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Bhutan's Gross National Happiness:An Economic Reality or Wishful Thinking ?
Odds with the Traditional Yardstick Cont..
Tibor Scitovsky, in his book The Joyless Economy: The Psychology of Human Satisfaction, has pointed out that the high level of income may rather reduce happiness. Increasing income affords continuous flow of comforts and thereby prevents happiness that springs from incomplete satisfaction of desires.15 Evidences from various countries suggest that income is not the only source of happiness. It is merely one among the various sources of happiness and not even the most important one. Health, marriage, family life, living circumstances, environment, leisure, work conditions have greater influence on happiness. Researcher Rebecca North of the University of Texas at Austin analysed data from 1981 to 1991 in a study involving 274 married adults living in San Francisco Bay area. The analysis of this decade-long data indicated that happiness was tied far more strongly to family relationship than to income.16 Similarly, a number of studies revealed that happiness holds a far more robust relationship with health compared to income. Even when money does promote happiness, it does so when spent pro-socially for others. As discovered by HBS professor Michael Norton, people with the comfortable financial positions draw happiness when they spent their money on purchasing gifts for friends or making donations to charities rather than spending on themselves.17
Call for a New MeasureThe very fact that GDP and happiness do not move in lockstep necessitated the quest for a new measure that would better mirror happiness. In 1972, Prof. William Nordhaus and James Tobin suggested a new measure called Measure of Economic Welfare (MEW)18 by introducing certain modifications to GDP. Around mid-1990s, in a similar vein, a group of Canadian experts headed by Prof. R. Colman recommended the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) by making certain additions (e.g., the value of household work), certain subtractions (e.g., the cost of pollution), and certain adjustments (e.g., income distribution) in GNP. GPI incorporated 26 variables covering social, economic and environmental aspects. In 1995, under UNDP sponsorship, Prof. Mahbub-ul-Haq, with the help from fellow economist prof. A.K. Sen, developed the Human Development Index (HDI), which enlarged the ambit of the conventional measure by including the life expectancy and educational attainments reflecting the quality of life (Exhibit III). However, all these measures of progress are extensions of the existing conventional measure. They gauge important external indicators of well-being but not the internal well-being itself. These expanded yardsticks, therefore, do not cure the problem although they obviously do offer wider band-aids. |
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Concept of GNH
In the early 1970s, when the idea of GNH was mooted by the fourth Bhutanese monarch, it was initially dismissed by outsiders as a throw-away comment by a newly crowned leader to conceal Bhutan's poor economic performance on the existing yardstick. Some have derided that it is a case of twisting the statistics with fuzzy qualitative elements, when statistics tell a story that is unpleasant to hear. But GNH kept attracting increasing attention as Bhutanese Royal Government started articulating the concept and orienting its policies towards this guiding force.
15] Guven C. and Sorensen Bent E., “Subjective Well-Being: Keeping up with the Joneses – Real or Perceived?”, Incomplete and
Preliminary Draft, January 2007, page 2
16] Boyles S., “For Happiness, Seek Family, Not Fortune”, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/19/health/webmd/
main4196906.shtml, June 20th 2008
17] Gilbert Sarah Jane, “Spending on Happiness”, http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5944.html, June 2nd 2008,
18] Nordhaus William D. and Tobin James, “Is Growth Obsolete”, http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cp/p03b/p0398a.pdf, 1972
