Gross national happiness

Canada is apparently considering joining the group of countries that assess their gross national happiness. Happiness is one of those concepts that has always interested me because a) so many people think it's extremely important, and b) so few people even attempt to define it. Love is a similar concept.

In fact the definition of gross national happiness is vague. The project seems chiefly to be an attempt to link population characteristics to feelings of well-being. Why you'd want to do that is a mystery to me. Sure, they've found that countries with low rates of infant mortality have happier citizens, but surely we don't justify fighting infant mortality as necessary to keep the public happy.

Similarly, an assessment of the adequacy of a country's economy has been proposed as an indicator of happiness, but if people are happy with an unsound economy are we to take that as a Good Thing? That approach doesn't seem to have worked too well in the United States, where many people were astonishingly proud of their economy until it came crashing down a few years ago.

I'm certain — or at least I'd like to be certain — that our government doesn't intend the assessment of happiness to be a guide to policy. If that's their intent, they should logically end up doing things like legalizing marijuana — that makes lots of people happy. If they don't intend it to be a guide to policy (and there's no good reason they should), there's no good reason to assess national happiness at all.

Gross national happiness © 2010, John FitzGerald
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