essay on gross national happiness

Gross National Happiness

• First Online: 01 January 2011

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• Sander G. Tideman 2  

Part of the book series: Issues in Business Ethics ((IBET,volume 33))

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Gross National Happiness (GNH) can be regarded as the next stage in the evolution of economic indicators for sustainable development, going beyond merely measuring values that can be expressed in money. GNH is an attempt to develop an indicator that accounts for all values relevant to life on this planet, including happiness. Moreover, by taking happiness as the objective, GNH serves as an important yardstick for a framework of Buddhist economics. Breakthrough research in quantum physics, medicine, biology, behavioral science, psychology and cognitive science is making the science of the mind relevant to economics. Conversely, from within the profession of economics, attempts are being made to broaden the scope of economics into the domain of psychology, which led to the emergence of behavioral economics and neuro-economics. Buddhist psychology and philosophy, which inspired the Buddhist King of Bhutan to conceive of Gross National Happiness, can offer a lot to the required shift in economic thinking.

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Tideman, S.G. (2011). Gross National Happiness. In: Zsolnai, L. (eds) Ethical Principles and Economic Transformation - A Buddhist Approach. Issues in Business Ethics, vol 33. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9310-3_7

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Happiness and Life Satisfaction

Self-reported life satisfaction differs widely between people and between countries. What explains these differences?

By: Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser

First published in 2013; most recent substantive revision February 2024.

How happy are people today? Were people happier in the past? How satisfied with their lives are people in different societies? And how do our living conditions affect all of this?

These are difficult questions to answer, but they are questions that undoubtedly matter for each of us personally. Indeed, today, life satisfaction and happiness are central research areas in the social sciences, including in ‘mainstream’ economics.

Social scientists often recommend that measures of subjective well-being should augment the usual measures of economic prosperity, such as GDP per capita . 1 But how can happiness be measured? Are there reliable comparisons of happiness across time and space that can give us clues regarding what makes people declare themselves ‘happy’?

In this topic page, we discuss the data and empirical evidence that might answer these questions. Our focus here will be on survey-based measures of self-reported happiness and life satisfaction. Here is a preview of what the data reveals.

• Surveys asking people about life satisfaction and happiness do measure subjective well-being with reasonable accuracy.
• Life satisfaction and happiness vary widely both within and among countries. It only takes a glimpse at the data to see that people are distributed along a wide spectrum of happiness levels.
• Richer people tend to say they are happier than poorer people; richer countries tend to have higher average happiness levels; and across time, most countries that have experienced sustained economic growth have seen increasing happiness levels. So, the evidence suggests that income and life satisfaction tend to go together (which still doesn’t mean they are one and the same).
• Important life events such as marriage or divorce do affect our happiness but have surprisingly little long-term impact. The evidence suggests that people tend to adapt to changes.

See all interactive charts on Happiness and Life Satisfaction ↓

Other research and writing on happiness and life satisfaction on Our World in Data:

• Are Facebook and other social media platforms bad for our well-being?
• Are people more likely to be lonely in so-called 'individualistic' societies?
• Are we happier when we spend more time with others?
• Collective pessimism and our inability to guess the happiness of others
• How important are social relations for our health and well-being?
• Is there a loneliness epidemic?
• There is a 'happiness gap' between East and West Germany

Happiness across the world today

The World Happiness Report is a well-known source of cross-country data and research on self-reported life satisfaction. The map here shows, country by country, the ‘happiness scores’ published this report.

The underlying source of the happiness scores in the World Happiness Report is the Gallup World Poll —a set of nationally representative surveys undertaken in more than 160 countries in over 140 languages.

The main life evaluation question asked in the poll is: “Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?” (This is also known as the “Cantril Ladder”.)

The map plots the average answer that survey respondents provided to this question in different countries. As with the steps of the ladder, values in the map range from 0 to 10.

There are large differences across countries. According to the most recent figures, European countries top the ranking: Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, and the Netherlands have the highest scores. In the same year, the lowest national scores correspond to Afghanistan, South Sudan, and other countries in central Sub-Saharan Africa.

You can click on any country on the map to plot time series for specific countries.

Self-reported life satisfaction tends to correlate with other measures of well-being—richer and healthier countries tend to have higher average happiness scores. (More on this in the section below .)

Happiness over time

Findings from the integrated values surveys.

In addition to the Gallup World Poll (discussed above), the Integrated Values Surveys provides cross-country data on self-reported life satisfaction. These are the longest available time series of cross-country happiness estimates that include non-European nations.

The Integrated Values Surveys collect data from a series of representative national surveys covering almost 100 countries, with the earliest estimates dating back to 1981. In these surveys, respondents are asked: “Taking all things together, would you say you are (i) Very happy, (ii) Rather happy, (iii) Not very happy, or (iv) Not at all happy”. This visualization plots the share of people answering they are “very happy” or “rather happy”.

As we can see, in most countries, the trend is positive: In most countries with data from two or more surveys, the most recent observation is higher than the earliest. In some cases, the improvement has been very large; in Albania, for example, the share of people who reported being ‘very happy’ or ‘rather happy’ went from 33.4% in 1998 to 73.9% in 2022.

Findings from Eurobarometer

The Eurobarometer survey collects data on life satisfaction as part of their public opinion surveys. For several countries, these surveys have been conducted at least annually for more than 40 years. The visualization here shows the share of people who report being ‘very satisfied’ or ‘fairly satisfied’ with their standards of living.

Two points are worth emphasizing. First, estimates of life satisfaction often fluctuate around trends. In France, for example, we can see that the overall trend is positive, yet there is a pattern of ups and downs. And second, despite fluctuations, decade-long trends have been generally positive for most European countries.

In most cases, the share of people who say they are ‘very satisfied’ or ‘fairly satisfied’ with their life has gone up over the full survey period. 2 Yet there are some clear exceptions, of which Greece is the most notable example. In 2007, around 67% of the Greeks said they were satisfied with their life, but five years later, after the financial crisis struck, the corresponding figure was down to 32.4%. Despite recent improvements, Greeks today are, on average, much less satisfied with their lives than they were before the financial crisis. No other European country in this dataset has gone through a comparable negative shock.

The distribution of life satisfaction

More than averages — the distribution of life satisfaction scores.

Most of the studies comparing happiness and life satisfaction among countries focus on averages. However, distributional differences are also important.

Life satisfaction is often reported on a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 representing the highest possible level of satisfaction. This is the so-called ‘Cantril Ladder’. This visualization shows how responses are distributed across steps in this ladder. In each case, the height of the bars is proportional to the fraction of answers at each score. Each differently-colored distribution refers to a world region, and for each region, we have overlaid the distribution for the entire world as a reference.

These plots show that in Sub-Saharan Africa—the region with the lowest average scores—the distributions are consistently to the left of those in Europe.

This means that the share of people who are ‘happy’ is lower in Sub-Saharan Africa than in Western Europe, independently of which score in the ladder we use as a threshold to define ‘happy’. Similar comparisons can be made by contrasting other regions with high average scores (e.g., North America, Australia, and New Zealand) against those with low average scores (e.g., South Asia).

Another important point to notice is that the distribution of self-reported life satisfaction in Latin America and the Caribbean is high across the board—it is consistently to the right of other regions with roughly comparable income levels, such as Central and Eastern Europe.

This is part of a broader pattern: Latin American countries tend to have a higher subjective well-being than other countries with comparable levels of economic development. As we will see in the section on the social environment , culture, and history matter for self-reported life satisfaction.

If you want data on country-level distributions of scores, the Pew Global Attitudes Survey provides such figures for more than 40 countries.

Differences in happiness within countries

Happiness inequality, happiness inequality in the us and other rich countries.

The General Social Survey (GSS) in the US is a survey administered to a nationally representative sample of about 1,500 respondents each year since 1972 and is an important source of information on long-run trends of self-reported life satisfaction in the country. 3

Using this source, Stevenson and Wolfers (2008) 4 show that while the national average has remained broadly constant, inequality in happiness has fallen substantially in the US in recent decades.

The authors further note that this is true both when we think about inequality in terms of the dispersion of answers, and also when we think about inequality in terms of gaps between demographic groups. They note that two-thirds of the black-white happiness gap has been eroded (although today, white Americans remain happier on average, even after controlling for differences in education and income), and the gender happiness gap has disappeared entirely (women used to be slightly happier than men, but they are becoming less happy, and today there is no statistical difference once we control for other characteristics). 5

The results from Stevenson and Wolfers are consistent with other studies looking at changes of happiness inequality (or life satisfaction inequality) over time. In particular, researchers have noted that there is a correlation between economic growth and reductions in happiness inequality—even when income inequality is increasing at the same time. The visualization here uses data from Clark, Fleche, and Senik (2015) 6 shows this. It plots the evolution of happiness inequality within a selection of rich countries that experienced uninterrupted GDP growth.

In this chart, happiness inequality is measured by the dispersion — specifically the standard deviation — of answers in the World Values Survey . As we can see, there is a broad negative trend. In their paper, the authors show that the trend is positive in countries with falling GDP.

Why could it be that happiness inequality falls with rising income inequality?

Clark, Fleche, and Senik argue that part of the reason is that the growth of national income allows for the greater provision of public goods, which in turn tightens the distribution of subjective well-being. This can still be consistent with growing income inequality since public goods such as better health affect incomes and well-being differently.

Another possibility is that economic growth in rich countries has translated into a more diverse society in terms of cultural expressions (e.g., through the emergence of alternative lifestyles), which has allowed people to converge in happiness even if they diverge in incomes, tastes, and consumption. Steven Quartz and Annette Asp explain this hypothesis in a New York Times article , discussing evidence from experimental psychology.

The link between happiness and income

The link across countries, higher national incomes go together with higher average life satisfaction.

If we compare life satisfaction reports from around the world at any given point in time, we immediately see that countries with higher average national incomes tend to have higher average life satisfaction scores. In other words, people in richer countries tend to report higher life satisfaction than people in poorer countries. The scatter plot here shows this.

Each dot in the visualization represents one country. The vertical position of the dots shows the national average self-reported life satisfaction in the Cantril Ladder (a scale ranging from 0-10 where 10 is the highest possible life satisfaction), while the horizontal position shows GDP per capita based on purchasing power parity (i.e., GDP per head after adjusting for inflation and cross-country price differences).

This correlation holds even if we control for other factors: Richer countries tend to have higher average self-reported life satisfaction than poorer countries that are comparable in terms of demographics and other measurable characteristics. You can read more about this in the World Happiness Report 2017 , specifically the discussion in Chapter 2.

As we show below, income and happiness also tend to go together within countries and across time .

The link within countries

Higher personal incomes go together with higher self-reported life satisfaction.

Above; we point out that richer countries tend to be happier than poorer countries. Here, we show that the same tends to be true within countries: richer people within a country tend to be happier than poorer people in the same country. The visualizations here show us this by looking at happiness by income quintiles.

Firstly, we show each country in individual panels: within each panel is a connected scatter plot for a specific country. This means that for each country, we observe a line joining five points: each point marks the average income within an income quintile (horizontal axis) against the average self-reported life satisfaction of people at that income quintile (vertical axis).

What does this visualization tell us? We see that in all cases, lines are upward sloping: people in higher income quintiles tend to have higher average life satisfaction. Yet in some countries, the lines are steep and linear (e.g., in Costa Rica, richer people are happier than poorer people across the whole income distribution), while in some countries, the lines are less steep and non-linear (e.g., the richest group of people in the Dominican Republic is as happy as the second-richest group).

In a second visualization, we present the same data, but instead of plotting each country separately, showing all countries in one grid.

The resulting connected scatter plot may be messy, resembling a ‘spaghetti’ chart, but it is helpful to confirm the overall pattern: despite kinks here and there, lines are, by and large, upward-sloping.

Looking across and within countries

A snapshot of the correlation between income and happiness—between and within countries.

Do income and happiness tend to go together? The visualization here shows that the answer to this question is yes, both within and across countries.

It may take a minute to wrap your head around this visualization, but once you do, you can see that it handily condenses the key information from the previous three charts into one.

To show the income-happiness correlation across countries, the chart plots the relationship between self-reported life satisfaction on the vertical axis and GDP per capita on the horizontal axis. Each country is an arrow on the grid, and the location of the arrow tells us the corresponding combination of average income and average happiness.

To show the income-happiness correlation within countries, each arrow has a slope corresponding to the correlation between household incomes and self-reported life satisfaction within that country. In other words, the slope of the arrow shows how strong the relationship between income and life satisfaction is within that country. ( This chart gives you a visual example of how the arrows were constructed for each country). 7

If an arrow points northeast, that means richer people tend to report higher life satisfaction than poorer people in the same country. If an arrow is flat (i.e., points east), that means rich people are, on average, just as happy as poorer people in the same country.

As we can see, there is a very clear pattern: richer countries tend to be happier than poorer countries (observations are lined up around an upward-sloping trend), and richer people within countries tend to be happier than poorer people in the same countries (arrows are consistently pointing northeast).

It’s important to note that the horizontal axis is measured on a logarithmic scale. The cross-country relationship we would observe on a linear scale would be different since, at high national income levels, slightly higher national incomes are associated with a smaller increase in average happiness than at low levels of national incomes. In other words, the cross-country relationship between income and happiness is not linear on income (it is ‘log-linear’). We use the logarithmic scale to highlight two key facts: (i) at no point in the global income distribution is the relationship flat, and (ii) a doubling of the average income is associated with roughly the same increase in the reported life satisfaction, irrespective of the position in the global distribution.

These findings have been explored in more detail in a number of recent academic studies. Importantly, the much-cited paper by Stevenson and Wolfers (2008) 8 shows that these correlations hold even after controlling for various country characteristics, such as the demographic composition of the population, and are robust to different sources of data and types of subjective well-being measures.

Economic growth and happiness

In the charts above, we show that there is robust evidence of a strong correlation between income and happiness across and within countries at fixed points in time. Here, we want to show that, while less strong, there is also a correlation between income and happiness across time. Or, put differently, as countries get richer, the population tends to report higher average life satisfaction.

The chart shown here uses data from the World Values Survey to plot the evolution of national average incomes and national average happiness over time. To be specific, this chart shows the share of people who say they are ‘very happy’ or ‘rather happy’ in the World Values Survey (vertical axis) against GDP per head (horizontal axis). Each country is drawn as a line joining the first and last available observations across all survey waves. 9

As we can see, countries that experience economic growth also tend to experience happiness growth across waves in the World Values Survey. This is a correlation that holds after controlling for other factors that also change over time (in this chart from Stevenson and Wolfers (2008), you can see how changes in GDP per capita compare to changes in life satisfaction after accounting for changes in demographic composition and other variables).

An important point to note here is that economic growth and happiness growth tend to go together on average . Some countries, in some periods, experience economic growth without increasing happiness. The experience of the US in recent decades is a case in point. These instances may seem paradoxical given the evidence—we explore this question in the following section.

The Easterlin Paradox

The observation that economic growth does not always go together with increasing life satisfaction was first made by Richard Easterlin in the 1970s. Since then, there has been much discussion over what came to be known as the ‘Easterlin Paradox’.

At the heart of the paradox was the fact that richer countries tend to have higher self-reported happiness, yet in some countries for which repeated surveys were available over the course of the 1970s, happiness was not increasing with rising national incomes. This combination of empirical findings was paradoxical because the cross-country evidence (countries with higher incomes tended to have higher self-reported happiness) did not, in some cases, fit the evidence over time (countries seemed not to get happier as national incomes increased).

Notably, Easterlin and other researchers relied on data from the US and Japan to support this seemingly perplexing observation. If we look closely at the data underpinning the trends in these two countries, however, these cases are not, in fact, paradoxical.

Let us begin with the case of Japan. There, the earliest available data on self-reported life satisfaction came from the so-called ‘Life in Nation surveys’, which date back to 1958. At first glance, this source suggests that mean life satisfaction remained flat over a period of spectacular economic growth (see, for example, this chart from Easterlin and Angelescu 2011). 10 Digging a bit deeper, however, we find that things are more complex.

Stevenson and Wolfers (2008) 8 show that the life satisfaction questions in the ‘Life in Nation surveys’ changed over time, making it difficult—if not impossible—to track changes in happiness over the full period. The visualization here splits the life satisfaction data from the surveys into sub-periods where the questions remained constant. As we can see, the data is not supportive of a paradox: the correlation between GDP and happiness growth in Japan is positive within comparable survey periods. The reason for the alleged paradox is, in fact mismeasurement of how happiness changed over time.

In the US, the explanation is different but can once again be traced to the underlying data. Specifically, if we look more closely at economic growth in the US over the recent decades, one fact looms large: growth has not benefitted the majority of people. Income inequality in the US is exceptionally high and has been on the rise in the last four decades, with incomes for the median household growing much more slowly than incomes for the top 10%. As a result, trends in aggregate life satisfaction should not be seen as paradoxical: the income and standard of living of the typical US citizen have not grown much in the last couple of decades. (You can read more about this in our page on inequality and incomes across the distribution .)

Health and life satisfaction

Life expectancy and life satisfaction.

Health is an important predictor of life satisfaction, both within and among countries. In this visualization, we provide evidence of the cross-country relationship.

Each dot in the scatterplot represents one country. The vertical position of the dots shows national life expectancy at birth, and the horizontal position shows the national average self-reported life satisfaction in the Cantril Ladder (a scale ranging from 0-10, where 10 is the highest possible life satisfaction).

As we can see, there is a strong positive correlation: countries where people tend to live longer are also countries where people tend to say more often that they are satisfied with their lives. A similar relationship holds for other health outcomes (e.g., life satisfaction tends to be higher in countries with lower child mortality ).

The relationship plotted in the chart clearly reflects more than just the link between health and happiness since countries with high life expectancy also tend to be countries with many other distinct characteristics. However, the positive correlation between life expectancy and life satisfaction remains after controlling for observable country characteristics, such as income and social protection. You can read more about this in the World Happiness Report 2017 , specifically the discussion in Chapter 2.

Life satisfaction through life events

How do common life events affect happiness.

Do people tend to adapt to common life events by converging back to a baseline level of happiness?

Clark et al. (2008) 12 use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to identify groups of people experiencing significant life and labor market events and trace how these events affect the evolution of their life satisfaction. The visualization here shows an overview of their main findings. In each individual chart, the red lines mark the estimated effect of a different event at a given point in time (with ‘whiskers’ marking the range of confidence of each estimate).

In all cases, the results are split by gender, and time is labeled so that 0 marks the point when the corresponding event took place (with negative and positive values denoting years before and after the event). All estimates control for individual characteristics, so the figures show the effect of the event after controlling for other factors (e.g., income, etc.).

The first point to note is that most events denote the evolution of a latent situation: People grow unhappy in the period leading up to a divorce, while they grow happy in the period leading up to a marriage.

The second point is that single life events do tend to affect happiness in the short run, but people often adapt to changes. Of course, there are clear differences in the extent to which people adapt. In the case of divorce, life satisfaction first drops, then goes up and stays high. For unemployment, there is a negative shock both in the short and long run, notably among men. And for marriage, life satisfaction builds up before the wedding and fades out after it.

In general, the evidence suggests that adaptation is an important feature of well-being. Many common but important life events have a modest, long-term impact on self-reported happiness. Yet adaptation to some events, such as long-term unemployment, is neither perfect nor immediate.

Does disability correlate with life satisfaction?

A number of papers have noted that long-term paraplegics do not report themselves as particularly unhappy when compared to non-paraplegics (see, for example, the much-cited paper by Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman, 1978). 13

This assertion has received attention because it tells us something about the very meaning of well-being and has important consequences for policy. It is, for example, considered in courts of law with respect to compensation for disability.

However, comparing differences in self-reported life satisfaction among people with different disability statuses is not an ideal source of evidence regarding the effect of tragedy on happiness. Non-paraplegics are potentially different from paraplegics in ways that are hard to measure. Better sources of evidence are longitudinal surveys, where people are tracked over time.

Oswald and Powdthavee (2008) 14 use data from a longitudinal survey in the UK to explore whether accidents leading to disability imply long-term shocks to life satisfaction.

The chart here, from Oswald and Powdthavee, shows the average reported life satisfaction of a group of people who became seriously disabled (at time T) and remained seriously disabled in the two following years (T+1 and T+2). Here, ‘seriously disabled’ means that disability prevented them from being able to do day-to-day activities.

As we can see—and as the authors show more precisely through econometric techniques—those entering disability suffer a sudden drop in life satisfaction and recover only partially. This supports the idea that while adaptation plays a role in common life events, the notion of life satisfaction is indeed sensitive to tragic events.

Life satisfaction and society

Culture and life satisfaction.

Comparisons of happiness among countries suggest that culture and history shared by people in a given society matter for self-reported life satisfaction. For example, as the chart here shows, culturally and historically similar Latin American countries have a higher subjective well-being than other countries with comparable levels of economic development. (This chart plots self-reported life satisfaction as measured in the 10-point Cantril ladder on the vertical axis against GDP per capita on the horizontal axis).

Latin America is not a special case in this respect. Ex-communist countries, for example, tend to have lower subjective well-being than other countries with comparable characteristics and levels of economic development.

Academic studies in positive psychology discuss other patterns. Diener and Suh (2002) write: “In recent years cultural differences in subjective well-being have been explored, with a realization that there are profound differences in what makes people happy. Self-esteem, for example, is less strongly associated with life satisfaction, and extraversion is less strongly associated with pleasant affect in collectivist cultures than in individualist cultures”. 15

To our knowledge, there are no rigorous studies exploring the causal mechanisms linking culture and happiness. However, it seems natural to expect that cultural factors shape the way people collectively understand happiness and the meaning of life.

Sense of freedom and life satisfaction

A particular channel through which social environment may affect happiness is freedom: the society we live in may crucially affect the availability of options that we have to shape our own life.

This visualization shows the relationship between self-reported sense of freedom and self-reported life satisfaction using data from the Gallup World Poll . The variable measuring life satisfaction corresponds to country-level averages of survey responses to the Cantril Ladder question (a 0-10 scale, where 10 is the highest level of life satisfaction), while the variable measuring freedom corresponds to the share of people who agree with the statement “In this country, I am satisfied with my freedom to choose what I do with my life”. 16

As we can see, there is a clear positive relationship: countries, where people feel free to choose and control their lives, tend to be countries where people are happier. As Inglehart et al. (2008) 17 show this positive relationship holds even after we control for other factors, such as income and strength of religiosity.

Interestingly, this chart also shows that while there are some countries where the perceived sense of freedom is high but average life satisfaction is low (e.g., Rwanda), there are no countries where the perceived sense of freedom is low but average life satisfaction is high (i.e., there are no countries in the top left area of the chart).

To our knowledge, there are no rigorous studies exploring the causal mechanisms linking freedom and happiness. However, it seems natural to expect that self-determination and the absence of coercion are important components of what people consider a happy and meaningful life.

The link between media and gloominess

A number of studies have found that there is a link between emotional exposure to negative content in news and changes in mood.

Johnston and Davey (1997), 18 , for example, conducted an experiment in which they edited short TV news to display positive, neutral, or negative material and then showed them to three different groups of people. The authors found that people who watched the ‘negative’ clip were more likely to report a sad mood.

This link between emotional content in news and changes in mood is all the more important if we consider that media gatekeepers tend to prefer negative to positive coverage of newsworthy facts (see, for example, Combs and Slovic 1979 19 ).

Of course, mood is not the same as life satisfaction. Yet, as we discuss below in the section on measurement and data quality , surveys measuring happiness often do capture emotional aspects of well-being. In any case, people’s perceptions of what it means to lead a meaningful life are heavily influenced by their expectations of what is possible and likely to occur in their lives, and this has also been shown to depend on media exposure. 20

Data Quality and Measurement

Can ‘happiness’ really be measured.

The most natural way to attempt to measure subjective well-being is to ask people what they think and feel. Indeed, this is the most common approach.

In practice, social scientists tend to rely on questions inquiring directly about happiness or on questions inquiring about life satisfaction. The former tends to measure the experiential or emotional aspects of well-being (e.g., “I feel very happy”), while the latter tends to measure the evaluative or cognitive aspects of well-being (e.g., “I think I lead a very positive life”).

Self-reports about happiness and life satisfaction are known to correlate with things that people typically associate with contentment, such as cheerfulness and smiling. (In this scatter plot , you can see that countries where people have higher self-reported life satisfaction are also countries where people tend to smile more).

Experimental psychologists have also shown that self-reports of well-being from surveys turn out to correlate with activity in the parts of the brain associated with pleasure and satisfaction. Various surveys have confirmed that people who say they are happy also tend to sleep better and express positive emotions verbally more frequently.

Is ‘life satisfaction’ the same as ‘happiness’?

In this topic page, we discuss data and empirical research on happiness and life satisfaction. However, it is important to bear in mind that “life satisfaction” and “happiness” are not really synonyms. This is, of course, reflected in the data since self-reported measures of these two variables come from asking different kinds of questions.

The Integrated Values Surveys asks directly about happiness: “Taking all things together, would you say you are (i) Very happy, (ii) Rather happy, (iii) Not very happy, (iv) Not at all happy, (v) Don’t know.”

The Gallup World Poll, on the other hand, uses the Cantril Ladder question and asks respondents to evaluate their life: “Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”

As the following scatter plot shows, these two measures tend to be related (countries that score high in one measure also tend to score high in the other), yet they are not identical (there is substantial dispersion, with many countries sharing the same score in one variable but diverging in the other).

The differences in responses to questions inquiring about life satisfaction and happiness are consistent with the idea that subjective well-being has two sides: an experiential or emotional side and an evaluative or cognitive side. Of course, the limits between emotional and cognitive aspects of well-being are blurred in our minds, so in practice, both kinds of questions measure both aspects to some degree. Indeed, social scientists often construct ‘subjective well-being indexes’ where they simply average out results from various types of questions.

Are happiness averages really meaningful?

The most common way to analyze data on happiness consists of taking averages across groups of people. Indeed, cross-country comparisons of self-reported life satisfaction, such as those presented in ‘happiness rankings’, rely on national averages of reports on a scale from 0 to 10 (the Cantril Ladder).

Is it reasonable to take averages of life satisfaction scores? Or, in more technical terms, are self-reports of Cantril scores really a cardinal measure of well-being?

The evidence tells us that survey-based reports on the Cantril Ladder do allow cardinal measurement reasonably well—respondents have been found to translate verbal labels, such as ‘very good’ and ‘very bad’, into roughly the same numerical values. 21 22

But as with any other aggregate indicator of social progress, averages need to be interpreted carefully, even if they make sense arithmetically. For example, if we look at happiness by age in a given country, we may see that older people do not appear to be happier than younger people. Yet this may be because the average-by-age figure from the snapshot confounds two factors: the age effect (people from the same cohort do get happier as they grow older, across all cohorts) and the cohort effect (across all ages, earlier generations are less happy than more recent generations). If the cohort effect is very strong, the snapshot can even give a picture that suggests people become less happy as they grow older, even though the exact opposite is actually true for all generations.

This example is, in fact, taken from the real world: using data from the US, Sutin et al. (2013) 23 showed that self-reported feelings of well-being tend to increase with age across generations, but overall levels of well-being depend on when people were born.

How much does language matter for cross-country comparisons of happiness?

Linguistic differences are often seen as a major obstacle for making cross-country comparisons of happiness. However, there is evidence suggesting that comparability issues, at least with respect to language, are less problematic than many people think.

Studies have shown, for example, that in interviews in which respondents are shown pictures or videos of other individuals, respondents can broadly identify whether the individual shown to them was happy or sad; this is also true when respondents were asked to predict the evaluations of individuals from other cultural communities. (For evidence of this, see Sandvik et al., 1993; Diener and Lucas, 1999). 24

Studies have also shown that ‘indigenous emotions’ across cultures (i.e., feelings that are unique in that they do not have equivalents in the English language) are not experienced any more frequently or differently than commonly translated emotions. (See Scollon et al. 2005). 25

The conclusion, therefore, seems to be that there is some basic understanding among humans about what it means to be ‘happy’. Survey-based measures of self-reported life satisfaction are informative about cross-country differences, even if these comparisons are obviously noisy.

A French translation of this topic page is available on our site: Bonheur et satisfaction .

Interactive charts on happiness and life satisfaction

Particularly important was the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission . It also relates to Bhutan’s famous measurement of Gross National Happiness (GNH) as an indicator of progress (Wikipedia here ).

To be precise, in 27 out of 31 countries with data spanning longer than one decade, the estimate for 2016 is higher than the earliest available estimate.

The GSS asks people a very similar question to the Integrated Values Survey: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?”

Stevenson, Betsey, and Justin Wolfers. “Happiness inequality in the United States.” The Journal of Legal Studies 37.S2 (2008): S33-S79. An ungated earlier version of the paper is available here .

These results have been discussed in various blogs. Freakonomics provides a quick and interesting overview of the debate, specifically with regard to gender gaps .

Clark, Andrew E., Sarah Flèche, and Claudia Senik. “Economic growth evens out happiness: Evidence from six surveys.” Review of Income and Wealth (2015). An ungated earlier version of the paper is available here

To be precise, the gradients correspond, country by country, to the regression coefficients between income quintiles and the related average life satisfaction reported by people within each income quintile.

Stevenson, B. and Wolfers, J. (2008). Economic growth and subjective well-being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1-87. An earlier version is available online here .

The dataset includes observations for Egypt. However, we have excluded these observations from our analysis. This is because the survey for Egypt in the wave labeled 2014 is from 2012, which was a year characterized by extreme political instability in that country.

R.A. Easterlin and L. Angelescu – ‘Modern Economic Growth and Quality of Life: Cross-Sectional and Time Series Evidence’ in Land, Michalos, and Sirgy (ed.) (2011) – Handbook of Social Indicators and Quality of Life Research. Springer.

Chart from Stevenson B, Wolfers J (2008) - Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox. Brookings Paper Econ Activ 2008 (Spring):1–87. Underlying data source: Life in Nation surveys, 1958–2007. Note from the authors: “The series in each of the four panels reports responses to a different life satisfaction question, and therefore comparisons should be made only within each panel. GDP per capita is at purchasing power parity in constant 2000 international dollars.”

Clark, A. E., Diener, E., Georgellis, Y., & Lucas, R. E. (2008). Lags and leads in life satisfaction: A test of the baseline hypothesis. The Economic Journal, 118(529).

Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? . Journal of personality and social psychology, 36(8), 917. Chicago.

Oswald, A. J., & Powdthavee, N. (2008). Does happiness adapt? A longitudinal study of disability with implications for economists and judges. Journal of Public Economics, 92(5), 1061-1077.

Diener, E., Oishi, S., & Lucas, R. E. (2009). Subjective well-being: The Science of Happiness and Life Satisfaction. Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology, 2, 187-194.

To be precise, the Gallup World Poll asks: “In this country, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?”

Inglehart, R., Foa, R., Peterson, C., & Welzel, C. (2008). Development, freedom, and rising happiness: A global perspective (1981–2007). Perspectives on psychological science, 3(4), 264-285.

Johnston, W. M., & Davey, G. C. (1997). The Psychological Impact of Negative TV News Bulletins: The Catastrophizing of Personal Worries. British Journal of Psychology, 88(1), 85-91.

Combs, B., & Slovic, P. (1979). Newspaper coverage of causes of death. Journalism Quarterly, 56(4), 837-849.

Riddle (2010), for example, found that people watching more vivid violent media gave higher estimates of the prevalence of crime in the real world. (Riddle, K. (2010). Always on my mind: Exploring how frequent, recent, and vivid television portrayals are used in the formation of social reality judgments. Media Psychology, 13(2), 155–179.)

Ferrer‐i‐Carbonell, A., & Frijters, P. (2004). How important is methodology for the estimates of the determinants of happiness?. The Economic Journal, 114(497), 641-659.

Van Praag, B.M.S. (1991). ‘Ordinal and cardinal utility: an integration of the two dimensions of the welfare concept’, Journal of Econometrics, vol. 50, pp. 69–89.

Sutin, A. R., Terracciano, A., Milaneschi, Y., An, Y., Ferrucci, L., & Zonderman, A. B. (2013). The effect of birth cohort on well-being The legacy of economic hard times. Psychological science, 0956797612459658.

Sandvik, E., Diener, E. and Seidlitz, L. (1993). ‘Subjective well-being: the convergence and stability of self and non-self report measures’, Journal of Personality, vol. 61, pp. 317–42. Diener, E. and Lucas, R.E. (1999). ‘Personality and subjective well-being’, in Kahneman et al. (1999) chapter 11.

Scollon, C. N., Diener, E., Oishi, S., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2004). Emotions across cultures and methods. Journal of cross-cultural psychology, 35(3), 304-326.

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• DOI: 10.11588/XAREP.00000329
• Corpus ID: 197745444

Gross National Happiness: A Tribute

• T. S. Powdyel
• Published 1999
• Economics, Political Science

2 Citations

The positive impact on gomchen tradition on achieving and maintaining gross national happiness, punctuating “happiness”: punctuated equilibrium theory and the agenda‐setting of the gross national happiness (gnh) policy in bhutan, one reference, man's search for meaning: an introduction to logotherapy, 4th ed., related papers.

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Measuring a Society's Progress

All societies seek to create wellbeing for individuals. The question is not whether societies desire welfare or not. The fundamental questions are: What does wellbeing mean?  How do we measure it? And how do we use indicators to organize society and its institutions to maximize wellbeing? Answering these complex questions is a challenging endeavor, especially given the diversity of values and worldviews around the globe. However, at the center of the essential questions of development and progress lie the indicators we use as a society to measure wellbeing and develop policies. As Hazel Henderson, futurist and evolutionary economist, said, "Statistical indicators are the structural DNA codes of nations. They reflect a society's values and goals and become the key drivers of economic and technological choices" (as cited in Salvaris, 2007). Indicators reveal particular information about society and should embody values that people care about, or at least should care about.  Therefore, if indicators are to drive the policies that push society in a genuine direction of progress, they should adequately measure wellbeing and progress.

What does GDP Measure?  Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was developed in the United States to manage the Great Depression (1929 – early 1940s) and the wartime economy. It is simply a measure of how much money is exchanging hands, a measure of a country's output in a given year. It was never developed as a measure of social wellbeing or progress. In 2009, Jon Hall, former head of the Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies at the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), noted, " Somehow, over the last 30-40 years, GDP has been seen as a measure of progress although it was never developed for that purpose… If GDP was going up, then everything was fine in our society. GDP has been guiding institutions and politics. We need to say, 'No, GDP is not a measure of progress.' It is one measure of progress perhaps, but there are many other things to think about." Expert and professor of political science at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Surat Horachaikul added , "How can we summarize something as complex as the progress and wellbeing of society in one single number like GDP? GDP fails to capture many of the components of a true wellbeing society"  (personal communication, July 15, 2009).

Over the years, the world has developed what Joseph Stiglitz, Professor of Economics, Columbia University, calls "GDP fetishism," a dogmatic fixation on GDP as a measure of progress. As a result, institutions and policies have revolved around maximizing GDP with little regard for what that means for individuals' standard of living and for social and environmental wellbeing.

Alternatives to GDP If GDP is not an appropriate measure of wellbeing and progress, then what is? Questioning GDP means asking the questions: What do we care about as a society? What does wellbeing mean for us? As Stiglitz (2009) asserted, " We need to open a national dialogue that sheds light on what values are important to society, and then create metrics that reflect this and are used by decision-makers." This dialogue is not an easy one to have, but it is definitely a fruitful one. If more holistic, comprehensive, and sustainable indicators are to emerge, what variables should be used? Who decides what these variables are? How is the information that the indicator reveals used by decision-makers?

THE SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE IN ACTION

Gross National Happiness in Bhutan Bhutan is a country about the size of Switzerland located on the eastern ridges of the Himalayas.

Located between the Assam-Bengal Plain of India and the Plateau of Tibet of southwestern China, the country has a population of approximately 682,000. In 2008, it shifted from being an absolute monarchy to a multiparty parliamentary democracy. Seventy percent of people live in rural areas and mostly farm for a living, although like in many other countries, rural to urban migration is a growing trend in Bhutan.

The concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) was first introduced in 1972 by the fourth King of Bhutan, H.M. Jigme Singye Wangchuck. For years following the introduction of the concept, GNH served as a guiding philosophy for the absolute monarchy based on four pillars:

• Equitable Economic Development
• Environmental Preservation
• Cultural Resilience
• Good Governance

Having absolute power, the King used the four pillars of GNH to guide the construction and implementation of policies in Bhutan. In recent years, however, with more Bhutanese students pursuing education in India, the United States, and elsewhere, and with Bhutan slowly opening up to the world, the concept of GNH has been scrutinized and sometimes criticized for not being measurable or statistically sound. GNH first came to public global attention in 1987 when, in an interview in Bhutan, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck told John Elliott of the Financial Times , "We are convinced that we must aim for contentment and happiness . . .(because even if we) raise the per capita income and increase prosperity (it) is not going to guarantee that happiness, which includes political stability, social harmony, and the Bhutanese culture and way of life" (p. 1).

As a way of integrating the scientific methods of industrialized nations, the Center for Bhutan Studies (CBS) has developed a GNH index from the research of a team that culminated in the first GNH questionnaire in 2005 (T. Zangmo, personal communication, July 24, 2009). The most recent GNH questionnaire focused on nine areas:

• Psychological Wellbeing
• Community Vitality
• Cultural Diversity and Resilience
• Ecological Diversity and Resilience
• Living Standard

1. PSYCHOLOGICAL WELLBEING "As collective happiness is the main goal of a GNH society, psychological wellbeing is of primary importance in gauging the success of the state in providing appropriate policies and services" (Ura, 2008). The psychological wellbeing domain of the GNH questionnaire covers three areas: general psychological distress indicators, emotional balance indicators, and spirituality indicators. Elements like the prevalence rates of negative emotions (jealousy, frustration, selfishness) and positive emotions (generosity, compassion, calmness), the practice of spiritual activities like meditation and prayers, and overall life enjoyment are part of this domain.

2. TIME USE "The domain of time use is one of the most effective windows on quality of life as it analyzes the nature of time spent within a 24-hour period, as well as activities that occupy longer periods of time" (Ura, 2008). The time use domain highlights the value of non-work time for happiness and overall quality of life. The domain was constructed under the assumption that non-work activities such as "sleeping, personal care, community participation, education and learning, religious activities, social and cultural activities, sports, leisure, and travel add to a rich life and contribute to levels of happiness" (Ura, 2008). Even though the "measurement of time devoted to unpaid work activities like care of children and sick members of a household, maintenance of household, and others can provide a proxy measure of the contribution made by unpaid activities to welfare," the value of such activities are underestimated in most national accounts (Ura, 2008).

3. COMMUNITY VITALITY "The domain of community vitality focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of relationships and interactions within communities. It examines the nature of trust, belongingness, vitality of caring relationships, safety in home and community, and giving and volunteering" (Ura, 2008). The domain consists of seven areas: family vitality, safety, reciprocity, trust, social support, socialization, and kinship density.

5. HEALTH "The health indicators assess the health status of the population, the determinants of health, and the health system. Health status indicators show information on self-rated health, disabilities, body-mass index, number of healthy days per month, knowledge about HIV transmission, and breast feeding practices" (Ura, 2008). Barriers to health are also assessed according to the walking distance to the nearest health facility and access to health services. The three areas in the health domain are health status, health knowledge, and barriers to health.

6. EDUCATION "Education contributes to the knowledge, values, creativity, skills, and civic sensibility of citizens" (Ura, 2008). The emphasis of the education domain is on the effectiveness of contributing to collective wellbeing. The education domain consists of the following areas: educational attainment, Dzongkha language, and folk and historical literacy.

7. ECOLOGICAL DIVERSITY AND RESILIENCE "By examining the state of Bhutan's natural resources, the pressures on ecosystems, and different management responses, the domain of ecological diversity and resilience is intended to describe the impact of domestic supply and demand on Bhutan's ecosystems" (Ura, 2008). The ecology domain mainly focuses on perceptual data on ecology, since most of the objective measurements of ecological diversity and resilience are conducted by other environmental agencies. It uses three areas: ecological degradation, ecological knowledge, and afforestation.

8. LIVING STANDARD "The domain of living standard covers the basic economic status of the people. The indicators assess the levels of income at the individual and household level, sense of financial security, room ration, and house ownership" (Ura, 2008). The indicators also reflect economic hardships, like inability to repair households and the purchase of second-hand clothing. The living standard domain consists of four areas: income, housing, food security, and hardship.

9. GOOD GOVERNANCE "The domain of good governance evaluates how people perceive various government functions in terms of their efficacy, honesty, and quality. The themes… include human rights, leadership at various levels of government, performance of government in delivering services and controlling inequality and corruption, and peoples' trust in the media, the judiciary, and the police" (Ura, 2008). The three areas of the good governance domain are: government performance, freedom, and institutional trust.

Policy Making Based on GNH The Gross National Happiness Commission (GNHC) is the planning branch of the government, and they use the information that the GNH index reveals to construct policies that promote GNH. The GNHC develops most of the policies and programs in Bhutan, and they are increasingly using the information from the GNH index to channel resources to the areas and issues where they are most needed.

GNH and its Challenges Bhutan is indeed a living example of a society where the distinct culture has a strong influence on not only how the country is governed, but also how the country moves forward in their efforts to join the community of industrialized nations. They have actively opened a dialogue that addresses questions such as, "What is progress? What matters to us as a society? How do we measure it? How do we use statistics to shape institutions and policies?" As does any other country in the South Asian region and other developing regions of the world, Bhutan faces many social, economic, and political challenges. But what differentiates Bhutan from other nations is that it uses an alternative approach to development by using Gross National Happiness as its metric of progress and as the driver for policies in the country.  This allows its cultural heritage to remain intact as it embraces the globalization of the 21 st century. 

Comprehension Check-in

• What fundamental questions should societies concerned about the wellbeing of their citizens ask?
• Why was the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) created?
• How effective is the GDP at measuring progress?
• Upon what principles did the King of Bhutan base the idea of Gross National Happiness (GNH)?
• How did the Center for Bhutan Studies (CBS) develop the Gross National Happiness index?
• What are the nine areas of focus in the GNH index?
• What is the impact of GNH in Bhutan and globally?

Credit: Adapted from Gross National Happiness in Bhutan: A Living Example of an Alternative Approach to Progress , by Alejandro Adler Braun. Used with permission from Alejandro Adler Braun. © Copyright 2012 Alejandro Adler. All Rights Reserved.

Gross National Happiness and Development

GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS AND DEVELOPMENT Proceedings of the First International Conference on Operationalization of Gross National Happiness

Edited by Karma Ura and Karma Galay

 ISBN Number: 99936-14-19-X

  PAGES: 767

 DOWNLOAD:  GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS AND DEVELOPMENT: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Operationalization of Gross National Happiness

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5 Gross National Happiness: A Buddhist Model of Development

• Published: January 2019
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Chapter 5 examines Bhutan’s singular approach to economic development; pursuing Gross National Happiness rather than the maximization of Gross National Product. “Happiness” in the Bhutanese context does not equate with Western notions of hedonic (“feel good”) pleasure, nor is it fully analogous to Aristotle’s notion of happiness as eudemonia , the sense of deep contentment arising from living a virtuous life. Rather, in the Bhutanese approach, true happiness comes from relieving the suffering of others, living in harmony with nature, and realizing the potential of one’s mind. This deep philosophical and soteriological difference in meaning is what makes the pursuit of “Gross National Happiness” so profound and why it is not merely a multi-dimensional measure of development as it is seen in the West. This chapter explains how Bhutan translates this unique orientation into policies that seek to modernize its economy without sacrificing its cultural traditions.

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Is Gross National Happiness more important than the GDP?

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The Great Depression forced many economists to find new and better ways to keep an eye on national economies. One of the most notable of all of the Depression-era advances in economic theory was the refinement of what we call the gross domestic product (GDP).

This economic indicator had been around in some form before the Depression, but it functioned as little more than a guesstimate of the value of a nation's economy. Economist Simon Kuznets improved it dramatically by applying real data to measure the total value of all of the goods and services produced in a nation within a given year. Since then, GDP has become a valuable tool for evaluating how well or poorly an economy's doing at a certain point in time.

As the global financial meltdown took hold in 2008, the GDPs of the world reflected this reality. All of the increases in unemployment, slowdowns in the production and sale of goods and other decisions that individuals made that cumulatively affected the vitality of an economy could be expressed in bar graphs and pie charts.

Indeed, GDP is a reliable indicator of economic health. As reliable as it is, however, GDP really only measures one thing -- money. More to the point, GDP measures the money being made by the interaction of production and consumption in an economy. For some people, this indicator tells them everything they need to know; others believe that money is one of many factors that determines an economy's health. Simply put, there are more important things to consider -- like happiness, for example.

With many of the world's countries about as unhappy as they can get because of their sagging GDP figures, the tiny nation of Bhutan is going in the opposite direction. Officials there have come up with a different indicator, called gross national happiness (GNH). At first blush, GNH seems a bit like the Five Day Weekend -- a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the pursuit of wealth common among developed nations. However, the Bhutanese are quite earnest about implementing GNH as their key economic indicator. The country's beloved former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, has been espousing the concept of gross national happiness since 1972, and the country adopted it as a formal economic indicator in 2008 [source: Mydans ].

Bhutan and Gross National Happiness

Happiness vs. money: the showdown.

The Kingdom of Bhutan (as it's formally called) is well known for its guarded lifestyle. Its population is generally cut off from the rest of the outside world. Television was first introduced to the nation -- located high in the Himalayas between India and China -- in 1999, and the Internet arrived there a couple of years later. Bhutanese leaders worked hard to keep the rest of the world from encroaching upon and supplanting the idyllic and pious Buddhist lifestyle that the Bhutanese maintain. In other words, the Bhutanese like the way they live, but they're also aware that globalization is an unstoppable force in the 21st century.

Rather than submit to the conspicuous consumption that characterizes much of the developed world, Bhutanese leaders chose to join the global economy on their own terms by measuring how the facets of its economy affect the positive outlook of its residents. Beginning in November 2008, all the economic factors used to measure gross domestic product are analyzed for their impact on Bhutan's residents' happiness. The factors of production are still there -- unemployment, agriculture, retail sales -- but GNH represents a paradigm shift in what's most valued by Bhutanese society compared to the rest of the world. In short, happiness matters, not money. The ultimate goal is economic support for the four pillars of Bhutanese society: economic self-reliance, preservation and promotion of Bhutanese culture, good governance and a pristine environment [source: Mustafa].

To calculate the effect a certain economic sector has on GNH, Bhutan's economic activity is measured by nine distinct criteria, or dimensions . These dimensions include concepts like time use, environmental diversity and psychological well-being [source: Centre for Bhutanese Studies ]. Time use, for example, takes into account the amount of time a particular sector's workers are able to spend with their families or in leisure activities. Psychological well-being includes the prevalence of both positive and negative emotions. These criteria can change the value of certain goods. For example, a tract of forest that would have more value as timber for sale in a consumption-based economy would have more value left intact under Bhutan's use of GNH.

By employing gross national happiness as its leading economic indicator, Bhutan's public policy will inevitably follow suit. A sector filled with unhappy and stressed employees who cut down trees for a living could receive less government funding than a sector that promotes adequate time off for daily prayers and is engaged in preservation.

If decades of scientific research are to be believed, the Bhutanese may be onto something.

Is gross national happiness more important than gross domestic product? That's a tough question, but the usefulness of GNH has a leg up for two reasons. Money has a dichotomous nature; it can bring happiness and sadness, security and insecurity -- usually depending on how much or how little cash you have. Happiness has a more singular nature: It brings only, well, happiness. In addition, studies consistently show that happy workers are more productive than depressed or stressed ones [source: Rost ]. After all, Bhutan's economic activity must still generate enough revenue to pay for services like health care, education and infrastructure and its population must still buy food and clothing.

Even beyond the benefits that a focus on happiness can provide an economy, strong evidence suggests that happiness is simply more important than money. For years, surveys investigating life satisfaction of individuals based on their income showed mixed results. Some show people with more money do tend to be happier; others show there isn't much difference. In fact, one 2006 Princeton study measured actual life experiences against satisfaction over one's life as a whole. The study showed that wealthier individuals showed almost the same amount of happiness during certain life experiences as the poorer ones, though they still reported higher life satisfaction [source: Quinones ].

Sudden and large influxes of cash don't appear to have much impact either. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert found that after about three years, amputees and lottery winners have about the same level of happiness, having returned to their natural state of happiness after their respective gains or losses [source: Rowe ]. The World Values Survey points out that while income has skyrocketed in developed nations compared to their pre-World War II levels, the levels of happiness found in those countries have remained nearly static. The survey, conducted annually in nations around the world, found that materialism appears to be "a happiness suppressant" [source: BBC ].

It would appear that the victor in this happiness-or-money battle depends largely on an individual's mindset. What makes us happy is subjective; the Bhutanese acknowledge this. "Happiness is an individual pursuit," the Bhutanese secretary of communications told the New York Times [source: Mydans ]. For an entire society to agree to buck the global trend and collectively pursue happiness over money, then, is all the more remarkable.

Lots More Information

Related howstuffworks articles.

• How to Be Happy with Yourself
• 5 Ways to Maximize Happiness
• Are men or women happier?
• Can money buy happiness?
• 10 Tips from Happy People
• Mustafa, India. "What about gross national happiness?" Time. January 10, 2005. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1016266,00.html
• Mydans, Seth. "Recalculating happiness in a Himalayan kingdom." New York Times. May 6, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/world/asia/07bhutan.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&ref=world
• Quinones, Eric. "Link between income and happiness is mainly an illusion." Princeton University. June 29, 2006. http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S15/15/09S18/index.xml?section=topstories
• Rost, K. "Happy workers, better workers." Medical Care. December 2004. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/24/health/webmd/main657624.shtml
• Rowe, Peter. "Pursuing happiness." The San Diego Union-Tribune. November 6, 2008. http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20081106/news_1c06happy.html
• Schell, Orville. "Gross National Happiness." Red Herring. January 15, 2002.http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/bhutan/gnh.html
• "Explanation of GNH index." The Centre for Bhutan Studies. Accessed June 1, 2009.http://grossnationalhappiness.com/
• "Gross domestic product." SparkNotes. Accessed June 1, 2009. http://www.sparknotes.com/economics/macro/measuring1/section1.html
• "Gross domestic product (GDP) graph." U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. May 29, 2009. http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/gdp_glance.htm
• "Nigeria tops happiness survey." BBC. October 2, 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3157570.stm
• "Simon Kuznets." Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Accessed June 1, 2009.http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Kuznets.html

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Gross National Happiness and Development: An Essay

In: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Operationalization of Gross National Happiness. Thimphu, Centre for Bhutan Studies 2004, pp. 1-50 . ISBN 99936-14-22-X

• URL: https://fid4sa-repository.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/360/
• DOI: 10.11588/xarep.00000360

This paper concerns the operationalization of the concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH). It assumes that GNH is a uniquely Bhutanese approach to development. GNH may have applications beyond Bhutan, but that is central neither to its definition nor to its operationalization. The paper further assumes that GNH is a strategy for social and economic change in Bhutan and, therefore, must be operationalized in policy decisions and actions. To argue this, it places the concept of GNH in the context of Bhutanese history and of the general history of the concept of development.

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Globalization vs. Nationalism. Gross National Product vs. Gross National Happiness

Feb 24, 2017

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Oksana Kravchenko, age 21, is a student at Moscow State University of International Affairs, Russia. Future lawyer and present dreamer, she loves to meet new people believing them to be friends waiting to be discovered and to explore new places considering each of them the next wonder of the world.

ESSAY TOPIC: Is nationalism an asset or hindrance in today's globalized world?

This could be our best century. Urbanization, integration, coming together. New era and new renaissance. This could be a century of life expectancy going up and illiteracy going down, a century of surge and tantalizing opportunities, a century of further evolution and unleashed potential. This could be a century of rapid changes and breath-taking innovation. A century of triumphant globalization—this could be our best century.

And this could be our worst century. Growing complexity, inequality, fragility. Global rippling effect with everything occurring in one place ultimately affecting everything else. This could be a century of dismal failure and universal plummet, a century of systemic shock and the world put into chains. This could be a century of pandemics, of people excluded from the global conversation. A century of triumphant nationalism—this could be our worst century.

But then, is it an either-or question? And why do we expel the opportunity of our best century being, at the same time, our worst one? Why do we regard globalization and nationalism as mutually exclusive with the former invariably considered a virtue and the latter a vice?

In fact, it is a deep-rooted preconception that globalization represents an utmost blessing which implies free trade, free movement of capital and people across borders. And undoubtedly, from such a perspective, globalization benefits everyone on aggregate endowing us with cooperation and peace. It seems to be all about tolerance and inclusion and leaving no one behind. Implacably coordinated orchestra with millions of like-minded individuals working together towards common ends. Nationalism, on the other hand, is much more about fear and hatred, about originating lies and mistrust. It is pure alienation and our retreat towards past of restrictions and borders and myopic view of the world.

In this context, viewing both phenomena in question as mutually exclusively looks downright explicable. But there is an underbelly. Achilles' heel of globalization. Come to think of it, humanity would have never grappled with nationalist movement but for globalization and its redistributive effects. According to globalization-free scenario, societies would not have given birth to Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán. And we would not have witnessed Brexit. And there would not have been this apocalyptic sort of feeling which suffocates modern politics.

Sycophantic globalization, despite its alleged democratic and inclusive approach, coins winners and losers and brings to the table disproportionality, the consequences of which are overwhelming. People, deprived of sufficient interaction across diverse communities, fall prey to the idea that they no longer share in the benefits of a globalized world, that they are victims of unreasoned politics. And so we have what we have: millions of those unrepresented by politicians and patently disillusioned with the establishment gradually give in to the desire of adopting self-interested stance and reclaiming control of their own lives. And the world ends up engulfed with protest, nationalist votes. But globalization skirts this issue talking its way out of thorny questions with the help of endless supply of vague scientific terms.

It is a deep-rooted preconception that nationalism represents an utmost curse, a topic which is unpleasant to address in a conversation. A rash on a sensitive skin of our world. Its aching burns and bruises. However, here is some food for thought. A rash is the most efficient deterrent from eating more chocolate. And burns save us from rushing further onto the fire. In essence, those side effects are mere indicators of glitches in a system. And to a certain extent, nationalist movements play the same role: we would never have been able to tell we were doomed but for antagonism dominating political arena.

Unarguably, we are a tribal species. Society is woven out of family groups, which in their turn form larger units and communities. In our perception there firmly stands out the notion of "us" as opposed to "them." Those, who are not embraced by a circle, will perennially remain foreigners and aliens, and that is perhaps the only truth unanimously shared. As far as globalization is concerned, it introduces something different, namely community expansion, washing out circles and drawing down bridges to family castles. Such a tendency is terrifying since in the long run it boils down to cutting social capital and, consequently, trust. Furthermore, it entirely contradicts our inherently conservative nature and entrenched resilience against changes. Idol with feet of clay, globalization makes a bold declaration that everybody around is our family. In the wake of it, our mind can`t help but encounter the most unconformable questions: "Who truly is my family?" and "Am I alone?". Therefore, globalization and solitude are not that wide apart.

As for nationalism, it is definitely more parochial bestowing upon us a sense of being rooted, a sense connectedness in a close-knit community. It is cozy and makes no grand endeavors to transcend the ordinary limits of human existence eliminating borders. It does not aspire for global governance and connives at our greatest whim—to stay tethered to the golden past. With its disarming sincerity nationalism is undeniably human putting forward the idea that gross national happiness, security and welfare are much more important than gross national product. On top of it, nationalism is cruelly rational with its statement that humans are merely too different to get mixed and blended together. To put it differently, nationalism is that second face of Janus and not necessary the ugly one.

Countdown has begun. This could be our worst century. A century of split world, divided world, of world torn apart. This could be a century of walls: political walls, trade walls, communication walls. A century of iron curtains and blind spots. A century of failed McDonaldisation with burgers and fries no longer sweetening the pill of rampant corruption, incurable illnesses, unalleviated conflicts and grinding poverty.

And this could be our best century. A century of extraordinary progress and people working miracles together and raising above geographic constraints. A century of us achieving Millennium Development Goals long before the due date and dissolving all the barriers. But in fact, there is no either-or option. Without globalization in the first place there would be no need to refuse so vehemently pervasive xenophobia and nationalism. And as long as globalization is our new reality, nationalism is our safety net. Our ski poles to slide the slippery slope. Our godsend and our asset which ensures that humanity does not overdo with chocolate and does not scorch its wings while getting warm by the global fire.

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