Measures of Happiness?

This week we talked about the Happy Planet Index (which makes me want to drink juice) and how it is calculated. It’s one of those measures that provide a number output that indicates how happy a country or community is. It looks like this:

HPI = General Satisfaction X Life expectancy
Ecological Footprint

From a sustainability and community relations point of view, this is an interesting measure. The intent of it is to rate a country based of the three factors and provide a number that can be compared to other countries. However, it’s possible for countries to achieve comparable scores for totally different reasons. For instance, a country with a high life expectancy, and high ecological footprint (e.g. Canada/USA) can have the same score as a country with a lower life expectancy, and a very low ecological footprint (Countries of Africa). This to me is a pretty significant flaw in the calculation. As a result, I decided to see what other happiness indexes I could find. There’s the GINI index (Ling, 2009), and Gross National Happiness (GNH) as outlined by the Centre for Bhutan Studies (Centre of Bhutan Studies, 2008).

The GINI index is based on the distribution of wealth across a country. On a scale of 1, the lower the score the better the distribution of income among the population - if it’s 1 then one person has all the wealth (Ling, 2009). From an economics point of view, the happiness of a community or an individual is a measure of how you compared to others (Krusekopf, 2009). As such, the GINI index seems like it would be a pretty accurate measure of how happy the community may be. The flaw is that is doesn’t take into account any environment al factors. Of course, to an extent, environmental degradation, etc. may not matter to a community (to a point).

GNH is a VERY thorough calculation of happiness. It has 11 different indicators that all contribute to a score of 1. Here are a few of the indicators: Time use, community vitality, cutlure, health, education, environmental diversity, living standard, governance, phychological well-being (Centre fo Bhutan Studies, 2008).

I can’t even begin to go into how it’s calculated, but again, it has the same flaws as the HPI. If it has high scores in certain areas, it may offset low scores elsewhere (Centre fo Bhutan Studies, 2008).

I suppose there are intrinsic difficulties in trying to quantitatively measure something so intangible. Perhaps measures like this should be kept separate and analysed that way. Regardless of the flaws, however, setting goals to achieve high or good ratings in any of these models could go a long way to building a happy community. After all, isn't that what people all over the world have in common?

Works Cited:

Centre for Bhutan Studies. (2008). GHN Methodology. Retreived February 8t, 2009 from http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/gnhIndex/intruductionGNH.aspx

Krusekopf, C. (2009). Environmental Economics. Lecture proceedings from Royal Roads University, Victoria, BC.

Ling, C. (2009). Social Capital in America. Lecture proceedings from Royal Roads University, Victoria, BC.