I've never been to France, but having watched live Tour de France TV coverage in the middle of the night in the depths of a Canberra winter, it seems there's a certain appeal to the place. Aside from le Tour, there's the food, the Alps, the wine, the culture, a language which I think sounds beautiful no matter what you're saying, and the fact that the President can marry a supermodel (and vice-versa!)...
These are probably some of the reasons that French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested yesterday at the Sorbonne that getting rid of the 'cult of figures' and the 'cult of the market' (le culte des figures et le culte du marché - told you it sounded beautiful!) by incorporating measures of people's quality of life into a GDP-type index might be a good idea. The joie de vivre index, as The Independant terms it, was proposed by Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and seized upon by Sarkozy. In essence, it would incorporate GDP but would also include other factors such as holiday length, quality of public services and other measures around general wellbeing.
At a guess, there's probably a little more to Sarkozy's proposal than just the seemingly wonderful French lifestyle. Luckily, Dr Paul Jelfs from the ABS will give us a rundown on this area of thought in his presentation 'Measuring progress: Global, national and local perspectives'.
I guess the question for me is how we incorporate those particularly Australian aspects of quality of life...
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