“Gross
National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product.”
-- His Majesty Jigme Singye Wangchuck of Bhutan
Last week, Nicholas Kristof
of the Times noted
that between 1975 and 2006, “99 percent of the French population actually
enjoyed more gains in that period than 99 percent of the American population.”
In other words, if you exclude the top 1
percent, the average French citizen did better than the average American.
Nevertheless,
on one of the more common metrics used to determine the prosperity and halth of
a nation—the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—the U.S. actually came out on top during
the same period, as the American economy significantly
outperformed the French.
So who’s “#1”? Before you start chanting,
“U-S-A! U-S-A!” (too late?), let’s take a closer look at just what we’re trying
to measure.
In
recent years, researchers have prodded cities and states to step away from the
traditional measures of prosperity and embrace tools to measure overall
“happiness”. In December
2013, the National
Academy of Sciences issued a report calling on
governments to ask citizens a series of questions related to their happiness
and to use the results to shape social policy priorities and prescriptions.
This type of survey—which
began in the small nation of Bhutan in the early 1970s—has spread to other
nations, like the U.K.,
France, and Canada, all the way down to the local level, as in Somerville,
Massachusetts.
Indeed, several U.S. cities are now
experimenting with happiness or wellbeing measures. Santa Monica,
California, which defines “wellbeing” as, “[p]ersonal satisfaction with life,
influenced by social connections, economic stability, personal safety, physical
surroundings, fulfilling employment, civic engagement, and health,” recently
won a Bloomberg Philanthropies award for its efforts to measure wellbeing and
respond accordingly.
In New York,
Megan Golden (NYU) and Liana Downey (Liana Downey & Associates) wrote that the de Blasio
Administration should pilot a happiness survey to determine “whether some
groups are struggling more than others, where problems are concentrated, and
what conditions affect New Yorkers’ happiness the most.” This pilot would
borrow from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which already
surveys Americans every four years about health and life satisfaction, as well
as “Measure of America”, a project of the Social Science
Research Council.
Of course, measuring happiness is easier
said than done. As with any broad survey, getting a representative sample is a
challenge, particularly in a City like New York, where many are often wary
to respond to formal government surveys (see: New York’s experience
with the 2010 Census). Furthermore, since most people filling out the survey
have different definitions of happiness, questions that seek to gauge the
subjective mindset of any population may be inherently suspect.
An even more fundamental
question exists, however. And that is
whether happiness, however defined, should be the goal of social policy in the
first place. As David Brooks wrote
this week, “Happiness wants you to think about maximizing your benefits.
Difficulty and suffering sends you on a different course.”
No, Brooks is not advocating for a political
system that promotes difficulty and
suffering. But he’s also cautioning against viewing certain types of suffering
as in need of eradication. To put it in concrete terms, suffering that flows from
hunger, disease, violence, or neglect carries no short or long term benefit
(much to the contrary), whereas the pangs that come with failure, the loss of a
loved one, or can make us fuller people—changed souls, rather than shattered
ones.
Ultimately, since that the unique number of
paths to happiness is roughly as numerous as the number of people alive, the
Framers probably got this one right—namely, that the government’s role is to ensure the foundational elements necessary
for the pursuit of happiness (food,
shelter, health care, employment), leaving to the individual citizen to decide
how to chart his own course toward that seemingly universal goal.
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