Stumbling on happiness
French president Nicolas Sarkozy has recently proposed that the current way of measuring economic output be replaced with one that includes measures of national happiness. According to the article, he complained that “Behind the cult of figures, behind all these statistical and accounting structures, there is also the cult of the market that is always right”.
Zogby International has a long standing interest in groups of people, such as Secular Spiritualists, who think that happiness rather than material abundance is what really matters. However, pursuing happiness and measuring it can be two different things. Some commentators have already observed that the very idea of measuring happiness defeats Sarkozy’s alleged goal of moving beyond “the cult of figures”.
What is your view of this new approach to measuring GDP? Do you think that happiness can be adequately measured? Would you support such change in the USA?
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Happiness is relative to an individual’s definition of that feeling. Silly idea.
Agree with Kevin. How does one measure national happiness? Ask a million people, “On a scale of one to ten, how happy are you?” Do we measure the GDP by asking people, “On a scale of one to ten, how rich are you?”
I think what we have here is possibly a cultural and linguistic difference. In the French, feelings come from within a person, as indicated by the reflexive form of the verb: je me fache (I anger myself), je m’ennuie (I bore myself)… In the English language and the American culture, we are always pointing the finger of blame at others: (He makes me happy, She annoys me, You bore me, etc). The truth is that a feeling will not happen if you don’t allow it to happen!
I believe that when Sarkozy refers to “national happiness”, he understood clearly that his French citizens would understand their own responsibility to their own civic responsibility. The American public is too eager to complain and blame everyone else rather than face their own civic responsibilities.We live in the world’s greatest country, yet how many Americans do more than complain?
How can we measure our “national happiness”? If we can’t control our own personal happiness, how could we deal with happiness on a national level?
that’s where government comes to help. if a government-subsidized researcher concludes that drinking more white tea makes one, on average, happier, then we will all be “nudged” to drink more white tea. low income families will vouchers so they can be happy, too. in addition, we will appear richer as a country in statistics collected by very esteemed (though heavily subsidized) political bodies. it’s quite simple, actually.
If that’s the case, I suppose the people of North Korea must have the greatest national happiness
Even so, no matter what experts measure our national happiness, most Americans are too much into complaining to believe it.
Americans are happiest when complaining.
In my work, I see people from most economic levels. It is the upper middle class who seem the most preoccupied with the loss of happiness [wealth], yet even now they have more than the bottom quintile. So I am with the majority. It depends on how a person or family defines happiness. That would be too subjective and variable to measure meaningfully.
There’s a whole bunch of research that’s been done on measuring happiness, or as some researchers describe it, subjective well-being. Look up Ed Weiner, or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi for some cool stuff. Self-reported happiness is as valid a measure as you’re going to get, and though that will mean different things to different people, it’s still worthwhile to try to measure it, in my view. Jeremy Bentham said a good act or policy provided the greatest good for the greatest number of people – and that’s a worthwhile thing to try to tease out – much more meaningful than, say, the GDP or GNP. In his proposal, Sarkozy is using a page from Bhutan’s playbook, who in the 1970’s voiced their intention to improve “Gross National Happiness”, and who have since developed tools to attempt to measure it.
Having the political goal of increasing happiness is a lot more meaningful than having a political goal of increasing economic growth at all costs. . .