Gross National Happiness Index

Further on my previous post about the national sense of pessimism over the future, I'd like to pitch the idea of the U.S. adopting Bhutan's Gross National Happiness Index to be used in tandem with GDP as an indicator of how things are going in general. Bhutan's index attempts to capture the over all sense of well-being amongst its population.  It could be argued that well-being is just as important, if not more so, than how much we consume.

A quick search revealed a Gross National Happiness Index conference has taken place twice so far. I could see this index taking off initially at the grass roots level with local newspapers conducting polls to aggregate data. Ultimately this would lead to adoption of a national GNH Index.

You can find more information on community building at Karavans.

Comments

[Andy]

I saw your comment on Jim Kunstler's blog and followed you here. Seems like you have lots of peak oil decivilization stuff here that I maxed out on long ago. Seeing the number of comments, either you're just getting started, or others are maxed out too--that's OK, my blog has almost zero comments as well.

What kept me reading was the photo of you (presumably) on a mountain (presumably), and I like mountains. Could you at least provide a caption so we can know which mountain, or better yet, an enlargement so that other mountain climbers can feel superior by recognizing somewhere they've already been.

Anyways, I thought I'd comment on this post because it gets out of the peak-oil doldrums (yes, I know, bad pun). I too would be interested to see happiness numbers in the US. But this post left me hanging. Didn't you find anything else, research, surveys, polls, etc that might give some general indication? My second reaction was "you're an entrepreneuring blogger, it couldn't be that hard to make a list of questions and phone 100 random people a day until the numbers start forming a picture. Properly managed, the result would surely get lots of links and hits, maybe even mainstream media attention." But if you're like me, you don't have the time but to record the thought.

[Peter]

Hi,

The peak in the picture is Mt Pilchuk which is about 50 miles NE of Seattle.

I didn't add anymore info on the GNHI because I figured the people doing the conference are probably on top of it. At least I hope they are.

The blog is new and not too many people know about it yet. Hopefully they will come. My area of interest is in getting businesses off the ground and relocalization.

Most of my time these days is spent on building www.karavans.com.

I see energy descent as an opportunity for people to move away from the rat race lifestyle most of us are sick to death of. I'd appreciate your feedback on the site itself if you have time.

Thanks for dropping by.