ecological efficiency

2006 Feasta Annual Lecture: Re-Thinking Progress: Well-Being as the Focus of Policy – Nic Marks

Nic Marks is the head of the Centre for Well-Being at NEF (The New Economics Foundation) and has recently set up a new global measure of progress, the Happy Planet Index, which shows the ecological efficiency with which human well-being is delivered around the world. He talked about how the economy is only really a means to an end and that we should be measuring the ‘ultimate end’ of people’s well-being instead of measuring GDP. He showed how simply relating the length and satisfaction of people’s lives to their ecological footprint creates a much more useful way of comparing …