Marion's Blog

This morning, over my coffee, I was reading a very interesting article in the Economy section of my paper. It was talking about the way that economic comparisons are made based on Gross National Product. GNP has only existed a relatively short time as a measurement between different countries and to show progress of a country over time.

The first time any type of measuring took place in the late 17th century, when warring England wanted to see if it could continue its fight against the French and the Dutch. Keynes created a major leap forward in the last century in terms of macro-economics and further changes were made over the past decades to calculate various economic models. The Gross National Product formula allows measurement of a country's "wealth" or even "wellness".

At the end of the article it was highlighted that all countries in the world take this approach and use the same economic formula bar one. Bhutan. Bhutan does not measure it's Gross National Product, it has chosen instead to measure it's Gross National Happiness. These are the type of things that make you sit up and think - isn't it odd indeed that we are all focused on monetary wealth and progress, even in the midst of the deepest recession we have known in the past century? And why do we strive for wealth? The answer usually is that we want a better life, for ourselves or for generations to come. We want more leisure time, the choice to live a simple life with the people we love, spending it the way we like to spend it instead of being tied to jobs or having to earn a certain income to keep up with "the Joneses". In fact, all we need wealth for is to live the way we like... so why NOT measure if we are happy, instead of whether we have an increase in monetary wealth? You may find measuring Happiness would even change the perception and ultimately behaviour of people to be expecting more Happiness instead of more of the income we have to fight for. Now that, to me, would be real progress!

We, E.Factor, are also keen to measure how entrepreneurs are feeling about their businesses so we will soon introduce a monitor that you can use to track your own "happiness" against that of others, or your industry. Measuring is important, as long as you measure that which makes sense.

The Bhutan example shows (me) once again, that there are too few people thinking about WHY they are measuring something - Bhutan clearly did stop and think about what it wanted its people to achieve.

Happiness instead of simply Wealth.