I find myself once again on the side of Patrick Harvie. I spotted in The Scotsman on Friday that the co-convener of the Greens found himself in a bit of hot water for using Twitter while hob-nobbing with Gordon Brown and other politicians.

Tavish Scott bemoaned the poor manners of it. But a spokesperson for Jim Murphy (himself an occasional Twitter user was a bit more light-hearted, noting that it is normal for Greens to like birds, so it’s not unusual for Patrick Harvie to be tweeting.

Although The Scotsman article itself is not too scathing, immediately underneath was a comment piece by a curmudgeonly “etiquette guru” who says dislikes “antisocial BlackBerry use” because “it really is the worst sort of behaviour”. I don’t know about you, but I think someone takes it upon themselves to go around the place telling other people to behave is actually incredibly rude.

Richard Havers calls him a twit. But Jeff at SNP Tactical Voting doesn’t see the problem, and I have to agree. I wonder if there is a generational divide here. I can well understand why people might find it disconcerting for someone to occasionally prod on a gadget while at a social function.

But these devices are our umbilical cord to the world. Why be holed up in a room when you can be communicating with the world? I think people my age have a tacit understanding about the acceptable use of mobile phones in a social situation.

While I would certainly feel offended were it to happen during a one-to-one meeting, it is in the nature of discussions with larger numbers of people for everyone to find themselves not taking part in a conversation at some point or another. I would particularly be tempted if the conversation centred around that turgid game known as football, as Patrick Harvie found. It is not as though he was constantly plugged into Twitter. He only fired off seven tweets over the course of about three hours.

If you are not engaged in conversation, there is no harm in getting your mobile out. Everyone does it in larger gatherings, and from time to time I have even seen instances where almost everyone in the group is doing something on their mobile. It might seem odd, but it is not a demonstration of antisocial behaviour.

It is silly to call using Twitter antisocial. I never got this nation that using modern communication technologies is antisocial. In fact, it is the complete opposite. So Patrick Harvie decided to take a bit of time out from communicating with eight other people. But by posting to Twitter, he began communicating with his 100-odd followers. So which is more antisocial — ignoring the eight or ignoring the 100?

I also like Patrick Harvie’s point that it is those other 100+ people who are the important ones. If nothing else, the politician’s use of Twitter is a good demonstration of a desire to engage people in the political process, even if his contributions on the night were not always very serious.

Yesterday, the BBC’s coverage began on the premise that it was “too close to call” or that, if anything, the SNP had squeaked it. Jim Murphy was making his excuses early (and doing a fairly good job of it, it has to be said). Coming towards midnight, it became clearer that Labour had won. The SNP were saying they hoped to have halved Labour’s majority.

Even with that knowledge, the scale of Labour’s victory when it was finally announced amazed me. The SNP hadn’t even halved Labour’s majority. In fact, Labour’s vote actually went up from the 2005 General Election result. The only real consolation the SNP can have is that the swing was 5% from Labour to the SNP. Even so, that looks minuscule compared to the swing of 22.5% achieved just a few months ago in Glasgow East.

There are all sorts of reasons why the SNP will be disappointed with this result. First of all, Glenrothes must have been a target seat for them anyway, even before this by-election was announced, with the SNP having won the similar Fife Central seat in the 2007 Scottish Parliament election. When Labour was in its trough of popularity, the SNP must have thought Christmas had come early.

Labour’s campaign had seemed like a total shambles. I do not live in the constituency so I haven’t seen any of the literature, but I have heard some bad things about it. Sarah Brown’s well-publicised visit to Cardenden was a complete botch job, and Gordon Brown’s visit to a cafeteria wasn’t much better.

Labour did not need a superstar candidate either. Lindsay Roy is a very nervy and uncomfortable performer on the television. However, it looks as though that actually played into his hands. Labour emphasised the fact that Lindsay Roy is not a career politician, and his track record of being out in the “real world” helping out Fife’s schoolchildren must have gained him a few votes.

As an aside, I doubt that Lindsay Roy actually wanted to become MP. He certainly didn’t look overjoyed at having won, and even after it was clear that Labour had won his body language seemed pretty negative to me. I have heard it said that Lindsay Roy wanted to retire from headteaching anyway and that he saw this as the ideal opportunity to get an early retirement. He probably thought he had no chance of winning.

There is also the fact that the SNP Scottish Government was still in its honeymoon period. Some people are reluctant to say that the honeymoon is over, but there is no doubt that this is at least a slap in the face.

Let us not forget that one of the SNP’s flagship policies was designed to please Fifers in particular. The SNP must have thought that the abolition of bridge tolls would have secured a few votes in Fife. Glenrothes in particular is within comfortable commuting distance of both Edinburgh and Dundee, meaning that many residents will be frequent users of both the Forth and Tay Road Bridges. The fact that the voters of Glenrothes in particular have given the SNP the cold shoulder is a major snub.

Nationalists may counter that Fife is fertile territory for Labour. Time and again I saw pundits on the television saying that Labour benefited from a “halo effect” spilling over into Glenrothes. Fifers, apparently, are proud that Gordon Brown is Prime Minister.

Let me just say, as someone who has lived in Fife all my life, that this is a complete load of tosh. Since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, I have never heard anyone say that they are proud that the PM is a Fifer. In fact, I have sometimes heard people wonder out aloud how it could possibly be that Kirkcaldy can have such high unemployment when the Prime Minister represents the constituency. (I once heard someone say, referring to the perceived unwillingness of Gordon Brown to help his local area, that Kirkcaldy has the highest rate of unemployment in the country, although I doubt that.)

Fife is not Labour loopy. Yesterday there was the opportunity for three of the four constituencies in Fife to be represented by a party other than Labour, leaving just Gordon Brown’s seat in tact. That didn’t happen. But the fact is that the Kingdom of Fife has the capacity to elect any one of three parties. As such, Glenrothes’s decision to vote for Labour should not simply be batted away because it was supposedly as “safe seat”. According to Alex Salmond, there is no such thing as a safe Labour seat these days, and Glenrothes certainly wasn’t one for the reasons outlined above.

The SNP may complain about the negativity of Labour’s campaign. But they should be alarmed that it worked. In retrospect, the decision of the SNP to select Fife Council leader Peter Grant as candidate must be seen as a major tactical error. The Labour Party was able to tap into some real dissatisfaction that people have with Fife Council at the moment.

Because of the complexities of this situation, it is not exactly clear what message the voters were sending out. There is no doubt that there was a message of some sort. But was it a verdict on the Labour government in Westminster? Was it a vote of confidence in Gordon Brown? Was it about sending a message to Holyrood? Or was it about punishing the leader of Fife Council?

Whichever, the SNP should take this seriously. I have no reason to doubt that they will, and the reaction from SNP members’ blogs is sober and reflective (see, for instance, Richard Thomson). There was some real evidence that the SNP were becoming complacent with their position. In the run-up to the election it was looking as though the SNP was giddy on power.

Alex Salmond’s supreme confidence was completely misplaced. And his attempt to attach himself to Barack Obama’s election as US President was crass in the extreme. Voters can smell this sort of thing a mile off, and I’d be amazed if it didn’t cost the SNP votes.

It is no longer enough to rely on the dissatisfaction with the Labour Party that many people have. With Labour’s vote having gone up, it’s pretty clear that they benefited from some serious tactical voting, with the Conservatives and the Lib Dems being squeezed. If this election shows anything, it is that while Labour are unpopular among many voters, the SNP are also loathed among many others.

A word on the Lib Dems, who must be very disappointed. For the second Scottish by-election in a row, they have come in fourth and lost their deposit. Glenrothes is practically sandwiched in between two Lib Dem constituencies — Dunfermline and West Fife and North East Fife. While there is no reason to automatically assume that the Lib Dems should therefore win Glenrothes, they must be disappointed by their complete inertia just now.

It is tough for smaller parties in by-elections anyway. But the current political climate cannot be doing them many favours. Despite PR, Scotland is beginning to look a bit like a two party system. In the 2007 Scottish Parliament elections, one of the biggest changes was the almost complete disappearance of the small parties. Now it looks as though both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems are wilting in a highly charged political atmosphere that pits the SNP versus Labour, leaving little room for much else.

In particular, the trouble that Iceland finds itself in has led Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy to jibe about how Alex Salmond’s “arc of prosperity” encompassing Ireland, Iceland and Norway has become an “arc of insolvency”. I also cheekily made a reference to Iceland last week.

Of course, supporters of independence rebut the notion of the “arc of insolvency”. The various arguments surrounding these issues will continue on until the cows come home. Whether it is really wise to compare Scotland to Iceland (being a country with a population of just 300,000) at all, whether or not Ireland will potentially be in similar bother, and so on.

I wonder, though, if too much attention is paid to economic indicators when it comes to the debate on independence. Sure, things like economic growth are nice and desirable in their own way. But they surely cannot be the be-all and end-all.

I’m thinking about happiness economics. This is a slightly controversial field for various reasons. Certainly, being a relatively new sub-field fraught with all kinds of hurdles that other disciplines don’t have to negotiate, its findings are pretty patchy.

A famous concept in happiness economics is the Easterlin Paradox. Part of the paradox is that after reaching a certain threshold, societies as a whole do not become happier as they become richer. What matters, apparently, is your wealth relative to others. So if everyone becomes richer and you stay the same place in the pecking order, you will be no happier. However, more recent research suggests that the Easterlin Paradox doesn’t actually exist.

The Freakonomics blog ran a series of interesting posts on this more recent research earlier this year. Because there is seemingly no easy way to navigate through them all I will link to them here: parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Despite contradictory findings and the various problems involved in researching people’s happiness, I think it’s important nonetheless for economists to study what makes people better off in broader terms rather than just assuming that well-being is a function of income. Certainly, even the more recent findings suggest that the relationship between happiness and income is far from simple.

A couple of interesting examples are relevant to the debate surrounding Scottish independence because they are both small countries. If you look in part 5 of the Freakonomics series, you will see nine graphs depicting the relationship between happiness and GDP. Ireland (part of the “arc of prosperity”) was very slow to become happier as GDP increased, though it did so, slightly, in the end. Meanwhile, Belgium’s happiness actually went down as GDP increased.

Whatever the pros and cons of studying happiness, it seems reasonable to suggest that there is more to life than just money. Certainly, it is an interesting thought experiment when it comes to considering the case for Scottish independence.

Cabalamat wrote recently on a comment on his blog: “I would probably support Scottish independence if the people calling for it had any coherent idea how to make Scotland richer. But they haven’t.” As you can probably guess from what I have written so far, I think this is a bit harsh.

Even though you probably won’t catch many people saying it, I am sure there are people who would happily accept a (slight) decrease in Scotland’s GDP as long as Scotland was independent. You might criticise these people, but if, as I have posited, life is not all about the money, it is a perfectly valid position to take.

For instance, I have often heard it said (and not just by nationalists) that Scottish people in general have had more confidence, more of a spring in their step, since Labour were kicked out last year. I don’t know whether that is true or not. I can’t say, personally, that I have noticed much difference in people’s behaviour since the SNP came into power. I am certainly not the sort of person who would become more confident just because the Yellow Party is in government and the Red Party isn’t. But if others do, then that is their prerogative, and who am I to judge that?

Similarly, it is often said that independence would have a host of other benefits besides any economic benefits there might be. For instance, some say that the people Scotland as a whole would become more confident, happier, prouder.

Whether or not you agree with that (and I have to say, I have my doubts), you have to admit that these are desirable goals of themselves, just as much as increased GDP is. As such, I would argue that it is reasonable to accept a trade-off in income if it gives you enough happiness to compensate for it. For this reason alone, I think the argument surrounding independence should hinge less on economic factors.

We all recognise this idea in a way. If everyone just focussed narrowly on money, we would all work 24 hour days and 7 day weeks. And while there are some people who like to work more than others, most of us like to have our leisure time which can boost our happiness. In so doing, we lose money by foregoing the wages that we would otherwise earn. And if we spend money on our leisure activities by going out or even by doing something as simple as using electricity, we lose even more money. But because it makes us happier, we do it. Indeed, if someone concluded that it was worth foregoing all of their leisure activities so that they could earn more money, you would probably think they were a bit of a dunce.

It is worth noting that Scotland has its own little Easterlin Paradox. Happiness in Scotland is lower than it is in England and Wales despite the fact that income is not substantially lower according to this paper (PDF link) by David Bell and David Blanchflower (found via Stumbling and Mumbling while searching for posts on happiness economics).

The fact that Scots are still unhappy relative to their neighbours suggests that Scotland’s problem is not just a deficient economy — it is a deficient people. Of course, independence would not let Scotland shed its “sick man” label overnight.

But if independence can contribute to an increase in the happiness alone of Scottish people, then it will have been of benefit. I’m not saying that independence would. But it’s interesting to think about.