Economic growth is the best way to raise living standards

A rebuttal of much of the material that makes a case for abandoning existing measures of national income in favour of broader measures of well-being and/or happiness.

Project Syndicate's Michael Boskin makes the case here that maximising output and finding more appropriate ways of measuring it are still the best method of improving the standard of living. And there's much to be said for this - why devote a lot of resources to developing more sophisticated measures of well-being when, for the most part, rising levels of GDP are associated with higher levels of welfare, not least in terms of improving consumer choice.