Gross National Happiness

[LDAHL]

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-11-20/the-world-isn-t-ready-for-gross-national-happiness

I thought this was kind of interesting. I sometimes see the claim made that “this or that political/economic system is better because the citizens are happier”. I always thought that to be one of those nonsense arguments along the lines of “we’ve lost every war we’ve ever fought, and we can’t compete economically, but we produce the best poets”.

Apart from arriving at a practical metric (there doesn’t seem to be a good correlation between reported happiness and the incidence of suicide, for example), should government be in the happiness business? How would a bureaucracy be set up to define, regulate and redistribute happiness? Can courts make a decision on the basis of a right to happiness? As one commenter said, “Mixing economics with psychology, what could possibly go wrong?”

[catherine]

This is a topic that interests me, because I think that the whole premise of "the more we consume the happier we are" is simply faulty, and devastating to the planet. I would love to see people step back, just a little, from the current GDP economic paradigm and explore alternative measures--but I agree that using a "happiness meter" is problematic.

I didn't study the Bloomberg article, but I did read through it, and I think that the issue is, they are equating satiety with happiness, and the individual's response to getting what they want. There is not going to be any straight line correlation between "happiness" and economic health because everyone knows that there are less well-off people who are happy and rich people who are miserable. You can't legislate making people happy with what they have.

I think it's better to think about what are the basic elements of a well-adusted society, and what are the pillars that support that. Here is an article that defines those pillars:

http://www.gnhcentrebhutan.org/what-is-gnh/four-pillars-and-nine-domains/

Here are the nine domains:
Living standards
Education
Health
Environment
Community Vitality
Time-use
Psychological well-being
Good Governance
Cultural resilience and promotion

You see that psychological well-being is just one of the domains. The other domains will either be supported or diminished by the economic model. So in the kind of capitalism we have, one might say that living standards are OK but wildly inconsistent, education is OK but again, very inconsistent in terms of quality and access, health--forget about it--our system is completely dysfunctional from an economic and an efficacy standpoint, and so on.

If we see that several of these domains are not working, and we can point to the quest for more-more-more as a cause, then how do we reconstruct the paradigm to enable a new metric that takes into account these different elements of social well-being and prosperity in a broader sense?

Just rambling and thinking out loud. But yes, GDP is like taking your temperature, but not paying any attention to the health of the whole body. And just focusing on self-reported happiness is not going to do it either.

[Alan]

"If you're happy and you know it clap your hands"
Clap, Clap!

[Williamsmith]

Read the Preamble to the United States Constitution lately?

[catherine]

Read the Preamble to the United States Constitution lately?

Don't have to read it. We had to memorize it in school and I can still recite it. So the question is--is the GDP the right temperature gauge for that noble mission statement?

[LDAHL]

Read the Preamble to the United States Constitution lately?

The word "happiness" does not appear in the Preamble. You're probably confusing the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence, which refers to an "inalienable right" to "the pursuit of happiness". Saying governments cannot interfere with individuals pursuing their own conception of happiness is a far cry from setting up indexes to measure and policies to deliver something as subjective as an emotional state.

[LDAHL]

Don't have to read it. We had to memorize it in school and I can still recite it. So the question is--is the GDP the right temperature gauge for that noble mission statement?

They made you memorize the constitution? Wouldn't that fall under "cruel and unusual"?

[catherine]

They made you memorize the constitution? Wouldn't that fall under "cruel and unusual"?

Haha… it was just the Preamble. .. however, the nuns were known for "cruel and unusual" in other ways.

I also can recite all the prepositions in alphabetical order, and I can sing the states in alphabetical order.

[LDAHL]

Haha… it was just the Preamble. .. however, the nuns were known for "cruel and unusual" in other ways.

I also can recite all the prepositions in alphabetical order, and I can sing the states in alphabetical order.

They certainly managed to burn the Ave Maria and Pater Noster into my brain.

[catherine]

They certainly managed to burn the Ave Maria and Pater Noster into my brain.

Yup, those were the good old days!

[Williamsmith]

Not speaking for the Founders but as one son of the American Revolution I would say GDP be damned. They would come back and look for freedom. I'm afraid that metric would fall short of the mark.

[Alan]

Don't have to read it. We had to memorize it in school and I can still recite it.
I don't remember having to memorize it, but I did learn to sing it with my daughter.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30OyU4O80i4

[kib]

"happiness" as used in the constitution isn't precisely about personal well being, either. from http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/46460 ,

".. when John Locke, Samuel Johnson, and Thomas Jefferson wrote of “the pursuit of happiness,” they were invoking the Greek and Roman philosophical tradition in which happiness is bound up with the civic virtues of courage, moderation, and justice. The pursuit of happiness, therefore, is not merely a matter of achieving individual pleasure. That is why Alexander Hamilton and other founders referred to “social happiness.""

Taking the nation's temperature with GDP is like saying a temperature of 92 degrees is not good, and therefore a fever of 105 is better than 98.6. While GDH may be a rather subjective marker of social health and progress, it's certainly an improvement over GDP.

[Gregg]

".. when John Locke, Samuel Johnson, and Thomas Jefferson wrote of “the pursuit of happiness,” they were invoking the Greek and Roman philosophical tradition in which happiness is bound up with the civic virtues of courage, moderation, and justice. The pursuit of happiness, therefore, is not merely a matter of achieving individual pleasure. That is why Alexander Hamilton and other founders referred to “social happiness."

A pretty sensible approach that would probably still work today if it was given the chance. Unless we are talking about our elected officials I don't think courage is in short supply today, but moderation and justice are certainly open to debate. I'd be curious to see our GDO (Gross Domestic Opportunity) score if anyone wants to develop a metric for that.

[LDAHL]

Taking the nation's temperature with GDP is like saying a temperature of 92 degrees is not good, and therefore a fever of 105 is better than 98.6. While GDH may be a rather subjective marker of social health and progress, it's certainly an improvement over GDP.

While i wouldn't consider GDP to be the only measure of a given system's success, it at least has the advantage of being relatively objective. It's just a measure of economic activity. I don't have any particular objection to academics or interested groups creating any arbitrary measure they like of "happiness". Sillier things happen all the time.

I do think it would be ridiculous (and perhaps even dangerous) to cede government a role as the determiner and arbiter of individual happiness. Various aspects of physical well-being, perhaps, but not happiness.

[kib]

I don't think the government should play a role in happiness quotients per se, but their job is not to make humanity miserable at the benefit of the bottom line, either. A rise in the marker of how well we're doing when more people get cancer is ... inappropriate, IMHO.

[catherine]

Every day or every other day I listen to a 10-minute video on brianjohnson.me--a website that focuses on "optimal living"--self-improvement, achievement, etc. It has over 300 books, with "philosopher's notes" in various formats. I love it! I choose to watch the videos every day, because they're short--only 10 minutes. If I really like the content, I'll read the pdf which has more stuff in it, and if I REALLY REALLY like it, I'll get the book.

I've been tackling the 300 books in alphabetical order. I wasn't excited about the one that was next in the lineup for today--Flourish by Martin Seligman: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being, but actually it had a couple of interesting points--and there's actually a part that relates to this topic. Here is the excerpt from Brian Johnson's notes on Seligman's book:


MEASURING GDP VS. WELL-BEING
“Gross domestic product measures the volume of goods and services that are produced and consumed, and any events that increase that volume increase the GDP. It does not matter if those events happen to decrease the quality of life. Every time there is a divorce, the GDP goes up. Every time two automobiles collide, the GDP goes up. The more people who scarf down antidepressants, the more the GDP goes up. More police protection and longer commutes to
work raise the GDP even though they may lower the quality of life. Economists, humorlessly, call these “regrettables.” Cigarette sales and casino profits are included in the GDP. Some entire industries, such as law, psychotherapy, and drugs, prosper as misery increases. This is not to say that lawyers, psychotherapists, and drug companies are bad, but rather that GDP is blind when it comes to whether it is human suffering or human thriving that increases the volume of goods and services.
This divergence between well-being and gross domestic product can be quantified. Life satisfaction in the United States has been flat for fifty years even though GDP has tripled.
Even scarier, measures of ill-being have not declined as gross domestic product has increased; they have gotten much worse. Depression rates have increased tenfold over the last fifty years in the United States. This is true of every wealthy nation, and, importantly, it is not of poor nations.”

This is all part of a much longer chat we don’t have the space to go into here but Seligman concludes the book with a chapter called “The Politics and Economics of Well-Being” where he talks about the opportunities of “Positive Business” and the need to find a better way to keep score of how we’re doing on a national and global level that combines both wealth AND well-being. He calls it the “New Prosperity.” Powerful stuff.
The bottom line: We need to make the cultivation of well-being an integral part of every aspect of our lives and culture—from business and media to government and education!

Not sure if you can access the link if you're not a member of the site, but here it is. https://brianjohnson.me/philosophers-notes/flourish/

[leslieann]

Wow, Catherine, now I'm happy that I checked in here. Thanks for this...

I recently read a book about how our physical evolution has not kept up with cultural evolution and how the resulting mismatches create health and social problems. One thing that stuck out for me was the author's assertion that we have learned to confuse comfort with well-being. Many highly desired objects and activities support comfort but are actually not really good for us (humans) in terms of overall well being. He wasn't talking about obvious things like alcohol use but others like soft mattresses and pillows, comfortable shoes, electric lights. I keep thinking that we actually have lost any measure of what is good for us...because in our subjective view, we confuse how we "feel" emotionally with well-being. (This is taken to an extreme with what I see as an apparent epidemic of anxiety and mood disorders in adolescents, who maybe actually don't realize that discomfort isn't the same thing as pain).

Anyway, I hope that's not totally off topic (could be; I am on my second cup of coffee) but I am going to check out Brian Johnson. Thanks.