Measuring Happiness
How can we measure a nation's well being? Most countries currently use the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – the sum of all economic activity or total market value – as an overall wellness indicator. Therefore, when the economy is in good health, factors such as oil spills, natural disasters, and high cancer rates get ignored.
In recent years, the Australian Treasury developed a "well-being framework," taking into consideration (i) the level of opportunity and freedom that people enjoy, (ii) the level of consumption possibilities, (iii) the distribution of those consumption possibilities, (iv) the level of risk that people are required to bear, and (v) the level of complexity that people are required to deal with. For the moment, Australia's new index will be used only as a descriptive tool, but could this be the first step towards policy change?
Other countries have attempted to look beyond GDP to evaluate the well-being of their citizens. Most notably, Bhutan's monarch declared in 1972 that the country's goal was to increase Gross National Happiness (GNH). Bhutan’s minister Dasho Meghraj Gurung stated that “The ideology of GNH connects Bhutan’s development goals with the pursuit of happiness. This means that the ideology reflects Bhutan’s vision on the purpose of human life, a vision that puts the individual’s self-cultivation at the center of the nation’s developmental goals, a primary priority for Bhutanese society as a whole as well as for the individual concerned.”
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Measuring Happiness
Ray Anderson, Chairman of Interface Global, the world's leading sustainable flooring company, spoke at the TED conference recently on the business case for Sustainability. In that presentation, he showed how Interface strives to run its company with a rewrite of Paul Erhlich's equation I = P x T x A for Ecological Footprint Impact. P is Population, T is Technology and A = affluence. Interface has already moved the T to the bottom of their equation by employing new technology and innovaton to dramatically reduce their footprint.
Anderson suggested that "H" should also be added to the bottom of the equation, which could dramatically reduce the Impact "I". "H" is for Happiness. As Happiness increases - through community relationships, a better balance of work and rest, spirituality, etc - then our need for more "stuff" to fill our emptiness is reduced, and the "A" of affluence can shrink to a small "a". Impact is lowered.
I suggest that instead of GDP to measure the success of our economies, we change to a new measure: NEW - Net Equitable Well-being. Prison costs, expenditures for fighting drug use, military spending, all the negative costs should be listed in the minus ledger to create a "Net" value (vs Gross), and the Equitable distribution of wealth should be monitored to see if the economy is working for everyone. Well-being is measured in mental and physically health reports, increasing green space and leisure time off, number of neighborhood block parties, ratio of botchi-ball courts to TV's, etc. Well-being and Happiness are closely linked, and the greater they are in a society, the larger is the denominator in the equation of how we humans are affecting our earth.