News

Ahead of a global Economic of Happiness conference in the UK in October, Liz Zeidler, chief executive of Happy City, looks back to the financial crash of 2008 and its aftermath, asking if we can finally believe that the days of GDP as a measure of economic progress are numbered.... read more →

World Cup thrills, Wimbledon shocks, Tour de France Welsh wizardry, a crazy heatwave – the summer of 2018 will be one to remember for all sorts of reasons. At Happy City we've had our own reasons to be cheerful as our summer interns came on board, bringing their own unique brand of... read more →

Saamah Abdallah, Happy City’s wellbeing advisor, recently attended an OECD advisory meeting discussing the use of wellbeing metrics in policy. In his blog, he reflects on evolving attitudes to wellbeing in different governments – particularly among those who hold the purse strings. Four years ago, I worked on an international... read more →

THE MEASURE THAT GETS TO THE HEART OF WHO THE ECONOMY IS REALLY WORKING FOR If there’s one thing that we learned from the political turmoil of the past few years it’s that people have woken up to the failings of our old economic model. The splintering of the electoral... read more →

Stories, stories, stories. They are everywhere – in the papers, on our phones, woven through our histories and inside our heads. The stories we tell and those we absorb become the foundation for our life choices. Last week I sat listening to the award-winning journalist Gary Younge. Told in his... read more →

The world’s most universal economic system – capitalism – is great at creating wealth. However, this prosperity is nearly always delivered at a cost. For a start, wealth tends to gravitate to a minority – those that take the risk, the business owners. The reward is financial, and wider considerations... read more →

Margaret Thatcher said in 1987: ‘There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.' Reading this, it is not hard to see how concepts of civic duty... read more →

When you head up a charity whose mission is to shake up the current economic model and the systems that fuel consumerism, you’re not naturally a huge fan of banks and PR firms. And when your job entails publically challenging the ‘more stuff and more debt equals success and prosperity’... read more →

To mark the 50 year anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s speech, where he expressed the limitations of GDP in leading us to true prosperity, we asked you to get creative and share photos of what GDP fails to measure - or in other words, what makes you ‘happy beyond GDP’. This... read more →