Two weeks to the RES deadline!

There are two weeks until the final deadline for submitting essays for the 2008 RES competition. Here at school we had our own internal competition to give students a chance to win a small prize for an early entry. I thought I would give a flavour of the topics covered

Open source software
Feed-in-Tariffs
Economics of mass collaboration
Micro-finance
Lump sum taxes
Free trade
Carbon trading
Globalization
Welfare and happiness policies
Flat rate taxes
Auctions

There were certainly some interesting essays from the two dozen that I read - it is so much fun reading an essay without having to give it a mark or apply some dodgy assessment criteria to it. Hopefully my students will find a bit of time away from revision to do a little more reading for their essays and work on their style and arguments before the 12th May deadline arrives!

More to life than GDP?

Happiness economics is a topic very much in vogue at the moment, and this year’s edition of Social Trends has clearly paid homage to that fact by including a measure of subjective well-being: Satisfaction with standard of living and financial prospects [Table 5.5]. The data made no attempt to debunk the Easterlin paradox: while household income has increased by over 60% and household wealth has more than doubled, satisfaction with standard of living has remained constant at around 85%.

Bhutan and Gross National Happiness

Is there a trade off between wealth and well-being? I missed this Newsnight report from Mark Easton which appeared on BBC2 last month - but came across it whilst revising my work schemes for our new courses next year. This is a terrific eight minute video on life in the absolute monarchy of Bhutan - a country without traffic lights and which has banned plastic bags and adverts for Pepsi and Coca Cola. The video clip is excellent perhaps as an introduction to discussion on living standards or even the basic economic problem.

Tim Harford’s essay on happiness which was published a couple of years ago is still well worth a read.

Robert Frank on Income and Happiness

One of my favourite authors, the ‘Economic Naturalist’, Robert Frank writes about real incomes and happiness in today’s New York Times. He makes the point that “findings suggest that relative income is a much better predictor of well-being than absolute income” and the article is excellent for students wanting to know a little more about the problems in adjusting for price changes in the economy when trying to capture real improvements in living standards.

“Since the mid-1970s, however, income growth has been confined almost entirely to top earners. Changes in per-capita G.D.P., which track only changes in average income, are completely silent about the effects of this shift.  A society that aspires to improve needs a better measure of what counts as progress.”

See: Income and Happiness: An Imperfect Link