Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index

Date

December 31, 2000

source

The Gross National Happiness Index of the Kingdom of Bhutan was the first large-scale attempt to measure the level of happiness of a whole country’s population. The GNH index defines four pillars in nine domains, for a total of 33 indicators, which are processed into one value that describes the society’s happiness level. But the system doesn’t always work as advertised.

If you like reading about philosophy, here’s a free, weekly newsletter with articles just like this one: Send it to me!

The happy kingdom

The Kingdom of Bhutan is not a place you’d normally have heard of. It’s a small country, 46,500 square kilometres: roughly 150 km north to south and 300 km east to west [1]. It’s mostly high mountains and deep valleys, and it stretches from a hot and humid south to the perpetual snow of the Himalayas in the north. What makes it remarkable, though, is that its government has set itself the explicit goal of making its people happier.

In the 1970s, the then King Jigme Singye Wangchuck promoted the idea that monitoring the happiness of a population, rather than other (economic) indicators, would provide a better, more human perspective on a country’s development.

Of course, this immediately poses the question: how could one possibly measure a whole country’s happiness? Is it even possible to measure one single number that would express the country’s happiness in a sensible way?

There are many reasons to believe that this is impossible.

What is happiness?

We talked in another post about Veenhoven’s idea that “happiness” is a word that actually refers to at least four totally different concepts:

We may be talking about a potential for happiness or about actually achieved outcomes.
And we may be referring to subjective measures of happiness (as in my private feelings); or to the way people look at me from the outside (“Einstein must have been happy because his life had such an influence on others.”)

So we have the view from the inside and the outside, and each can be directed towards potentials or outcomes, which gives us four different versions of what “happiness” could refer to. Therefore, so Veenhoven, talking about “happiness” in general is (at best) misleading. At worst, we would be trying to measure one thing which, in reality, is four different things that cannot be measured together or expressed in one single number.

How could one possibly measure a whole country’s happiness? Is it even possible to measure one single number that would express the country’s happiness in a sensible way?

But this criticism doesn’t seem to make such measurements entirely impossible. As an example, take a lunch. What I get from a “good” lunch will be a whole collection of different things that are valuable to me: