Leveling the ‘Happiness’ Playing Field
Yesterday was the International Day of Happiness. It set me to wonder at how divergent our concept of happiness can be, and how unequal our experience of it.
As an urban planner with a background in sustainability, I am aware of the global movement, initiated by Bhutan and sponsored by the United Nations, to promote ‘a New Economic Paradigm’ built not on the measure of Gross National Product (GNP), but Happiness and Well-Being. Indeed, since the 1970s, Bhutan has given priority to their Gross National Happiness indicator over measures of national income. This is interesting!
Raised by parents in the engineering and accounting/business fields, and living in a society that is very much in love with numbers, quantification and measurement, I marvel at the paradigm shift being considered. Aren’t we meant to measure human and societal progress using the most objective and ‘hard’ measures we can find? Is this merely an example of stubborn optimism from a nation with lower development than my own choosing to look at indicators where they may be more successful? Might Gross National Happiness have practical and important application everywhere?
The search for a more meaningful measure for the outcomes of our collective (national) economic, social and governance efforts was eloquently described by Robert Kennedy in his remarks at the University of Kansas 53 years ago:
But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction — purpose and dignity — that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product — if we judge the United States of America by that — that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
I can think of many human and nature-destroying activities that are generating a positive contribution to GNP that I truly abhor and do not contribute to my happiness. I’m pretty sure there are others who see this, beyond Bobby Kennedy and me!
A focus on GNP (or its cousin, Gross Domestic Product or GDP) has overtaken not only our attention, but become a goal in and of itself; a target for our collective efforts. As V.F. Ridgway asserted in 1956, there are ‘dysfunctional consequences’ for us in this myopia. And perhaps the most obvious consequence is the rise of consumerism, where we have swapped our citizenship rights for consumer advocacy. Even if one could accept this consequence as reasonable (which I do not!), do we really believe this is the pathway to happiness? Consumerism has a significant impact on self-identity. This identity is bombarded by commercial advertising with the purpose to encourage us to compare ourselves to others and then go shopping to ‘keep up with the Joneses’.
With the top 1% of the world’s population holding almost 44% of global wealth, and the bottom half collectively owning less than 2%, what prospects are there for people to conform and, thus, be happy? Thanks to near ubiquitous access to social media and global media advertising, people now compare their life circumstances to others not only within their community/nation, but globally. This does not seem to be making us happier.
GDP growth that can provide a minimum standard of living has been demonstrated to improve happiness. But once we have enough food in our bellies, a roof over our head, and a little bit of spare time on our hands, we begin to long for things we see others enjoying and cannot have. The reasons we cannot have them are often systemic, not personal. Our systems deliver inequality rather than happiness.
I have seen this image (below) frequently used to visualize the concept of inequality and the idea that we have a responsibility to level the playing field for people who are challenged by system barriers. Sometimes the business case for addressing inequality is based on maintaining a social licence to operate, establishing new bottom-of-the-pyramid market niches, or because it constrains growth.
I am a bit bothered by one aspect of the image above. Why are the baseball fans so different in height in the first place? If these were representative of different nations, the tallest would be an OECD country; the shortest from the Global South. Jason Hickel’s 2017 book, The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions highlights the systemic barriers that impede growth for some nations while privileging it for others (allowing some to grow tall, others stunted).
At the level of the individual person, I imagine the fans are likely responsible for carrying those boxes to the ball-park. But while the shortest fan was given the most boxes (and likely the heaviest), the tallest may have had no box to carry at all. The reality I see is one where people are experiencing inequality as a direct result of the size and weight of the burdens that our economic, social and governance systems place on them. Here in Canada, more than 200 years of colonial systems and values have created unequal burdens. Reconciliation is an important process for lifting these burdens from the shoulders of Indigenous people and communities. The benefit is that, like in the image above, it will remove the fence (and the need for boxes) for us all.
We have a long way to go, and importantly, those for whom the system is not working today must be respectfully included in the solutions of tomorrow. After all, only they can describe the barriers they face; and they know what will make them happy.
