GDP or GNH?

The 2009 NEF publication 'National Accounts of Well-Being: bringing real wealth onto the balance sheet' examines the reasons behind choosing GNH over GDP. Moreover it surveys the personal and social well-being of 22 European countries, and lays out a framework for developing National Accounts of Well-Being. The link for the PDF is http://neweconomics.org/gen/uploads/iglzyk45xj2jksb01c14fvq424012009010050.pdf Although it requires registering (free of charge) with the NEF, I would recommend reading it, even if it is just the 7 page Executive Summary.


Within the document, I stumbled across the following quote from Robert Kennedy (the younger brother of JFK):

"The Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertisings, and...the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl...Yet [it] does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play...the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages...it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."

This quote appealled to me as it really emphasised the irony of how society measures (economic) progress and the current standing of society.


In addition, a finding that particularly interested me was that Britain only came 13th (out of 22) in terms of their total social/personal well-being score. The results also revealled that those aged 16-24 had the lowest level of trust/belonging (a key element of social well-being) anywhere in Europe. Contrastingly, older citzens were much more trusting.


This makes for interesting debate regarding policy approaches - for instance, should the government just accept the change in the feeling of 'belonging' as inevitable or should they target its improvement in the younger age groups? Such issues may seem fairly pedantic, but in the context of measuring GNH, and thus future progress (assuming that GNH is incorporated as a greater influencing performance indicator), they are more significant than first thought.