Measure Your Country’s Greatness

Bliss and joy are often thought to be subjective. But as Carol Graham, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told OZY, there are ways of measuring “temporary happiness and long-term life satisfaction,” as well as eudaimonic well-being, which is the type of satisfaction associated with a sense of purpose. Graham noted that the work of economists Caspar Kaiser and Andrew Oswald, both of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, have shown that people can rate their happiness, and that they do so in a consistent manner. While happiness might be subjective, Kaiser and Oswald suggest that people can actually communicate how they feel with numbers.

Kaiser and Oswald uncovered that when people are asked to rate their feelings on a simple one-to-10 scale, their answers have strong predictive power, with the responses serving as a far better predictor of human behavior, according to these economists, than such traditional metrics as income, employment status or homeownership.

Economist Murray Leibbrandt of the University of Cape Town noted that this is precisely what Bhutan has been doing to compile its GNH: asking people how they feel. And while any individual person’s sense of happiness might have more to do with personal disposition than the state of society at large, on average, said Leibbrandt, “If people perceive their happiness or well-being is increasing, then that suggests there is progress in that society.”

Instead of GDP or the stock market, can you imagine world leaders and news outlets obsessing over people’s happiness?

Several OZY readers said that any genuine measure of national well-being should factor in access to housing, clean water, education, and mental health services. Leibbrandt pointed out that these variables are at the heart of Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen’s theory of capabilities; in Liebbrandt’s words, Sen argues that governments should be trying to “improve people’s capacities to do what they want to do.” Leibbrandt, like Sen, believes that access to food, water, housing, education and political freedoms is fundamental to the role of government, as these things are essential to virtually everyone’s ability to do what they want with their lives.

Of course, in most societies, some people have access to these resources, while others do not. Liebbrandt said that this is an area in which it’s important to track GDP (not just happiness) and to do so in tandem with another measure: inequality. He explained that, if inequality is decreasing while the economy is growing, “it implies that that growth is spreading across society.” In other words, for well-being to increase, the national economy must be inclusive for a broad swath of society.

Inclusion in the economy almost certainly allows for human flourishing.

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While many people might want their country to go the way of Bhutan and gross national happiness, Graham of the Brookings Institution said there should not be a single statistic or index for measuring how well a country is faring. Instead, she tells us there should be several indices — including GDP — to measure a range of factors, which she called a “dashboard approach.”

This guidance was remarkably consistent with the suggestions we received from readers, who saw a variety of social indicators as necessary for grasping the complexity of a society’s progress. One reader suggested that there should be a measure of “connection to social networks.” Graham noted that connection and public trust indeed play an important role in a society’s well-being; she pointed out that countries that have done better at managing COVID-19 are places where trust between people, as well as trust in the government, is high. As one study found, Nordic and East Asian nations with high levels of interpersonal trust and confidence in government had lower infection rates.

Should negative societal traits be counted against any overall measure of well-being? One OZY reader suggested that levels of violence should perhaps be subtracted from a happiness index. Mario Coccia, an economist at the National Research Council of Italy, has written that the unhappiness in a society created by stark inequalities often leads to violence. In other words, violence may be an effect of unhappiness.

Many readers said the state of the environment should be included in any measure of a country’s well-being. Liebbrandt agreed with this idea. He also noted, perhaps counterintuitively, that climate change could create a chance to improve happiness through greater economic inclusivity — with the pursuit of green alternatives to fossil fuels. Forbes recently noted that the otherwise distressing recent U.N. Human Development Report highlighted that photovoltaics have become vastly more affordable, creating opportunities for small companies and even households to contribute to the energy market by harvesting solar power.

While it seems unlikely that climate change could provide the path to happiness, any society that responds to such a crisis in a way that reduces inequality would appear to be on the right track. One thing seems clear: When it comes to surviving climate change, success — or failure — probably won’t be difficult to measure.

On a scale from one to 10, how unhappy or happy are you — and why?