The primary cause of unhappiness in Britain is not lack of material wealth but a loss of faith in God and religion, a group of MPs says today. In a new report on wellbeing, a crossparty group of Christian MPs echoes concerns raised by the Conservative leader, David Cameron, who has emphasised repeatedly the importance of action to improve society’s sense of “wellbeing”. They say that the Christian voice is not being respected properly because it comes across too often as “negative”.

Steve Webb, a Liberal Democrat MP, said: “Over the years, many of us who are MPs rooted in the Christian community have been concerned that our voice in the public square can come across as being too negative.

“We are easily identified by what we are against, but less clear what we are for.” He said that, despite material wealth, society lacked a sense of wellbeing. He argued that this had been caused by the erosion of religious values.

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[…] It is time for politicians to start focusing on the politics of wellbeing rather than the politics of wealth, one of the world’s leading psychologists told an audience in Auckland last night (April 22).Professor Martin Seligman, the pioneer of positive psychology, told an audience of 150 people attending a lecture at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, sponsored by Human Resource consultancy the Foresight Institute, that creating wealth was no longer enough.

Despite countries such as New Zealand, Australia and the United States being wealthier than ever before, they were all experiencing epidemics of depression, he said. New Zealand scored particularly badly in world rankings of wellbeing, usually placed at around 22 or 23, compared with Australia, which was usually placed around 8.

“Why is there so much pessimism and depression and lack of wellbeing?” he asked. “Given the prosperity of your nation, and given what’s happened in the past century, why is there so much depression? Depression is probably 20 times more common than it was 50 years ago.

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Luckily the annual Australian Unity wellbeing index - the statistical smile tracker - was released this week, which helped shed some light on this consumerist conundrum.

The what-makes-us-happy report discovered that happiness starts to stall as household income passes $100,000.

According to the authors, once you crack six figures “money loses its ability to reliably raise wellbeing and does not increase in line with increasing income”.

Which makes perfect sense. It’s a fancy way of describing what I call the economics of enough.

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