Gross National Happiness

Economists’ continued stranglehold on political discourse is troublesome considering that the unanticipated rise of the Great Recession exposed deep-seated flaws in their theories. What we need is a way of empowering other disciplines and forms of knowledge within the political arena. To this end, policymakers’ steps towards embracing the idea of measuring “Gross National Happiness” are a welcome development.

Since the financial downturn in 2008, economists have spent many moons wringing their hands trying to explain why they didn’t see it coming and writing papers trying to correct their formulas. Other critics have been less generous. Prominent intellectuals such as The New York Times’ David Brooks and Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman have gone so far as to argue that economics is more art than science. This is not to say that economics is useless; much of America’s growth over the past century is due to good economic theories. But the fact that few major economists saw the downturn coming should give us pause as to whether we should be further empowering them to dominate policy circles. What is needed is a little more balance.

This egalitarian goal has proved surprisingly difficult to achieve largely because so much of our understanding of the state of the country is based around economic measurements. We all understand that monetary success is only one possible measurement of our national health. But because we have only developed economic measurements for national well-being, we pretend that it is the only measurement that counts. And, because these are the measurements that count, we are forced to rely on economic forms of knowledge.

In recognition of this conundrum, policy heavyweights have begun to endorse the idea of collecting more detailed information on national well-being in order to gain a picture of GNH. The idea first took root in Bhutan, a country in which every national policy is measured according to its impact on GNH. The Economist reports that in 2008, French President Nicolas Sarkozy invited two Nobel Prize winning economists — Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen — to develop “a broader measure of national contentedness than GDP.” In November 2010, British Prime Minister David Cameron instructed his government to begin collecting figures on general well-being.

Closer to home, Princeton professors Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, and Alan Krueger, Former US Department of Treasury chief economist, have proposed that the government begin to regularly collect GNH-related data. For example, they suggest asking people how much time they spend on different activities during the day and then asking them about their emotional state during that activity. Not surprisingly, their results show that people don’t really enjoy work and do enjoy sex. More usefully, their results also show that people spend a fair amount of time commuting and hate that part of their lives. Therefore, they suggest, the government should work to maximize national well-being by investing in high-speed transportation.

This demonstrates how a national accounting that included smiles and frowns alongside dollars and cents might provide new justifications for policy makers to endorse worthwhile initiatives. Currently, almost no one talks about long commutes as a national priority. But they might if we started collecting statistics that showed it was one.

Of course, the major challenge in developing some sort of GNH — or any general accounting for emotional well-being — is how one might define “happiness.” This is a rather difficult question. Thankfully, in order to answer it, we need to rely on knowledge from all sorts of disciplines — psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and, yes, even economics. All of these disciplines can play an important role in helping policy makers learn about how people think about their own well-being, the terms that people use to describe their own emotional states and the activities that make people in different cultures happy. Each individual’s understanding of happiness is tied to culture, biology and individual subjective values.

This is the larger implication of the recent small steps that Western governments have taken towards embracing some variation of the GNH; it has the potential to dethrone the troubled field of economics and put it back on equal footing with all the other disciplines. This alone is reason enough to give the GNH serious consideration.