I like Bhutan's constitutional adoption of "Gross National Happiness" as an alternative:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness
The whole "GNH" concept was created by McKinsey, contracted by Bhutan - I know the leads on that project. While it does bring in some level of national identity to rally around, I think the primary benefit it brings is in marketing. There are some meditation centers in Bhutan that charge more than $5K/day, targeted towards the extremely rich who have lost a sense of peace in their pursuit of wealth. This, of course, is a grand con - there's no happiness you're going to find in Bhutan that you can't find in your immediate surroundings.
New Zealand, on the other hand, I feel is doing a lot better. There's a general acceptance that communing with nature is important, while at the same time, they readily embrace modern comforts and continue building their economy. They're also attempting to build a better way to interact with natives and are creating programs such as EHF (ehf.org) to attempt to tackle the grand planet-wide problems, with impact as a focus.
True impact is impossible to measure with just any one number. Anyone who attempts to put a number to this will run into the trouble of that number getting gamed.
source? I searched around couldn't find anything resembling that. The closest I found was one source[1] which stated the king of Bhutan used the phrase "Gross National Happiness" in a 1971 speech, and that the country paid McKinsey $9M for a report in 2009[2].
[1] https://publicism.info/economics/invention/10.html
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bhutan/modernizing-bhutan...
But back to the topic, I think you're right about GNH and it's implications, especially when compared to Aotearoa and their efforts in establishing a more genuine level (rather than measure) of a literal 'national happiness'.
As a last touch, your comment (both words used, and in what it discusses) is comically ironic in that McKinsey is currently under investigation in my country for advising in a project that ended up landing us a few million dollars poorer and without a functioning public transport system that we could genuinely really benefit from right at the moment.
Our ruling Labour party (supposedly-but-not-really left-ish) does talk a lot about wellbeing budgets, but both our major parties are stuck in a neo-liberal trap where they refuse to allow national debt to get over 30% of GDP (crazy low by international standards), and also refuse to allow the tax ratio to get over that figure. This has meant that all our public services have been systematically underfunded for three decades, which has had a terrible impact on our poor. We like to smugly think that our Aussie neighbours are run by a bunch of knuckle-dragging troglodytes, but they have a vastly fairer tax system (see: https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/07-09-2022/lets-copy-and-p...) and welfare system. The British High Commissioner recently said it very well (see: https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/climate-news/300178615/o...): "You have Scandinavian ambitions in terms of quality of life and public services, but a US attitude to tax. The brand 100% Pure New Zealand lulled many into a false sense of security, when the environmental reality is far more challenging". Add to that the least affordable housing in the developed world (which politicians of all stripes refuse to touch), and the wellbeing of our less well-off is in a terrible state. If you are lucky enough to own a house, and have some money, you can live in a little bubble and pretend it's not happening to others here, but sadly you would be mistaken. God forbid you might need some of the dustier corners of the health or education systems, like having a kid with special needs.
Is this happening everywhere? Yes, it is, but I think there's a general perception that New Zealand is somehow better than a lot of other places, when in a lot of concrete, tangible, measurable ways it's actually significantly worse than most countries that we would like to compare ourselves to. I would struggle to recommend NZ as a place to move to for expats.
When comparing between populations, subjective measures such as surveyed happiness make for very poor and very noisy metrics - you often can’t even simply compare answers between different populations within a country. It is even dependent upon your age demographic https://archive.ph/sAzDA and there are some surprisingly counterintuitive properties to reported happiness: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlin_paradox
I would think that life expectancy is a poor metric, because: (1) the differences become smaller as it rises so it becomes dominated by noise, (2) it overvalues the last few years of life compared to the rest of a life, and (3) expectancy is highly dependent on how it is calculated along with parameters such as input factors, similar to those that you dislike!
In summary: intuition can often be a very poor substitute for research, and before relying on your intuition it is a good idea to look at the basics.
The whole point of having measurable metrics and models is that they allow the use of the scientific method in policy making, whilst asking random people in the street might just get different answers whether you are asking them during or after their lunch break.
A happiness index is hard to measure, agreed... but that's also not how GDP is used.
Policy-makers will say "our research shows lowering taxes will do X and increase GDP", or "our research shows raising taxes will do Y and increase GDP". That happens now. I don't think we usually actually manage to tie an actual law or policy, as implemented, back to a change in GDP pretty much ever. It's not really the scientific method.
What GDP gives us is a way to frame policy.
If our number were "National Happiness", policies would be framed in terms of that. "Increasing taxes lets us make this work better, and increases happiness" and "Decreasing taxes gives people more money, which increases happiness". The same policies, but framed differently, and with different arguments as a result.
That framing seems better to me, and how measurable and "scientific" it is seems like it would barely change.
>Policy-makers will say "our research shows lowering taxes will do X and increase GDP", or "our research shows raising taxes will do Y and increase GDP". That happens now. I don't think we usually actually manage to tie an actual law or policy, as implemented, back to a change in GDP pretty much ever. It's not really the scientific method.
Strong disagree on this. Policies aren't just framed on "GDP goes up, we should do it", they're framed on "GDP goes up by $x at the cost of $y, so we should do it". A policy that claims to increase GDP, but where $x is smaller than $y is going to get shot down even if it sounds good.
With GDP there's at least some way of checking your estimates. You can fudge your estimates up or down by changing your assumptions, but in the end you're still trying to pin down how much economic activity will occur and that can be cross-checked with tax records or government statistics. How are you going to do the same with GNP?
IMO going the easier route invariably brings along many other dangerous shortcuts.
For instance here you mention “scientific method” for GDP when the measure in itself isn’t that reliable: what fits inside GDP isn’t fixed nor objective, and a lot of decisions happens upon survey. We have countries (most countries ?) regularly reshaping how they measure GDP to fit the narrative they need.