just live our lives, be as good as we can be to the people who mean a lot to us, and never let it be said that we missed any real chance to be happy.



Snowing again today. Yet strangely not in Mesa, one would confidently surmise.... (I'm not even going to link to it tonight)


Have a pleasant weekend.

Turns out I'm going here to deliver a conference paper later this term. Hopefully it will have stopped snowing and the reindeer will be unfrozen....


and everything is - at least partly, in my limited universe - right with the world.

The IRS has apparently launched the biggest criminal tax fraud prosecution in US history. An art collector called Walter Anderson is the lucky winner, and was nabbed by the feds today at Dulles as he arrived from London.

How complicated does your life have to be to owe $450m in evaded tax?

Puts everything else into a little perpective, I guess.



This item on the Reuter news diary for today:

New York court to begin hearing lawsuit brought by more than 100 Vietnamese seeking compensation and clean-up of contaminated areas from more than 30 firms, among them Dow Chemical and Monsanto Co, makers of Agent Orange.



Myron Kandel, perpetual star of the cocktail line at the Financial Follies, is retiring. A real pro. Good luck...


Tonight is the official leaving party for about 30 of my colleagues who took the recent voluntary redundancy package. Good luck to them, too... Coincidentally, it's the same day our parent company announced prelims for 2004.


Meanwhile, a journal called Personnel Psychology thinks that “rank and yank” systems, where a set number of under-performing employees are fired each year can improve the performance potential of a typical organization.

excerpt:

"Supporters of FDRS (Forced Distribution Ratings System) believe it motivates the best employees, removes dead wood, and helps to develop strong leaders. Detractors see a myriad of problems including a system that is open to bias and discourages teamwork. The authors found that “in all our scenarios, workforce performance potential at the end of the simulation was higher than it was at the beginning.” The overall impact of FDRS on the company’s performance was not measured."




The Michael Jackson trial opens today. And even though this is a bit old, it's still very very funny....



Talk about good money after bad.... or, get out now while there's even a remote possibility the franchise might be worth something next season.

Meanwhile, post-Oscars, the mothership moves to resolve another loose end.



Hey. For $4.4m, I can usually tie my shoes and whistle at the same time.


Lets just hope this isn't true....


And, yep. Snowing again....

By the way - this is well worth checking out. $5 from each sale goes to Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.