Creating 740,000 jobs a good try but the ultimate test is level of happiness

Opinion and Analysis

Planning secretary Anne Waiguru (right) and KNBS chairman Terry Ryan during the launch of the Economic Survey. While some States have adequate jobs, they are yet to report happiness, which should be the pursuit of every economy. Photo/FILE 

By MARVIN SISSEY

In Summary

• What’s the point of celebrating growth when people can hardly smile?

It has become one of everybody’s favourite jams (sic) and yours truly is no exception.

I can’t remember the last time I actually memorised the lyrics of any song. My zero musical talent is an open secret. It helps of course that the lyrics to this particular song have some jingle like smooth tide to it.

‘‘Because I am happy /clap along if you feel like a room without a roof/Because I am happy/ clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth/Because I am happy/clap along if you know what happiness is to you/Because I am happy/clap along if you feel like that’s what you wanna do….’’ Let’s just say that Pharrell William’s latest song, Happy, makes me, well, happy.

It’s on this happy juncture that I start my final column of my three part series analysing GDP and its statistical shortfalls.

A fortnight ago, I sought to explain the economic absurdities of GDP rebasing. Last week, I attempted to explain why relying on GDP as a measure of national wellbeing is a tad misleading. Today, I seek to throw another spanner in the works.

I wish to submit that a country’s leadership should take it upon itself to care not just for the economic growth of its people but to go a step further and care about their general happiness too.

In fact, I further wish to submit that the latter step should probably be given more attention since, as I will explain shortly, happy people are more likely to grow their economic wealth more organically than unhappy people ever could.

This concept of national happiness is not a novel one. Let me take you back to 1776.

When Thomas Jefferson drafted the United States Declaration of Independence, this particular phrase is seen to be fundamental to the whole fabric that later inspired the country into a global superpower barely two centuries later, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

It is not the destination of happiness that is promised but its pursuit. Could the fact that this destination was fundamentally never intended to be arrived at be the reason many studies have indicated Americans to be slightly unhappy when compared to many of their developed countries’ counterparts despite her sterling economic might?

Nowhere is the concept of national happiness so ingrained as in the small Asian country of Bhutan.

As far back as 1729, a legal code in this country stated, “If the Government cannot create happiness for its people, there is no purpose for that Government to exist.”

But it wasn’t until 1972 when Bhutan’s fourth Dragon King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who opened Bhutan to the age of modernisation soon after the demise of his father, Jigme Dorji Wangchuk, coined the term “Gross National Happiness.”

He used this phrase to signal his commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan’s unique culture based on Buddhist spiritual values.

It was this policy recognition of happiness that led Bhutan to develop the first well regarded sophisticated survey instrument to measure the population’s general level of well-being.