Sriram Balasubramanian — Wellbeing measurements, Easterlin’s paradox and new growth models: A perspective through gross national happiness

 A good article.

Based on my observation as a traveler years ago, many people in so-called "poor countries" as "happier" than most people in developed countries, but this is true most of those people that were rural and their lifestyle was close to the historically indigenous culture. They were "happier" in the sense that they had few wants and those wants were mostly needs that were met through "tribal" culture and simple technology.

"Happiness" is in the mind, and it is grounded in the level of consciousness of individuals and their collective consciousness as communities and societies. So-called primitive societies have developed social systems and personal development that generally serves well in its environment. External conditions are not sufficient in approaching happiness as a subjective factor. In fact, some of the unhappiest people I have known were extremely wealthy. They dealt with their issues through substance abuse or abnormal behavior.

Traditionalisms have been saying that real happiness is within and that status, power and wealth can at best provide a palliative. They can only serve as a façade.

The problems, challenges really, arise when these traditional systems come into contact with developed systems and new conditions begin to predominate. The problem is one of scale. Scaling up "underdeveloped" systems to meet the criteria of the West presents the challenge of also bringing along the positive aspects of so-called primitive cultures. That generally doesn't happens, it seems from experience, especially when traditional peoples are forced to adopt new ways and fit themselves into an alien mold, either owing to changing conditions, or by force.

This also brings in the current conflict between traditionalism and liberalism, especially when liberalism is viewed as neoliberalism. This is also connected with the West perceiving its shouldering "the white man's burden" by bringing the 18th century Enlightenment to the rest of the world and forcing it on traditional peoples in the name of progress.

It not going to be possible to develop a very useful Gross Happiness Index under those conditions, since it won't fit the realities of the dialectic that the world is now in the midst of going through. The good news is that the "holy grail" of unlimited growth that underlies neoliberalism is being challenged by changing circumstances and neo-imperialism and neocolonialism are being challenged by emergent powers.

VOX.EU
Wellbeing measurements, Easterlin’s paradox and new growth models: A perspective through gross national happiness

Sriram Balasubramanian | Consultant Economist, International Finance Corporation

Marshall Auerback — Higher GDP Growth Does Not Equate To Greater Social Well-Being And Happiness

For rich, developing, and transition countries, whether pooled or analyzed separately, there is no time series evidence that a higher economic growth rate increases the rate of improvement in life satisfaction. Doubling the rate of economic growth does not double the increase in life satisfaction; rather, the evidence is that it has no significant effect at all.

If there is any less developed country for which one would expect a positive impact of economic growth on SWB it is China, whose growth since 1990 from an initially very low value has been at the highest rate ever recorded, a four fold multiplication of real GDP per capita in two decades (Heston, Summers, and Aten 2012). Household appliances such as refrigerators and washing machines – quite rare in 1990 – are now commonplace in urban areas. Color television sets currently average over one per household. By 2008, almost one in ten urban households owned a car and China had become the world’s leading automobile producer, according to the OECD.

Yet, the combined evidence from six separate surveys is that life satisfaction in China has not improved, and, if anything, may have declined somewhat, according to Richard Easterlin, a Professor Emeritus at USC, who has made a lifetime study of the phenomenon…. 

Macrobits by Marshall Auerback
Higher GDP Growth Does Not Equate To Greater Social Well-Being And Happiness
Marshall Auerback

While psychologists have long used surveys of reported well-being to study happiness, economists only recently ventured into this arena. Early economists and philosophers, ranging from Aristotle to Bentham, Mill, and Smith, incorporated the pursuit of happiness in their work. Yet, as economics grew more rigorous and quantitative, more parsimonious definitions of welfare took hold. Utility was taken to depend only on income as mediated by individual choices or preferences within a rational individual’s monetary budget constraint. 

Even within a more orthodox framework, focusing purely on income can miss key elements of welfare. People have different preferences for material and non-material goods. They may choose a lower-paying but more personally rewarding job, for example. They are nonetheless acting to maximize utility in a classically Walrasian sense. 

The study of happiness or subjective well-being is part of a more general move in economics that challenges these narrow assumptions. The introduction of bounded rationality and the establishment of behavioural economics, for example, have opened new lines of research. Happiness economics – which represents one new direction – relies on more expansive notions of utility and welfare, including interdependent utility functions, procedural utility, and the interaction between rational and non-rational influences in determining economic behaviour.…

Joshua Holland interviews Clair Brown — How Would Buddha Organize Our Cutthroat Modern Economy? (via Moyers & Company)

How Would Buddha Organize Our Cutthroat Modern Economy? (via Moyers & Company)

Clair Brown, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, taught economics for over 30 years. She often found that the students in her sprawling introductory classes had a hard time reconciling the dominant neoclassical model that she taught with the real world…

---

Kathleen Maclay — Buddhist economics: oxymoron or idea whose time has come?

As part of the course, students have been engaged in conversation with Tibetan Buddhist priest Anam Thubten Rinpoche, who explained Buddhism’s “Eightfold Path” that is based on right livelihood — or a way of making a living that does no harm to others, interdependence and connectedness, and inner contentment. True Buddhist economics, he told the students, recognizes everyone’s interconnectedness.

Rinpoche stressed living a life based on inner values and inner wealth and taking care of those who are suffering or in need. “Wealth is not only your material acquisition,” said Rinpoche, suggesting rejection of modern society’s “grand delusion” in favor of a middle path based on faith, generosity, integrity, wisdom, conscience and contemplation.

UC Berkeley New Center
Buddhist economics: oxymoron or idea whose time has come?
Kathleen Maclay

See also E. F. Schumacher's article, Buddhist Economics, and book, Small Is Beautiful that introduced Buddhist economists to the West.

Buddhist monk declared world’s happiest man

As he grins serenely and his burgundy robes billow in the fresh Himalayan wind, it is not difficult to see why scientists declared Matthieu Ricard the happiest man they had ever tested.

The monk, molecular geneticist and confidant of the Dalai Lama, is passionately setting out why meditation can alter the brain and improve people’s happiness in the same way that lifting weights puts on muscle.

“It’s a wonderful area of research because it shows that meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree but it completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are,” the Frenchman told AFP.

Ricard, a globe-trotting polymath who left everything behind to become a Tibetan Buddhist in a Himalayan hermitage, says anyone can be happy if they only train their brain.

Neuroscientist Richard Davidson wired up Ricard’s skull with 256 sensors at the University of Wisconsin four years ago as part of research on hundreds of advanced practitioners of meditation.
The scans showed that when meditating on compassion,

Ricard’s brain produces a level of gamma waves — those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory — “never reported before in the neuroscience literature”, Davidson said.

The scans also showed excessive activity in his brain’s left prefrontal cortex compared to its right counterpart, giving him an abnormally large capacity for happiness and a reduced propensity towards negativity, researchers believe. 

Research into the phenomenon, known as “neuroplasticity”, is in its infancy and Ricard has been at the forefront of ground-breaking experiments along with other leading scientists across the world....

Much more of interest in the full article.

The Raw Story
Buddhist monk declared world’s happiest man
Agence France-Presse

Kind of undercuts the assumption of "pursuit of happiness" in terms of maximum utility based on measurement of units of consumption, and the scarcity thinking on which neoclassical economics is based.

Robert Skidelsky — Happiness Is Equality

The king of Bhutan wants to make us all happier. Governments, he says, should aim to maximize their people’s Gross National Happiness rather than their Gross National Product. Does this new emphasis on happiness represent a shift or just a passing fad?

Project Syndicate
Happiness Is Equality
Robert Skidelsky | Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University and a fellow of the British Academy in history and economics, is a member of the British House of Lords

As a philosopher, the issue is really getting the definition of "happiness" right. Why is this so? Because it is generally agreed that everyone seeks happiness, as Aristotle notes in Book One of the Nichomachean Ethics. This is the origin of the phrase "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence and its recognition as a natural right

Aristotle also observed there that while all agree about the pursuit of happiness, people disagree over what happiness is and what the means to achieve it may be. He examines the various alternatives that were proposed before settling on his own answer.

Is happiness the result of satisfaction of material preferences through rational pursuit of maximum utility? Does happiness result from the successful pursuit of fame, fortune, power, and pleasure, as is commonly supposed? Or is happiness the outcome of fairness and justice, i.e., egality, which is the tack that Lord Skidelsky takes? Or is it attendent upon progressive self-actualization, as Aristotle and Abraham Maslow, for example, claimed. Or is the abiding fulfillment of an ineffable realization the only true happiness, as perennial wisdom teaches?

Or is it something else? What would the criterion be for deciding among alternatives?

And this is before we get into the quality versus quantity distinction and how to assess quality.

Needless to say, this is not properly a question for economics. The settling of economists on a view that Aristotle rejected as adolescent vitiates the entire economic enterprise based on this arbitrary and baseless assumption, selected for computational convenience rather than correspondence with reality.

The difficulty of answering this question about what constitutes happiness arises from different views of human nature and reality itself.

Prosperity economics: Building an Economy for All

The research, writing, and production of this report has been a collaborative effort involving several dozen economists and other academics, policy analysts, activists, organizers, and other dedicated professionals in the public policy arena. The authors owe special thanks to Steve Savner of the Center for Community Change, Damon Silvers of the AFL-CIO, Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, and Dan Feder of Yale University. We are grateful to Patrick Watson, who edited the report and oversaw its final production, and to Kim Weinstein, our designer, who worked against strict deadlines with grace and good humor. Valuable feedback was provided by the following (organizations provided for identification purposes only): Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research; Seth Borgos, Center for Community Change; Mark Levinson, SEIU; Catherine Singley, National Council of La Raza; and Corrine Yu, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. In addition, the authors benefited immensely from the input and help of dozens of generous thinkers. Though they are too numerous to list here, we would like to thank in particular Eileen Appelbaum, Diane Archer, Algernon Austin, Ana Avendana, Bob Baugh, Jared Bernstein, Deepak Bhargava, Victoria Bilski, Pierre X. Bourbonnais, Healther Boushey, Max Bruner, Olivia Cohn, Cory Connolly, Stuart Craig, Nina Dastur, Andrea Zuniga DiBitetto, Gail Dratch, Linda Evarts, Michael Evangelist, Heidi Hartmann, Wade Henderson, Jon Hiatt, Charles Kamasaki, Lane Kenworthy, Mike Konczal, Doug Kysar, Pamela Lamonaca, Mary Lassen, Kelly Lawson, Mike Lux, Barry Lynn, Mark Manfra, Jane McDonald, Caitlin Miner-LeGrand, Denise Mitchell, David Moss, Teryn Norris, Christine Owens, Tom Palley, Paul Pierson, Jonas Pontusson, Eric Rodriguez, Kelly Ross, Lauren Rothfarb, Nancy Schiffer, Theda Skocpol (and the Scholars Strategy Network, which she founded), Rick Sloan, Gus Speth, Becky Thiess, Anna Walnycki, Jessye Waxman, Drew Westen, and Joanne Williams.

Paper available at Prosperity For America
Prosperity economics: Building an Economy for All
Jacob S. Hacker, Ph.D., is the Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science, and Senior Research Fellow in International and Area Studies at the MacMillan Center at Yale University, and Nate Loewentheil, third year law Student at Yale Law School where he is focusing his studies on environmental law and politics.
(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)

Study and public policy proposal with a decidedly liberal bias. Most of us will recognize several people in the acknowledgements.

Nic Marks — Measuring what matters: the Happy Planet Index 2012

Interesting project, only in the beginning stages. Check out the Happiness Index as it is constructed so far, as well as country rankings.

Read it at NEF — New Economics Foundation

Measuring what matters: the Happy Planet Index 2012
Nic Marks | 
Founder of the centre for well-being

Bhutan's happiness index goes global

...the then king of Bhutan Jigme Singye Wangchuc declared his aim of not just increasing the gross domestic product of his country, but also the "gross national happiness". That year, 1972, had the same numbers as the year 1729 when Bhutan was given its original governance code that declared: "if the government cannot create happiness for its people, there is no purpose for the government to exist." [emphasis added]

Read it at Asia Times Online
Bhutan's happiness index goes global
By Raja Murthy

This is turning into a big deal as a counter to neoliberalism. It's going to be a rising trend as the emerging nations step onto the stage and confront the neoliberal powers that be of the West. It is also a rising trend in the progressive element of Western societies.

World Happiness Report 2012: Scandinavian Countries Are Happiest On Earth

Denmark has taken the top spot on the United Nation's first ever World Happiness Report, followed by Finland, Norway and the Netherlands.

The 158-page report, published by Columbia University's Earth Institute, was commissioned for the United Nations Conference on Happiness on Monday in order to "review the state of happiness in the world today and show how the new science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness."

The rankings in the report were based on a number called the "life evaluation score," a measurement which takes into account a variety of factors including people's health, family and job security as well as social factors like political freedom and government corruption. It also looks at measurements from previous reports on happiness from the Gallup World Poll (GWP), the World Values Survey (WVS), the European Values Survey (EVS), and the European Social Survey (ESS).

In the introduction to the report, co-editors John Helliwell, Richard Layard and Jeffrey Sachs explain that the report aims in part to evaluate happiness based on a more comprehensive measurement system that can be used to inform policy-makers. As the Atlantic explains, previous reports on happiness have linked personal contentment to income, but that correlation has been challenged in recent years by economists who have argued that the happiness of a nation is determined by far more than its Gross National Product.

"While basic living standards are essential for happiness, after the baseline has been met happiness varies more with the quality of human relationship than with income," the report read. "Policy goals should include high employment and high-quality work; a strong community with high levels of trust and respect, which government can influence through inclusive participatory policies; improved physical and mental health; support of family life; and a decent education for all."

Read it at The Huffington Post
World Happiness Report 2012: Scandinavian Countries Are Happiest On Earth

Gross National Happiness

UNITED NATIONS, April 3, 2012 (IPS) - Which is more important in human life: money or happiness? Can money buy happiness? According to the tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan, the time has come for the world to pay closer attention to this age-old question.
"We are starting a global movement on this issue," Jigme Thinley, the prime minister of Bhutan, told IPS after a high-level meeting on "Happiness and Well-being: Defining a New Economic Paradigm" held at United Nations (U.N.) headquarters in New York on Monday.

Thinley said he wants the international community to realise that a paradigm shift in addressing the issue of sustainability in both the environment and global development is urgently needed.

The prime minister explained that in his country, "gross national happiness" is a development paradigm that has guided its development for several decades. He said hoped the world community would embrace that model.

The phrase "gross national happiness" was first coined in 1971 by the fourth king of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who declared, "Gross national happiness (GNH) is more important than gross domestic product."

That concept implies that sustainable development should not depend solely on economic aspects of wellbeing as it addresses the notion of progress.

Read the rest at Inter Press Service
Measure Progress in Happiness, Not Money, Bhutan Urges
by Haider Rizvi