Prof. Jeffrey Sachs published his report on the gross national hapiness index again.
(I didn't manage to find a link to the report yet).
He was quoted to say that the most important factors for hapiness are a social welfare system, absence of corruption and the amount of personal freedom and that these are much more important than financial factors.
His example the US; having a four fold increase in GDP since 1960 but no increase in the happiness index.
Country like the Netherlands and scandinavia are doing much better.
I am not placing this thread as a type of pissing contest but more as a support for some thing angry commie sometimes writes down here (in a very crude way). And also because we always tend to push our threads away from the initial topic and into something about the constitution and freedom of speech.
What I wanted to do here is showing that looking at a different economic model not just based solely at increasing wealth is not such a strange thing. (the UN is actually holding a conference about this at the moment)
Further (before you start) I would like to point out that holland and the scandinavian countries are not the communist havens that the US media always tries to make you believe. They are farthest with privatization of many services, personal freedoms are very high and corruption very low. The only thing that these countries try to regulate a tiny bit is that taxes are high for high incomes.
here we are http://static1.volkskrant.nl/static/asse...ort_61.pdf
(I didn't manage to find a link to the report yet).
He was quoted to say that the most important factors for hapiness are a social welfare system, absence of corruption and the amount of personal freedom and that these are much more important than financial factors.
His example the US; having a four fold increase in GDP since 1960 but no increase in the happiness index.
Country like the Netherlands and scandinavia are doing much better.
I am not placing this thread as a type of pissing contest but more as a support for some thing angry commie sometimes writes down here (in a very crude way). And also because we always tend to push our threads away from the initial topic and into something about the constitution and freedom of speech.
What I wanted to do here is showing that looking at a different economic model not just based solely at increasing wealth is not such a strange thing. (the UN is actually holding a conference about this at the moment)
Further (before you start) I would like to point out that holland and the scandinavian countries are not the communist havens that the US media always tries to make you believe. They are farthest with privatization of many services, personal freedoms are very high and corruption very low. The only thing that these countries try to regulate a tiny bit is that taxes are high for high incomes.
here we are http://static1.volkskrant.nl/static/asse...ort_61.pdf