Gross National Happiness: Explained
Money isn’t everything, at least to some people. That includes the Bhutanese government!
In 1972, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck of Bhutan was 17 when he made the decision to create a new way of comparing his nation to the world. While most countries compare standards of living and productivity through the Gross Domestic Production scale (GDP), he decided to measure this using Gross National Happiness (GNH). GDP is the cumulative total of all production in a country. On the other hand, GNH, is a general term the King Jigme chose to refer to the population’s overall wellbeing. He went as far as declaring “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product.”
The population’s wellbeing is divided into multiple sectors, measuring healthcare, education, environmental impact, and corruption. According to the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative, the GNH index takes into account 33 different factors divided into nine categories which are: psychological well being, health, education, time use, cultural diversity and resilience, good governance, community vitality, ecological diversity and resilience, and living standards. Unlike GDP, which is the cumulative income of a whole country, the GNH index can be manipulated to measure the wellbeing of specific subgroups such as measuring the happiness of only specific ethnicities in a certain town .
Based on the overall percentages a group can be classified as unhappy, narrowly happy, extensively happy, or deeply happy. Scores that are 50% or less are considered unhappy, those which are 51% to 65% are narrowly happy, 66% to 76% are extensively happy and anything above that is deeply happy. According to The World Happiness Report 2021, Finland was the happiest country in the world; whereas Afghanistan was ranked the lowest out of the list. The United States was ranked 19th, ahead of Belgium and behind the Czech Republic.
Bhutan itself was not ranked in the 2021 report due to polling technicalities; however, the analysts stated, “[Bhutan] once again provided an inspiring example for the world about how to combine health and happiness. They made explicit use of the principles of Gross National Happiness in mobilizing the whole population in collaborative efforts to avoid even a single COVID-19 death in 2020, despite having strong international travel links.”
GDP is at (most) times still more appropriate to use than GNH because not all countries recognize happiness as a measurable variable. Out of the 195 countries recognized by the United Nations, 153 participated in the 2021 World Happiness Report. Business oriented individuals would probably favor measuring countries by production over human wellbeing. For instance, a luxury clothing company would rather create a store in the United States than Bhutan. The high levels of happiness of Bhutan does not reflect on the fact most people in the country live in what the rest of the world would consider poverty. Even though the system is well meaning, it still is not appropriate for every task.
