William Davies, “The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being” (Verso, 2015)

William Davies, “The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being” (Verso, 2015)

Are you happy? In his new book The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (Verso, 2015), William Davies, a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, critically investigates this question. The book offers skepticism towardsthe demand that economy and society be happy, skepticism founded in an interrogation of the practices of contemporary government and businesses. A whole range of our everyday experiences, including ‘nudges’ for citizens and staff, the perverse incentives of metrics, through tothe consequences of how psychiatry classifies depression, are subject to critical scrutiny.Moreover, the book acts as a primer on economics, psychology and organizational theory, clearly articulating the roots and the consequences of our current economic and social settlement. The book concludes with the possibility of a more democratic way of organizing the world, in contrast to our impersonal, oppressive, and data driven present. Dr Davies is a co-director of Goldsmiths’ Political Economy Research Centre and blogs at Potlatch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Episoder(2157)

Kerry Gottlich, "From Frontiers to Borders: How Colonial Technicians Created Modern Territoriality" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Kerry Gottlich, "From Frontiers to Borders: How Colonial Technicians Created Modern Territoriality" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

How did modern territoriality emerge and what are its consequences? From Frontiers to Borders: How Colonial Technicians Created Modern Territoriality (Cambridge UP, 2025) examines these key questions ...

14 Jan 1h 14min

Angie Hobbs, "Why Plato Matters Now" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Angie Hobbs, "Why Plato Matters Now" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Does Plato matter? An ancient philosopher whose work has inspired and informed countless thinkers and poets across the centuries, his ideas are no longer taught as widely as they once were. But, as An...

14 Jan 1h 18min

Mercedes Valmisa, "All Things Act" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mercedes Valmisa, "All Things Act" (Oxford UP, 2025)

All Things Act explores the collective character of action to expand the ways we think about agency. First, it resists viewing agency as a capacity, much less one exclusive to humans. Instead, it defi...

13 Jan 56min

Dagmar Herzog, "The New Fascist Body" (Wirklichkeit Books, 2025)

Dagmar Herzog, "The New Fascist Body" (Wirklichkeit Books, 2025)

The success of new far-right movements cannot be explained by fear or rage alone – the pleasures of aggression and violence are just as essential. As such, racism is particularly intense when it is er...

13 Jan 1h 4min

Matthijs Lok, "Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Matthijs Lok, "Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenment, and counter-enlightened conservative nationalists extol...

12 Jan 56min

J. Logan Smilges, "Crip Negativity" (U of Minnesota Press, 2023)

J. Logan Smilges, "Crip Negativity" (U of Minnesota Press, 2023)

In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativ...

10 Jan 57min

Caitlin Vincent, "Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future" (Simon and Schuster, 2026)

Caitlin Vincent, "Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future" (Simon and Schuster, 2026)

How can cultural industries survive in the twenty-first century? In Opera Wars Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future Caitlin Vincent, a Senior Lecturer in Creative Industries at the...

9 Jan 40min

Keidrick Roy, "American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Keidrick Roy, "American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World. What they saw was a racially stratified c...

8 Jan 51min

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