Goods = Happiness

The use of the word "goods" to denote the saleable products of human activity reveals some very deep assumptions.
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First, harking back to agriculture, it suggests that goodness comes from human manipulation of nature and not from nature itself.
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A good is something produced, extracted from its original place in the ground, the water, or the forest and then subjected to other forms of processing.
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Unimproved, nature is not good.
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Oil in the ground or a forest left standing are invisible to economic accounting: they are not yet "goods", just as unpaid mothering is not yet a "service".
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A second implication is that if something is good, it can be assigned a price—commoditized, bought, and sold.
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Got that?
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Our definition of a "good" is that it is exchanged for money.
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Money = Good.
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That some good things are not yet commodities merely means that the conversion of social, cultural, spiritual, and natural capital is not yet complete.
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Good news for anyone but an economist.
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From the economist's point of view, the equation of economic growth with more and more "goods" adds a note of moral imperative to the quest for economic growth.
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More and more goodness, goods = more and more happiness.
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Do you still believe that?
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Charles Eisenstein