Christopher Fildes has a very funny column in the Telegraph, devoted to the discipline of hedonomics, or the dismal science with its own happy ending, as he calls it. When shares have gone up you can report that they are rising. When they have gone down you can report that they are cheap to buy. All news is good news is the basis of hedonomics, as practiced by our Chancellor, among many others.

This is the newly identified branch of economics which exists to show that every story has a happy ending. As so often happens, practice has been running far ahead of theory. Chancellors work on it, deal-makers live by it, tycoons try their luck with it. In the stock market, hedonomics finds its natural home.

Deal-makers profit from deals, so they talk up their advantages. Tycoons radiate optimism about what they can do for a company (in exchange for a small percentage of it). Buy! Deal! Trade! The news is always good.

Do not imagine that hedonomics is a mere phenomenon of the financial markets. Chancellors of the Exchequer have long relied on it to keep them out of trouble. It has let them describe runaway public spending as the social wage, or runaway inflation as a blip, or the frozen wastes of recession as the green shoots of recovery.

Hedonomics explains why our revised inflation index takes out housing (the biggest cost) and council tax (about to leap through the roof). Inflation as measured is better news than it feels like, and the same for the quality of our public services. As so often, the writer puts pungency into his humour.

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[footnote:
Christopher Fildes tells us he has been writing his Telegraph columns for 21 years, and that it is time to stop. We will miss them. He combined keen economic insight with real flair. Best of all, he was no respecter of powerful positions, and often treated the holders of them with skepticism and, when they deserved it, with scorn. Yet he leavened his humour with courtesy. Nobody did it better.]