Gross National Happiness

As long as there have been countries, there have been governments concerned with how well their countries are doing. There are lots of ways of measuring this, but the standard method for seeing how countries stack up against each other, or against their own previous performance, is the Gross National Product, or GNP. The GNP is (more or less) the total sum of all the income accrued to the country and its residents in a given year.


This is all well and good, so long as you assume that income = cash = good things for everyone. To a certain degree, this holds true. When you have enough money for food and shelter, you are inarguably better off than when you didn't. However, things get a bit trickier once we've taken care of the fundamentals and we start talking about cash above and beyond what we need to survive. Will you be happier with that motorized tie rack or Robopanda? Maybe, but probably only until the novelty wears off, or your robot panda becomes sentient and decides to avenge the indentured servitude of the tie rack.

If more money doesn't consistently lead to more happiness, is there perhaps some other way we can gauge the success of a country? As usual, we can look to Bhutan for the answer. Wait... Bhutan?



Bhutan, a land-locked Himalayan Buddhist kingdom with a population of just under 700,000, has been the first country in the world to adopt Gross National Happiness as its official metric for national success. GNH is much more subjective than GNP, which can lead to some criticisms regarding its use as a comparative tool between different countries. That being said, since the government adopted the GNH instead of the GNP, the residents of Bhutan have consistently reported very high levels of happiness without the associated high levels of production and consumption that classical economics dictates would be necessary to achieve this.

Should we Canadians adopt Gross National Happiness as our new standard of measuring success? It's certainly not an idea without merit, but it turns out that if we want to emulate Bhutan's recipe for happiness, we should also probably eliminate cable TV and the internet.