The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [29]
In 2008, as the French economy slipped toward recession, French president Nicolas Sarkozy drafted two Nobel Prize-winning economists, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, and the domestic economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi, to prepare a report on how to better measure people’s socioeconomic progress. “The time is right for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people’s well-being,” the report concluded. Government, it suggested, should supplement standard economic data with other information, including citizens’ sense of happiness with their lives.
The tiny Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, high in the Himalayas, has stretched the idea further—devising a quantity it calls “gross national happiness,” which it plans to use to evaluate policies and keep track of the country’s well-being. King Jigme Singye Wangchuck coined the term in 1972, but it became a reality only after he abdicated thirty-six years later, when Bhutan had its first-ever democratic election, and the Bhutanese approved a new constitution that established the world’s first GNH index.
The index has six dozen variables, grouped into nine dimensions—including psychological well-being and community vitality, ecology, good governance, and time use. And it sets values to behaviors. People score happiness points if they pray and meditate often and understand their family, and lose points if they feel selfish. Yet more isn’t necessarily better. Playing Langthab, for instance, a game in which opponents head-butt each other into submission, is assumed to make Bhutanese happy. But it is enough to play it once or twice a month. Playing more doesn’t increase the happiness stock. Similarly, money adds to happiness—but only up to 70,597 ngultrum—or about $1,550—per household per year.
YET DESPITE ITS growing popularity, the belief that money has little or nothing to do with happiness is misleading. Like Schopenhauer’s musings and Mariana’s troubles, the sweeping rhetoric about the emptiness of material wealth supports a dubious proposition that the pursuit of economic progress is somehow a waste of time because it does not deliver what is most important in life. Despite the skepticism about run-of-the-mill economic growth, despite the angry denunciations of materialism, it is usually better to have a big gross domestic product than a small one. Just ask one of the more than 3 billion people—half the world’s population—how happy they are making do with less than $2.50 a day.
In fact, surveys find that richer people tend to be happier than poorer people. That’s because money provides many of the things that improve people’s lot. Richer countries are generally healthier and have lower child mortality and higher life expectancy. They tend to have cleaner environments, and their citizens often have more education and less physically demanding and more interesting jobs. Richer people usually have more leisure time, travel more, and have more money to enjoy the arts. Money helps people overcome constraints and take control over their lives. Whatever Kennedy said, gross national product does allow for the health of our kids.
Researchers in Britain found that an extra £125,000 a year increased people’s sense of satisfaction with their lives by one point on a scale of one to seven. A study in Australia pored through surveys to understand how people’s feelings of happiness responded to life’s events. It found that a windfall of $16,500 to $24,500 provided more or less the same boost to happiness as getting married. Losing between $178,300 and $187,600 generated the same level of unhappiness as that caused by the death of a child. A Gallup survey in 2009 found that 30 percent of Americans earning less than $24,000 a year had received a diagnosis of depression, compared