You can’t judge happiness by GDP

One of David Cameron’s ideas which may have fallen victim to the recession is the proposal to measure Britain’s success by some means other than GDP. When first proposed, the idea was linked to the famous remark of the king of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who had observed in the 1980s that ‘Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product’. Cameron’s suggestion was that some more holistic measure of ‘Gross National Wellbeing’ should replace the purely economic measure of GDP.

At a time of financial crisis, it would be easy to ridicule the suggestion that we all become less materialistic, especially when it comes from an Etonian — the kind of person who, in Harry Hills’s joke, ‘already had a castle so, for his birthday, his parents hired a bouncy council estate’. The idea isn’t helped by its Buddhist associations either: if you have just lost your job in Teesside, it can’t be much consolation to hear that you suddenly have a lot more spare time for sitting around saying ‘om’ or dyeing everything saffron.