From GDP to Gross National Happiness

The current global economic crisis is causing a lot of reconsideration and re-examination of past practices and theories. French President Sarkozy fromed a commission including Nobel-Prize-winners Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz to consider new ways to measure growth. Their report was released September 2009.

www.france24.com

www.cfo.com

New York Times

Here is a related video from December 11, 2009: the Kenneth Arrow lecture by Amartya Sen, including a response by Joseph Stiglitz. It's very very very long, but it gives you an idea of how Amartya Sen speaks and looks.

Annual Kenneth Arrow Lecture Featuring Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, and Eric Maskin, Part 1 of 3 from Heyman Center for the Humanities on Vimeo.

Worldmapper

Worldmapper is an interesting site, especially for students, teachers, and people who are interested in the world. They have created about 700 maps which display information in a visual, map form. The sizes of countries are distorted to show various kinds of information in a proportional way. This map shows the number of elderly people in the country.

© Copyright 2006 SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).

Other maps show distribution patterns of food, goods, resources, work, income, wealth, health, education, poverty, violence, cause of death, age of death, communication, religion, language, and other measurable qualities. This site also allows you to download high-resolution images, PDFs, Excel or OpenDoc data spreadsheets, and other resources under a Creative Commons license.