Gross National Happiness- silly or legitimate?

Last Wednesday I went uptown to the Brookings Institute for an interesting event called “Measuring Happiness and Opportunity Around the World.”  This event, based on author Carol Graham’s book The Pursuit of Happiness: An Economy of Well-being, presented a new method to measure a country’s national progress: happiness.  Happiness is important- after all, in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. guarantees its citizens “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Policymakers are beginning to seriously consider the benefits of measuring happiness. 

A few slides were presented on the screen in front of us.  One of them was the image of a happiness curve, based on the data of South America, but the U-shaped curve is meant to apply worldwide.  The curve shows that people’s happiness generally forms a U-shaped curve, meaning that it decreases, but climbs back up after the age of 40.  The panelists provided other data relating to happiness, such as how happier people live longer, and that happiness is increased by stable partnerships and employment, which I guess is not so surprising.  However something I was surprised about is that people in a changing society where the citizens are trying to make change, are likely to be unhappy.  Another interesting fact I found depressing was that there is a “paradox of unhappy growth.”  This means that countries with rapid growth often have unhappy citizens.  This could be due to the increasing gap in income levels in a rapidly growing country, among other reasons.

Automatically I associate the phrase “rapid growth” with China, and so I instantly started thinking about my experiences with China and if I thought the “paradox of unhappy growth” could be accurately applied there.  I am no expert on China, but I know that people are much happier now than forty years ago, and this has a lot to do with the increased standard of living, due to the fast-growing economy.

Economic growth is often the main objective of politicians.  However the power of relationships and social context can greatly influence one’s happiness, and happiness is enormously important to citizens’ wellbeing.  Graham points out that economic growth and GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in particular, is too narrow of a perspective for policy since GDP does not look at relationships.  Some countries have already began to take happiness into account in making policy, such as Bhutan in their Ministry of Happiness, where they measure citizens’ happiness using a measure called Gross National Happiness.  I became interested in Bhutan and was curious to see how measuring happiness has influenced the country’s policy and the wellbeing of its citizens. Ignorance is bliss, and Bhutan was previously a very isolated country. Bhutan only started opening up to the world recently, such as getting its first internet connection in 1999.  A quote I found while looking up articles on Bhutan reads, "’TV and the Internet are very new to us, and their impact on family and society has not been fully understood,’ he says without hesitation. ‘After all, we are talking about a traditional society that only recently came out of isolation. We feel vulnerable. In the past, we always saw these threats in the form of physical occupation. But with TV and the Internet, we must now fear a new threat--a kind of aerial threat.’[1] I do not have any profound concluding remarks about measuring happiness, or if I believe it should be seriously incorporated into policy.  After all, it is a subjective measurement that is complex and extremely difficult to try to quantify.  I am curious, however, to see how Bhutan and other countries fare who use this hard-to-measure, yet very significant human need into their policy-making.

Liz

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[1] Dorji, Kinley. “Bhutan- The Last Place. Gross National Happiness.” May 2002
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/bhutan/gnh.html