Body and Soul: The pursuit of happiness

This classic post from yesterday in the excellent blog Body and Soul is about human scale economics, what you have vs. what you own. It really hit me right where I live. This is an absolute must-read, and it is right on target for the sort of thing I would now be publishing if I had pursued my dream to be an academic economist. My grand thesis which never happened was based on this tantalising paradox: economics started out as a branch of philosophy that was concerned with the human drive to be happy. It is now called, half-affectionately and half-disparagingly, "the dismal science". How did this branch of knowledge transform itself from the art of happiness to the science of immiseration? Ah, that's a very good question ...