News

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) recently published their latest estimates of personal wellbeing in the UK. In addition to providing a picture of personal wellbeing at national level, there is also a focus on individual local authorities. For the first time they examined possible explanations for the observed differences... read more →

What opportunities lie behind this week’s ONS wellbeing data releases, and why might it profoundly matter to our collective future? Last week 238 leading international academics publically called on the European Union and its member states to plan for a future in which human and ecological wellbeing is prioritised over GDP and... read more →

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 →