Silly Concept of Gross National Happiness

Hi, I found this Article in one of the Blog pages. It is very old but still found very interesting to read. I generally do not copy the stuffs from another blog but for my beloved readers, I am copying this materials. Being a law student, I am very sensible about Copyright Laws. So, I want to clarify here that the copyright is entirely vested on the original writer whosoever he may be. This is copied here just as a fair use for critical reporting of the silly trend that one of the tiny nations in the world, The Kingdom of Bhutan, is using to fool the world. No Readers may copy this Article from here and I suggest you to follow the proper instructions to publish as may be mentioned by the Original Writer in the Blog. I suggest you to read the last comment of this Entry in the original blog where it has been published if you happened to visit that Blog as well.

Here it goes:
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What is happiness? In the United States and in many other industrialized countries, it is often equated with money.

Economists measure consumer confidence on the assumption that the resulting figure says something about progress and public welfare. The gross domestic product, or G.D.P., is routinely used as shorthand for the well-being of a nation.

But the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has been trying out a different idea.

In 1972, concerned about the problems afflicting other developing countries that focused only on economic growth, Bhutan’s newly crowned leader, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, decided to make his nation’s priority not its G.D.P. but its G.N.H., or gross national happiness.

When thinking about GDP and GNH, one has to be very careful about what one is aggregating. GDP is an accurate measure of what it measures: aggregate annual production of final goods and services in an economy denominated in monetary terms.

GDP does not aggregate cows, or beauty or whatever one may mistakenly think it does. Thus saying that the GDP does not accurately tell me anything about how many cows are in the economy, or complaining that GDP does not tell me anything about “the total amount of beauty is in an economy,” is as silly as saying that GDP does not tell me whether the people in the country are happy or not.

So those who make that complain are complaining that the tape measure is flawed because it does not help in figuring out the temperature of a liquid. It is not meant to do so in the first place.

Now there is something called happiness or satisfaction. A person can be said to be happy or satisfied. That is a feeling, a subjective experience. I can say that “I am happy” just like I can say “I am rich.” Those two look similar but the statements are qualitatively different. There is an objective validity to the statement “I am rich” because my wealth can be measured and verified externally. But happiness is subjective and does not allow interpersonal comparisons, while richness does. We can definitely say how A’s wealth compares to B’s wealth but cannot say how A’s happiness compares to B’s happiness.

If even interpersonal comparisons of happiness is mostly meaningless, attempting to define a measure which aggregates the “happiness” of millions of people clearly leaps over the bounds of the silly and lands somewhere in idiotic stupidity land.

I have never considered the GDP to be the end-all and be-all of an economy, any more than I consider the monthly income of a person to be the only relevant characteristic of a person. Perhaps some do, but then people believe in all sorts of silly stuff. Some economists do mess around with GDP growth rates and that is important, just like your tax accountant messes around with your income statements and your investments. Just because your income does not fully define you does not mean that your tax accountant is a myopic narrowminded individual or that the job of preparing your financial statement is meaningless.

I think that those who complain that GDP is not all that matters are making a valid but rather trivial complaint. I have yet to meet a single intelligent mature person–and most economists I have met fit that bill–who believes that GDP is anything more than a measure of economic activity and that too narrowly defined economic activity.

What I don’t understand is the attempt by the detractors of GDP aping a metric which they have perhaps misunderstood. They are in effect saying, “GDP does not measure happiness. So we must come up with an alternate aggregate measure we will call Gross National Happiness which will be more appropriate.”

That is Gross National Silliness."

Source: http://indianeconomy.org/2005/10/20/gross-national-happiness-is-grossly-silly/