The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [87]
For too long we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community value in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product now is over 800 billion dollars a year, but that gross national product, if we judge the United States of America by that, that gross national product counts air pollution, and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic squall. It counts Napalm, and it counts nuclear warheads, and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our city. It counts Whitman’s rifles and Speck’s knifes and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet, the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play; it does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything in short except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.24
There have been growing efforts to expand the range of indicators to measure better what’s important for our well-being. The World Values Survey and Gallup International have each pioneered various measures of subjective well-being, which psychologists and economists have found to be stable, slowly evolving, and useful for social diagnostics. The Human Development Index (HDI) is another well-known attempt to combine economic indicators with social indicators (literacy, school enrollment, and life expectancy) to give a more rounded picture of well-being. The American Human Development Project has recently extended the HDI to American states, counties, and congressional districts, an enormously helpful contribution to assessing the diversity of America’s economic and social conditions.25
No country has taken the challenge of measuring, and raising, happiness more seriously than the Himalayan Buddhist Kingdom of Bhutan. Back in 1972, the country’s fourth monarch, Jigme Dorji Wangchuk, called for the country to orient its policies to promote the gross national happiness rather than the gross national product. This challenge has not been taken lightly or figuratively. The government of Bhutan established the Gross National Happiness Commission to oversee a series of metrics that would quantify and track the changes in national happiness.26 GNH is measured in nine domains:
Psychological well-being
Time use
Community vitality
Culture
Health
Education
Environmental diversity
Living standard
Governance
Each of these is measured by a series of quantitative indicators. What is notable is the combination of relatively standard economic measurements such as household income and education with measures of cultural integrity (e.g., the use of dialects, engagement in traditional sports and community festivals), ecology (e.g., forest cover), health status (e.g., body mass index, number of healthy days per month), community well-being (e.g., social trust, kinship density), time allocation, and general mental health (e.g., indicators of psychological distress).
The worldwide movement to measure happiness and the quality of life is now expanding very rapidly. The OECD launched a Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies in 2004, and the European Commission is moving forward on its own set of integrated indicators. There have been countless recent attempts to correct GNP to account for its many anomalies