You’ve never been better off. So why aren’t you happy?

“How good’s Australia?!” asked the Treasurer. “So good!” exclaimed the data rounded up by the treasury. But Australians are still feeling a bit glum.

OK, so Jim Chalmers didn’t actually ask that Morrisonian question the way I’ve painted it, accompanied by a broad grin and a folksy thumbs up. He didn’t ask it in so many words at all. Instead, he summoned a set of metrics that would reveal how well Australia is tracking on measures more directly relatable to people’s lives beyond the cold hard parameters of gross domestic product.

And what the data reveals is that on most objective measures, life in Australia has been improving over the past few decades.

But subjectively we don’t feel like things are getting better.

Swedish author and classical liberal historian of ideas Johan Norberg has made it his lifelong mission to tackle this discrepancy between the objective and the subjective by gathering and presenting data. Over the course of half a dozen books, with titles including Progress, he’s demonstrated that countries that liberalise their economies become prosperous and improve people’s lives on nearly every imaginable measure.

Despite the nit-picking of conservatives and Liberals, the document that Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers launched last Friday, Measuring What Matters, reads less like “Ashram economics” and very much like the research brief for a new Norberg contribution, but focused on Australia.

Loading

Norberg’s latest book, published in June, is The Capitalist Manifesto, an exposition of the way capitalism and free markets have improved people’s lives and lifted even seemingly helpless countries out of poverty. It is also a defence of the prosperity that capitalism brings, which is not just monetary: one of the greatest gifts of human progress, Norberg argues, is that we now live long enough to see potential grandkids grow up.

In Chalmers’ own “Capitalist Manifesto”, we discover that life expectancy in Australia has increased over the last two decades, along with health-adjusted life expectancy. Sadly, longer lives and lifestyle factors have led to an increase in chronic conditions, such as coronary heart disease, cancer and diabetes. But “men and women born in 2022 could expect to live an average of 88 per cent and 87 per cent of their lives in full health, respectively”.