Yes. There is nothing new about the media's concentration on trying to keeps us as miserable as possible.

I agree that the media's 'body count' idea of news gives an unrealistically negative view of things, but ..... this article is also unbalanced in a Pollyanna-ish way.

Norberg can write in one paragraph "And scholars write books saying that we are all sad and depressed." but then later write "We used to worry about everybody who was depressed, now new antidepressant drugs have reduced suicide in rich countries by one-fifth. And so we worry about so many people taking pills." So there's no problem ??

Norberg is wrong to think that everything that has happened in the last 200 years only had benefits, and we would be wrong to recreate circumstances that we have had to remedy already.

What a load of s..t. Johan may be wealthy, healthy and happy, but if he ever has to live in the real world, God help him, poverty, depression, this man has no idea

The point that Johan Norberg misses, and it is a pretty major point, is that the world could, with some applied intelligence and compassion, be a much better place than it now is. Sure, technologies has made us happier, wealthier and healthier but we could do much better. A car running on three cylinders is still better than a horse - but wouldn't it be so much better running on all four cylinders? That is why many of us get depressed about the current state of affairs on this planet. It's not good enough to just say we're better off - we should be doing much more to help global equality and sustainability.

Why am I not surprised that Johan Norberg has not lived up to the hype that preceded his arrival in Australia?

The best answer to this claptrap can be found in Ronald Wright's brilliant and short "A short history of progress" (132pp excluding the index and extensive notes) :

"To undermine this (post-war) consensus and return to archaic political patterns is to walk back into the bloody past. Yet that is what the New Right has achieved since the late 1970's, rewrapping old ideas as new and using them to transfer power from elected governments to unelected corporations - a project sold as 'tax-cutting' and 'deregulation' by the right's courtiers in the media ... The conceit of laissez-faire economics - that if you let the horses guzzle enough oats, something will go through to the sparrows - has been tried many times and has failed many times, leaving ruin and social wreckage."

Sysyphus,

Whilst the point you make is valid, I think you are making a mistake, typical of left critics of neo-liberalism, of accepting that we are 'better off' in a material sense.

The globalised economy, run largely under the principles of neo-liberal economics, is destroying the natural capital built up over tens, if not hundreds of millions of years, most notably our reserves of fossil fuels, half of which have been stupidly and wastefully burnt off in less than two hundred years, which is only blink of the eye in terms of total human history.

If some of us are temporarily 'better off' we are only 'better off' only in the sense that any one of us (or at least any one of us who owns our own home) could be 'better off' if we sold our home in order to buy electronic entertainment equipment, whitegoods, a new car and to travel overseas for a couple of years.

The raw materials which we are now plundering from the earth are being wasted so profligately that many of us today, and not just our descendents, are missing out on much their potential benefits.

Our manufacturers find it necessary to build artefacts which last only ten years if we are lucky, instead of many decades as seemed to be possible early last century, so consumers have to pay far more than should be necessary.

Planning of our cities has been taken out of the hands of our governments and placed in the hands of of property speculators and developers, so that today vast quantities of non-renewable petroleum resources are wasted by hundreds of millions of commuters travelling daily in gridlocked conditions over long distances, when it should have been possible to have our cities designed to have most workers living within cycling distance from their work.

These are just two of the many obvious inefficiencies of our economic system which are concealed from us by the GDP measure, which mouthpieces for corporations, such as Norberg are using in ways against which Simon Kuznets, the GDP's originator, warned in 1934.