Why Oh Why Can’t DeLong Think Clearly, Like Sanchez?

I'm not Schmoopie, you're Schmoopie.

It took TV news 50 years to slide into irrelevance by beginning the practice of having one reporter interview another and calling it news.

Bloggers seem to have reached a similar point of irrelevance in just a few years.

*Yawn* Wake me up when the next fad of "intelligent" discourse hits the web...this one is over.

Scanning over the various extracts it seems to me that the dispute stems from Layard's incoherence in the first place (which supports your position re: Happiness, but i'm not sure your rebuttal of the 'Happiness... is self-evidently good' paragraph is right).

If we assume that Layard is making a rather clumsy attempt at using a utilitarian definition of happiness wherein happiness is caused by the satisfaction of preferences then happiness, rather than being a good thing itself, is the tool we use to measure what is good.

Treating it both as the way we measure good things and a self-evidently good thing creates one of those awkward logical loops whereby we seek happiness because we know that it's good, and we know that it's good because it makes us happy.