Gross national happiness

Gross National Happiness ( BNG) is an attempt to define the standard of living in a broadly diversified, humanistic and psychological way and thus, be compared with the conventional gross national income, a certain measure of cash flows exclusively through a holistic frame of reference.

The term was coined in 1979 by Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the then King of Bhutan, in reply to an interview with an Indian journalist who had asked about the gross domestic product of Bhutan. The king wanted to express that he feels committed an economic development that'll Bhutan's unique culture and Buddhist values ​​justice. Bhutan has with the Commission for the gross national happiness used for this purpose, a State Commission.

While conventional development models make the economic growth for the outstanding criterion of political action, the idea of gross national happiness is believed that a balanced and sustainable development of society can only be done in the interplay of material, cultural and spiritual steps that complement and reinforce each other. The four pillars of Gross National Happiness are

• The promotion of a socially just social and economic development,
• Preservation and promotion of cultural values ​​,
• Protection of the environment and
• Good governance and administrative structures.

Gross national happiness can be difficult to measure objectively and is subject to a number of subjective value judgments. This is equally the case with the usual economic and social models. Since the key question is who defines the corners of the frame of reference, the way the political will of the discussion is particularly in the context of the constitution of 2008 in Bhutan great importance.

A similar path went Ecuador and Bolivia to the anchoring of the indigenous principle of sumac Kawsay ( "good life", Spanish for " buen vivir " ) in the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008 and the Bolivian Constitution of 2009.

A report produced by the New Economic Foundation 's Centre for Well -Being in London Happy Planet Index, life expectancy and satisfaction of the population in relation to the ecological footprint (resource consumption) sets, is Costa Rica in 2012 the first place, followed by Vietnam. The United States is not on this list at number 105, behind some developing countries. The Index was developed by Robert Stavins, an economist at Harvard University, criticized because he would simply reflect the ideological bias of its authors.

In Germany in January 2011 adopted a Commission of Inquiry (Enquete Commission on "Growth, prosperity, quality of life ) of the Bundestag, the work on which is to look for a possible new measure of prosperity and progress beyond the growth fixation of the entity previously dominant scale gross national product as well as the previously not or insufficiently costs taken into account, for example, consumption of natural resources and the extinction of species. The Commission shall be composed of seventeen members of all political groups and seventeen professionals. One result of the Commission are the W3 indicators that are holistic prosperity and progress indicators in contrast to GDP. The W3 indicators include not only economic factors but also on social indicators and participation, as well as ecology. There are 10 indicators to measure these three groups. These relate to the GDP per capita, income distribution, public debt, employment, education, health, freedom, greenhouse gases, nitrogen and biodiversity.