How Does Happiness Measure Up in Development?

Happiness is everywhere in development these days. France called in a team of hotshot economists to reorient its economic policy and now the Prime Minister of the UK says he wants to develop a happiness measurement for the UK. But before France, and before the UK, the idea of happiness was making a name for itself in a much smaller and out of the way place—Bhutan.

Gross National Happiness (GNH), the Bhutanese incarnation of the idea, came about after the 4^th King’s glib remark about the limits of Gross National Product (GNP). GNP was the dominant measurement of development at the time, one very similar to GDP. Bhutan, the king said, cared more about GNH than GNP, because economic growth alone was not what was important. Even back in the 1970s when he made the comment, Bhutan’s king was far from the first to remark on the limitations of GNP, GDP, and the models of economic growth that accompanied them. Many before had noted that GNP and its successor GDP left out negative externalities, environmental impacts, and inequality.

The main point of GNH was that it questioned the ends of development and the conventional wisdom of the time. Should we place limits on growth? Was economic output the only measurement that concerned a developing country? What should a just society look like? In Bhutan’s case these were more about Bhutan’s development and direction. In fact Bhutan developed its own vision of development that included inequality, the environment, and cultural preservation alongside economic growth. Although designed for Bhutan, the thinking behind it was more broadly relevant which is part of the reason I think it caught on globally.

Word to the wise: Do not try to pay your hotel bill in happiness.

What GNH did, essentially, was remind us that it is not wealth itself we value, but what it brings us and our concern should be on how well we are meeting those ends. To get old school for a minute, this insight goes all the way back to Aristotle. In Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle states that “wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful for the sake of something else.” It is also an insight that has not been lost on some modern economists—Amartya Sen’s work comes to mind.

However, recently in Bhutan, as well as in France and the UK, the idea of GNH has been reduced to a metric. This is, I think, a problem for several reasons. To begin, economics and economists already have alternative metrics to deal with other elements of development we may care about. For inequality, there are measurements like the Gini coefficient, and for the environment, well, there's a lot of literature devoted to just how to value the environment and its degradation. Similarly, there are a plethora of alternative measurements for development, PQLI and HDI to name two, that try to incorporate elements of development other than economic output. So, to begin with I’m skeptical about the need for another metric.

Perhaps more fundamentally, there’s the problem of measuring happiness itself. I have to admit the very idea of measuring happiness as a basis of economic policy is preposterous to me. Much like Catherine Bennet at The Guardian and Jamie Whyte at the Wall Street Journal, I find serious problems with the idea of a standardized definition of happiness, both across individuals and cultures within a society and for those individuals and cultures across time.

In Bhutan this obsession with measurement has led to some fairly absurd consequences. The GNH survey conducted here consists of thousands of questions that take a ridiculously long time to administer. To give you an idea, the shortening of the survey is described like this on the official website: “The pilot survey questionnaire, which was found to be too lengthy, was pared down to a questionnaire that took half a day to interview.” A half a day still seems like an unreasonably long survey to me. The are other problems with the survey, which I invite you to explore.

But aside from the specific problems with a GNH survey in Bhutan or the difficulty measuring happiness in general there is something else that bothers me about this way of incorporating happiness into development. To begin, it shifts development from an open and complex discussion about what the ends of development should be and whether they have been achieved to a simple calculation. Instead of discussing just or fair development, or, to note Brad’s post, whether we care about the environment and other species as ends in themselves, and then evaluating, we merely have to see if our GNH index has gone up.

The second problem is that a GNH metric opens itself up for fundamentally undemocratic misuse. On the one hand, the metric moves discussions of the good life off the table and assumes whoever designed the metric knows what happiness is. Jamie Whyte (mentioned earlier) at the Wall Street Journal notes this is fundamentally illiberal and authoritative. But the other problem is that it opens the possibility of dismissing social problems. Much to my chagrin, my American-written sociology textbook here in Bhutan told my students that people in slums in India were poor, but happy and basically okay with their lot in life. A GNH index that “proves” this with numbers, I worry, would make it all the easier to dismiss concerns like poverty or the slashing of social programs because people are "happy" without them.