In April 2010, Tshoki Zangmo propelled herself up steep, snow-dusted slopes to reach Laya, a remote town in the mountainous district of Gasa, Bhutan. She was two days’ walk from the nearest city, and this hike formed just one leg of what would be a six-month trail across the small, South Asian Kingdom of Bhutan. “There was no guaranteed accommodation, so we had to carry sleeping bags everywhere. We cooked our own meals and ate whatever we found,” Zangmo says.
She was there to enter villagers’ homes, and measure their happiness. Wielding a 148-question survey, Zangmo would ask meticulous questions covering every aspect of their lives. ‘How anxious are you about your children’s future?’ she would ask. ‘How spiritual do you consider yourself to be?’
Every five years, researchers like Zangmo from the government’s Centre for Bhutan Studies go to great lengths to survey a nationally-representative sample of over 7,000 Bhutanese citizens. The purpose? To gauge the country’s happiness. “It’s one of the biggest social surveys in the world,” Zangmo says. Since 1972, when the country’s fourth king proposed the idea of ‘Gross National Happiness’ (GNH) as an alternative to gross domestic product (GDP) – the measure of a country’s economy – Bhutan has sought to measure a suite of other factors that it believed could more fully capture national progress – from psychological health, to sense of community.
When Bhutan formally enacted GNH as the government's express responsibility in 2008, the timing was fortuitous. The global financial crash saw governments suddenly looking for alternatives to their current measures of progress. Taking its cue from Bhutan, France’s former president Nicolas Sarkozy commissioned a major report in 2009 that made the case for wellbeing as a measure of progress, instead of GDP. In 2010, former prime minister David Cameron announced the UK would start measuring wellbeing alongside economic growth, prompting a vast data-collection effort by the country’s Office for National Statistics. Then in 2012, at the behest of Bhutan, the United Nations convened an international meeting to devise a new, more “holistic approach to development”. Ultimately, that spawned the UN World Happiness Report, an influential compendium that ranks countries according to citizens’ self-reported happiness.
Riding the wave, several countries now have whole ministries, departments, and programs devoted to happiness. In the United Arab Emirates, a dedicated minister oversees the National Program for Happiness and Wellbeing. And New Zealand has recently taken what many consider to be the boldest step: the launch of a Wellbeing Budget that’s designed to usher in policies that deliberately target public welfare.
Yet, as countries race to be recognised for national happiness, there are still questions over how we measure this fuzzy emotion – and what tangible change can truly result from nations tallying it up. Critics argue that at worst, it’s a distraction governments use to draw a cloak over their own failings. But if they play it right, could some good come from it, too?
Simon Kuznets is the reason we have GDP. In the midst of the Great Depression the American economist developed the metric that turned into our current metric for GDP. Commissioned by the United States Congress, his work was intended to help the government better understand how the financial crisis had unfolded – and how to avoid it again –by creating a tally of the rise and fall in nations’ economic growth.
At the time, Kuznet warned against the misuse of his metric, writing that “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.” He might have known its limitations – but he couldn’t control how misunderstood GDP would one day become.
“Every economist knew that GDP was not a measure of welfare, when I was being taught in the 70s,” says Arthur Grimes, professor of wellbeing and public policy in the school of government at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. But over the decades it has become increasingly mischaracterised as the key indicator of a nation’s progress.
Part of the confusion is that there is actually a correlation between economic growth and wellbeing, especially at the early stages of a country’s development, explains Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, and associate editor of the UN World Happiness Report. “Pure economic indicators of growth correlate with people’s well being up to a certain level,” he says. But with increasing economic development, “it really, really tapers off.” Beyond a certain point, GDP no longer captures the nuances of citizens’ happiness. “It’s probably not a coincidence that nations like New Zealand, the UK and other relatively well-off countries are moving beyond GDP,” says De Neve. “Growth for the sake of growth is no longer translating to further wellbeing.”
The Kingdom of Bhutan grasped earlier on than either of these countries that the contentedness of its citizens could be an alternative marker of success. “When we talk about Gross National Happiness we are not against GDP,” says Zangmo. “We’re just saying that the ultimate end goal is wellbeing and happiness of the people. And GDP is just one of the means.”
The national survey uses some traditional socioeconomic measures of wellbeing, such as living standards, health, and education. But it also incorporates some more unusual elements, such as culture, community vitality, and psychological health (which encompasses spirituality). Respondents’ happiness is ranked based on their scores across the various domains. Then, the results are broken down by age group, gender, and district, providing a granular reading on citizens’ experiences.
Whether this citizen-minded approach is working, so far, is harder to disentangle from the data. Between the first survey in 2010, and the second in 2015, Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness grew by 1.8 per cent. That was shaped in part by a noticeable spike in living standards registered in the survey, as well as a 20 per cent surge in access to electricity and healthcare. “[Bhutan] also had a massive, electrifying reduction in poverty” – declining from over 20 per cent to 8.2 per cent today, says Sabina Alkire, director of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, and co-developer of the Alkire-Foster measurement method which the government of Bhutan adapted to build its GNH Index.
In Zangmo’s opinion, however, these benefits can’t necessarily be credited to the government’s wellbeing-centred approach; rather, they’re an outcome of the country’s rising growth and employment. Bhutan is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world – because of its small size, increasing trade and modernisation, and the massive growth of its hydropower industry.
Where the Index proves its value is as an exquisitely-detailed tracking tool. For instance, between 2010 and 2015 the results showed a dip in what Zangmo calls “softer indicators” like psychological wellbeing, playing out as a statistical decline in compassion, contentment, and spirituality. Bhutan considers these crucial to its national happiness. This suggested that psychological wellbeing – as well as community vitality, where scores were also low – should focus areas for the Gross National Happiness Commission, whose job is to transform such findings into policy. “If these [indicators] improve in another five years, then it must be attributable to [the GNH approach,]” Zangmo says.
But many take issue with Bhutan’s rise to prominence as global happiness guide. In the 1990s, persecution of minority religious ethnic groups pushed thousands of people out of Bhutan, many of whom are still seeking resettlement. While active persecution has ended, this cast a shadow over the country’s push for Gross National Happiness – drawing a question mark over who it really serves. (The survey is designed to ensure the inclusion of religious minorities, Alkire emphasises.) As well as this, the country has recorded high rates of domestic abuse, and battles persistent gender inequality.
But more philosophically, there’s also some scepticism around the global fixation on ‘happiness’ that has come out of Bhutan’s approach. Clearly, Bhutan’s survey does more than just gauging people’s feelings: “The GNH Commission requires data that not only says how happy you are, but also, what are the enabling conditions for happiness or wellbeing” – so that those can be delivered in policies, Zangmo says. Yet, packaging all this as a measure of happiness, and making that the explicit national goal - the idea that has so charmed and captivated the rest of the world - is risky, not least because ‘happiness’ is something we don’t know how to define.
The idea of national happiness is spreading. In May, New Zealand’s government caused an international stir when it launched its annual budget. This wasn’t an ordinary financial breakdown: it was called the ‘Wellbeing Budget”, and its purpose was to make life better for New Zealanders.
The budget is built on a pre-existing Treasury tool called the Living Standards Framework, a set of wellbeing indicators – including cultural identity, health, and time-use – that are used to broadly advise the government on how to lift living standards, says Tim Ng, the Treasury’s chief economic adviser. From these indicators, the current government has identified five priorities, including the improvement of mental health, and increasing child welfare, around which it will organise spending. Several hundred million from the new budget will be devoted to improving mental health, for instance, and incoming policies will have to be justified according to how they address the budget’s five key wellbeing goals.
Previous governments have used the Living Standards Framework to inform their policies, so some critics say that framing the current budget in this way just cynically repackages what has already been done. Yet, others insist that tethering spending to wellbeing makes the goals more tangible.
“What, in New Zealand, has felt like it’s pushed the envelope the most is using the [Living Standards] Framework to try to go beyond simply presenting a bunch of headline indicators, and to push those indicators into policy usage,” says Ng. This also makes the New Zealand stand out from other nations that simply measure wellbeing, he believes: “The really hard stuff is actually getting it into the system and changing the way we do things as government.”
Arthur Grimes from the Victoria University of Wellington says the deliberate focus on wellbeing makes New Zealand stand out in the current global political climate. “There aren’t that many governments around the world at the moment that are interested in people’s wellbeing,” he says. “This is very much an early attempt, but it’s an early attempt to make it meaningful.”
The idea of wellbeing is something for which we have decades of data and dozens of reliable indicators – embedded in prestigious metrics such as the Human Development Index, and devised over years of research at the country-level, as in the case of New Zealand’s Living Standards Framework. Happiness, on the other hand, is a murkier notion – and yet it’s still what tends to dominate when we talk about wellbeing. “I don’t know that we’ll ever arrive at a definition of happiness that will satisfy everybody,” says Jessica Pykett, a social and political geographer at the University of Birmingham in the UK. “Happiness means different things to different people, and in different cultural contexts.”
The problem arises partly because the only way we can currently measure happiness is to ask people directly how happy they are: usually that’s done using a standardised, popular metric called the Life Satisfaction Scale, which employs a series of questions to gauge how happy someone is with their lives. Several countries use it – including the UK’s own Office for National Statistics – and it’s also the backbone of the UN World Happiness Reports. The reason it’s so popular is that asking people directly to rank their happiness “is ultimately more democratic,” says Oxford University’s Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, than a dystopian scenario wherein governments might be compelled to define happiness on their citizens’ behalf.
But, when it comes to building a definition of happiness, these subjective responses aren’t helpful, Pykett says. “We don’t actually know what we’re measuring.” And, without a reliable definition, it’s unclear what governments should be aiming for, if happiness is the goal.
One poignant example comes from India. In 2016, the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh launched the country’s first ever Happiness Department. Inspired by Bhutan, the department rolled out 70 programs intended to “infuse positivity” into citizens’ lives. Mainly, these seemed to revolve around the practice of yoga, meditation, and a self-help calendar, which elicited tips on cultivating happiness within. As one article pointed out, the state was less explicit about how it sought to improve happiness by tackling social ills, such as unemployment and gender divides.
This reveals something else Pykett is concerned about: a focus on achieving happiness risks forming an increasingly ‘internal’ view of personal wellbeing, which might act as a convenient distraction from how governments can improve the ‘external’ conditions that enable it. “Governments are not there to create happiness, necessarily. They are there to arbitrate between different preferences and interests that people have, and to enable us to live together,” Pykett says.
In fact, several nations are now shifting away from ‘happiness’ as the explicit goal. The German government has stated that it doesn’t think ‘happiness’ can be achieved through government policies – but wellbeing can. Meanwhile, Morocco has moved away from an individualised notion of happiness to focus on its external drivers. In the United Kingdom, a fusion exists, as the Office for National Statistics (ONS) seeks to measure both subjective happiness and objective wellbeing, together.
The ONS was among the first in the world to start incorporating wellbeing statistics into its official data collection program, after Cameron’s wellbeing speech back in 2010. As part of an initiative called ‘Beyond GDP’, the Office for National Statistics surveyed 30,000 people in the UK about what mattered to them most, and then “used this feedback to construct 43 headline indicators of national well-being,” explains Glenn Everett, director of the sustainability and inequalities division of the ONS.
These go far beyond economics alone, covering everything from health, to jobs, relationships, and the environment, and they’re now used to build up a broad picture of wellbeing in the UK. Those results include subjective well-being measures – happiness – and these measures are also embedded across more than 20 national surveys.
The ONS is also a rich resource for organisations like What Works Wellbeing, a UK-based organisation that helps government, charities, and think tanks translate wellbeing data into practice, says Deborah Hardoon, head of evidence at the organisation. She expects that with ever-richer datasets, the connections between wellbeing indicators and people’s self-reported happiness will grow clearer. That will ultimately take us beyond national averages to reveal what she calls “the ‘hidden unhappy’ in the UK, pinpointing specifically where and why people are struggling, so we can develop “targeted interventions for particular people, particular with complex needs,” Hardoon says.
That’s supported by a growing body of evidence that objective measures of wellbeing do correlate with subjective, self-reported happiness, says De Neve. In his view, the beauty of asking someone to rank their own happiness is that “we can then reverse-engineer from that to see which of these objective quality-of-life-type aspects – sustainable development, healthcare, community – are driving that response.” That carves out a role for happiness, perhaps, in fine-tuning how governments can understand and improve citizens’ wellbeing, overall.
But ultimately, it’s whether governments enact the change, that really counts. “There’s a political naivety in assuming that knowing the best science, of happiness or wellbeing, will lead to improved public policy,” Pykett believes. “We already know quite a lot about what will help people, and yet we don’t necessarily do all these things, because of politics.”
Back in Bhutan where it all began, that thought is pertinent as the country prepares for its third nationwide survey next year. The government still needs to secure funding from the international community to carry it out. But Zangmo is hopeful that it will come through. Before Bhutan introduced the idea of Gross National Happiness, “GDP had brainwashed every leader,” Zangmo says. But since then, she believes the world has increasingly grasped the importance of what Bhutan is trying to do. “Already, I feel there’s a change in how we think.”
This article is part of our in-depth series investigating how technology is changing wellbeing, happiness and the spaces we inhabit.
From what drives the world's happiest countries to the apps we use on a daily basis, we're looking at how technologies and ideas are changing our wellbeing – for better or worse.
Click here to read more articles from this series.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
