The Uncertainty Principle

Oh if the customers like it then they'll keep on paying / If they keep on drinking then they'll end up staying

Over the last ten years or so, government and others have been getting to grips with 'outcomes' . If, like me, your project, your work and indeed far too many hours of your life are spent on worrying about funding from government and how to get it, chances are you've had to bite the bullet and ask, but what's the change we're making?

The frown and wince that that is the standard response to that question serves an impressive unifying function. It spans the sectors, bringing together the bored civil servant writing a project initiation document, and the tired charity-worker scrawling out a funding bid in one massive exasperated sigh.

Government and loads of other funders are increasingly dissatisfied with funding people, projects, policies and organisations on the basis of number of events held or reports produced. Quite rightly, they want to know what change you are expecting to make beforehand and how you can demonstrate that once you've got the money.

So far, so splendid. But, if you were big-chief government man, how do you set the outcomes you want people to work towards?

The boy Layard has been all over the airwaves in the last year, riffing about how policymakers should focus on increasing "happiness" rather than wealth, prosperity, health or social welfare, per se.

Should happiness be taken into account? The consistently interesting Chris Dillow suggested what this might mean.

Now, Jamie Whyte lays it down. Introducing happiness as an aim of government policy assumes that everyone's idea of happiness is the same. Bad idea.

Some will say my greedy friends are making a mistake. Professor Layard, for
example, says they are in the grip of an addiction from which it is the
Government’s duty to save them through punitive income taxes. It is, of course,
tempting to think that those who do not share your values are crazy. But it is
also an alarming pretext for state intervention. Free men should fear the happy
brigade.

To have been born British is to have won first prize in the lottery of
life. This is almost as true now as it was when Cecil Rhodes said it. But not
because the British are or ever were the happiest people on earth. It is
because, unlike those happy Nigerians, we are prosperous and free. Which means
we have just about as much happiness as we want.

Just because you're nobody / It doesn't mean that you're no good / Just because there's a reason / It doesn't mean it's understood

Trying to ease myself back in to the wonderful world of blogs. Yes. That's my preferred term to blogosphere.

A brief list of phrases that I can only assume are euphemisms for certain practices, that nobody has let me in on. I offer up,

Horizontal marketing

Oral History

Organ scholarship

'the prominent actress...' *

Anyone else?

* As in the Wikipedia entry for Salman Rushdie, which describes his wife, Padma Lakshmi, as 'prominent Indian model and actress'. (her screen roles have included: an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, Glitter with Mariah Carey and ITV's Sharpe's Challenge).