And so, the cynical UK press react to Action For Happiness.
Commentators dissect Action for Happiness, a campaign to boost the world's well-being, which was launched on Tuesday.
Anthony Seldon explains in the Telegraph why he helped found Action for Happiness:
"It encourages personal responsibility by promoting healthy living, and actively discourages smoking, excessive drinking and the taking of drugs except when absolutely necessary. Finally, the agenda promotes productivity. Many studies have shown that companies which look after their employees well flourish economically and that is exactly what the movement is designed to achieve...
"I wonder, in conclusion, whether all those who sneer at happiness and well-being would do so if their own children developed anorexia or the many other mental afflictions which are increasingly blighting the lives of young people. The right needs to wise up: this agenda is here to stay."
The Guardian's editorial says if smiling becomes policy then politicians may face painful questions:
"It should be admitted at the outset that Action for Happiness offers latter-day sceptics (whether following Nietzsche or not) plenty of targets to have a pop at. There is the grandiosity of that self-description - splendidly undercut by the prosaicness of the "twenty practical actions for happiness", which urges people to hug each other, exercise more often and say thank you more often.
"So far, so fluffy. But there is more substance to the happiness movement, as evidenced by the people behind it - including the LSE economist Richard Layard, and Geoff Mulgan, the former director of the government's strategy unit."
Sandra Parsons suggests in the Daily Mail that the key to happiness is being a little less selfish:
"I doubt somehow that the answers will make him all that happy. Because these days too many people think they're entitled to happiness. Happiness is having even more possessions, sexual satisfaction, success at work, status. It's what you can have, rather than what you can give, which means, by definition, that we can never be content."
In the Guardian Simon Jenkins recommends the "happiness lobby" should focus on local authorities and drugs:
"Research indicates that people are more satisfied with services the closer they are run to their community, as with clinics in Scandinavia or police in Japan. They are happier where they are allowed more personal and neighbourhood autonomy. Yet all British governments, national and local, remain implacably opposed to honouring this satisfaction. They do not trust people to tax and provide locally.
"Likewise, there is a clear preference for smallness and intimacy in public institutions. People like small schools and small hospitals. They like their own GPs rather than group practices. Yet every move by government is in the direction of bigness, closing local schools and hospitals and aiming always at regional concentration.
In the Independent Cristina Patterson says it was a bad time to launch Action for Happiness:
"You might think that a year when a government is cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs, decimating public services and preparing to throw thousands of people out of their council homes, isn't an ideal time to be finding out whether those people start each day by whistling a happy tune. You might think that those people might feel a bit like they did when they heard that the Prime Minister, who is a multi-millionaire, took his wife, perhaps for the first time in her life, or his, on a Ryanair flight.
"You might think that those people might also feel like they did when they heard him say that he wanted us to 'bring out the bunting' to celebrate the wedding of a nice young man to an alarmingly thin young woman. You might think, in other words, that those people might feel just a tiny bit patronised."
From www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/seealso/2011/04/daily_view_the_politics_of_hap.html
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