Is there a “politics of happiness”?

By Hazel Henderson

I welcome the worldwide debate on the politics of happiness and John De Graaf’s many contributions to ways we can get our nations’ scorecards beyond measuring GDP. I began critiquing the idiocies of measuring national progress in GDP-measured money terms as a member of the Technology Assessment Advisory Council to the US Congress and the National Science Foundation from 1975 until 1980.

So why are we still debating what’s wrong with the GDP-view of progress and the need to go beyond it to measure leisure time, health, education, poverty gaps and environmental quality, as well as happiness?  Why, when 170 countries agreed to correct the errors of GDP by deducting its social and environmental costs at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, are we still wedded to the GDP scorecard so beloved of economists?

On the way back from that 1992 Rio Earth Summit, I determined to continue my efforts and those of many others to keep demanding these reforms of GDP. I developed an alternative scorecard, Country Futures Indicators© to expand the official statistical lenses of economists and governments to include personal, social and ecological wealth indicators of human development.  I joined forces with the UN Development Program and encouraged their launch in 1990 of their Human Development Index, now the most widely used alternative to GDP. I helped to create the (regularly-updated) Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators. Calvert’s PR people helped set up press interviews on new indicators with every major news outlet. 

We got nothing but deafening silence until the groundbreaking first International Conference on Implementing Indicators of Sustainability and Quality of Life (ICONS), held in Curitiba, Brazil, 2003. (I was an advisor for the conference organizers.) At ICONS, an advisor to Bhutan presented its developing work on indicators of Gross National Happiness (GNH).

The Brazilian media reported on the conference, which sparked a global media feeding-frenzy about Gross National Happiness.  Yet to this day, most still ignore the deeper issues of why all the existing indicators of health, education, poverty gaps and environmental quality had been suppressed for so long.

One reason is that the economics profession does not want GDP changed. They fear losing their data series, their intellectual superiority, their dominance of national policy-making and international bodies, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO – all of which relied on the same faulty economic models.

Another reason why GDP has never been corrected is the special interest politics that preserve the GDP money view of wealth. These include all the companies whose profits depend on “externalizing” the social and environmental costs of their operations and the politicians and government departments (think Commerce, Trade, Central Banks, Economic Development authorities) who do their bidding. 

The public gets it, however. Ethical Markets Media funded a survey by London-based Globescan in 10 countries and found large majorities of their populations supported, including all the available indicators of quality of life (“Worldwide Support for True Wealth Measures”). The popular movements that promote the politics of happiness have found a way to confront economists, business-as-usual and their political allies. I welcome and support them and all the new books including those of Derek Bok and Sissela Bok, and the new indicators, particularly the Canadian Index of Wellbeing and its latest focus on time.
 
The political pitfalls in focusing on “happiness” are my deeper concern — and the way they are already manipulated to maintain the status quo. They include the subjective nature of “happiness,” as pointed out by many proponents and the skeptics, including myself. Just one or two examples suffice: a population surveyed may report high levels of happiness for many reasons. Some cultures seem to produce happier people than other cultures; a community can report high levels of happiness while in danger from undiscovered contaminants in their water supply or radiation levels in their homes due to spent wastes mixed with cement in their construction.  This is just the beginning! I’ll discuss these in more depth next time. 

About Hazel Henderson

Hazel Henderson is author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy and co-developer with the Calvert Group of the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators.  She is a member of the Club of Rome and a Fellow of Britain’s Royal Society of Arts.

Readers: Join the debate! Is there a “politics of happiness”? And why should companies care?