Active citizens, subjective well-being and Clarksonism

Jeremy. Suffering in silence, as ever.....

If you were to add one blog to your RSS reader at my request, please make it Chris Dillow’s Stumbling and Mumbling.

It’s about ‘Clarksonism.’ Why  tedious self-pitying rich white blokes on the telly the question of ’subjective well-being’ is an important one to understand and why politicians often end up being forced to expend lots of energy on people with imaginary grievances while ignoring those with genuine ones:

“Almost a fifth of the poorest one-fifth of people – and these, remember, are the poorest in the world – say they are satisfied with their lives, whilst a third of the best-off fifth say they are dissatisfied.

This suggests that subjective indicators – how people feel, what they say – are an imperfect measure of actual inequality.”

This is another example of the way that highly visible citizens can often dominate debate at the expense of other – perhaps more deserving – cases. In another example of this, the Freethinking Economist gives us Theodore Dalrymple. It is the Jeremys, the Theodores and the Victors who are often – as Anthony observed here a while ago – the main beneficiaries of a good deal of outreach and consultation work.