Happiness Makes the World Go ‘Round
Columbia University’s Earth Institute have just made publicly available their World Happiness Report, joining the expanding list of happiness reports emerging ultimately from Bhutan’s Happiness Index. There’s some interesting results in this one and some that you might expect were more obvious, like the idea that at a certain point, more money won’t make you significantly happier. From page five – ‘…a word of warning for those who expect to become happier by becoming richer…evidence is quite overwhelming that after a certain point the gains are very small’. This for me taps into the ‘Enoughness’ paradigm I’ve been writing about for a few years
There’s other interesting insight to in regard to the progress of certain countries and overall ideas on what can be done to lift people’s happiness. Mental Health is a major key here yet often ignored as an area of Government support. You can go to the Columbia website at http://www.earth.columbia.edu or if you want to download the report from here, click this link It’s about 7meg in size
The second annual fund raiser was held in late October and attended by almost 300 people. Marcus Barber offers a brief update: The Blackwood 8 commitee put together a great fund raiser on behalf of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Melbourne. With a delightful crowd warm up by Greg Champion of the ‘Coodabeen…
Read More >The slides used as part of Marcus Barber’s key note address to the Regional Produce Summit are now available via the link below Held at the Wangaratta Gateway Motel (and the first conference event staged in its very impressively redsigned function room) the conference brought together a range of speakers to discuss culinary tourism,…
Read More >Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber will be kicking off proceedings at the 2008 Regional Produce Summit in Wangaratta on the 20th of October where he’ll detail some of the emerging issues likely to impact upon the tourism and food sector in the foreseeable future and suggest ways that businesses in the sector might be able to…
Read More >Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber will both key note and act as Master of Ceremonies at the Lockhart Industrial symposium on the 9th of October, in Lockhart NSW. Marcus will discuss the clear business advantages that Eco Industrial parks provide to businesses, the way that symbiotic supply chains work to improve business resilience and the way…
Read More >Marcus Barber joined host Tim Cox and co-host, author and writer Andrew Peglar on the Conversation hour to muse about the types of futures one might expect to see in coming years. After Tim asked for clarification between a General, Theoretical and Strategic Futurist, Andrew kicked off with a question over the singularity. The…
Read More >Members of the Futures Foundation and the AFFA will be congregating in Pearl Beach in the coming weeks to consider the state of play in the Australian Futures community. Given the emerging challenges in Australia and around the world, the futures community requires just as much serious contemplation and forethought as does any one …
Read More >One of our many Nordic watchers, Are Thorsteinsson, has posted the Future Matters segment looking at the future of robotics, along with marking up full language captions in Danish. Although a couple of years old now, the early signs listed in this segment are only now coming into more mainstream focus Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber…
Read More >Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber has contributed a chapter to Volume Five of the ‘Death and Anti-Death’ Anthology which has just been published by Ria University. With contributors including Aubrey de Grey and Kevin Kelly and edited by Dr. Charles Tandy, Volume Five in the series is dedicated to the memory of Loren Eiseley, the renowned…
Read More >One of the challenges for one aspect of the world is fuel and the price of fuel used for private transportation. I use the word ‘aspect’ quite deliberately because the ‘aspect of the world’ that seems to be making the most noise about rising fuel prices is by and large the ‘westernised’ world – that’s…
Read More >With the theme ‘Moving Forward, Supply Chains of the Future’, Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber will open the Australian Supply Chain and Logistics Conference in Brisbane in July on behalf of the Supply Chain and Logistics Association of Australia. Details for the conference can be found below. The focus on the future of supply chains…
Read More >