GNH Quotes

“Even if we can never quantify [satisfaction or happiness]….as precisely as we currently quantify GNP,….perhaps it is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong. ”

Hermany Daly and Joshua Farley, in Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications, Island Press, 2004, p. 243.

“The overwhelming majority of our people seek a greater opportunity for humanity to prosper and find happiness. They recognise that human welfare has not increased and does not increase through mere materialism and luxury, but that it does progress through integrity, unselfishness, responsibility and justice …”.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1934 State of the Union address

“There is a tremendous yearning in people’s hearts for an integrated solution to problems and GNH shows a systematic approach to all of them. People want to work together towards that. … More and more people in the world are material-oriented but there is also a yearning of the human soul beyond material possession, that’s why GNH has touched so many hearts. Will Brazil follow USA where Gross National Product increased three times in the past 50 years but people are less happy? Where community vitality has been extremely degraded, the number of people who don’t visit neighbours increased by four times, violence tripled, one in every 100 people jailed and one in every four people unhappy or depressed? Now is the time for Brazil to follow a new formula and GNH offers the most complete set of indicators for true progress.”

Psychologist and educator Dr. Susan Andrews, founder of Future Vision Ecological Park and coordinator of GNH in Brazil, November 25, 2008

“The legacy of this crisis will be a worldwide battle over ideas – over what kind of economic system is likely to deliver the greatest benefit to the most people.”
Joseph Stiglitz, coined G-192, chaired group of experts that prepared General Assembly of the UN on the economic crisis in June 2009

“For 60 years gross domestic product, or GDP for short, has been the yardstick by which the world has measured and understood economic and social progress. However, it has failed to capture some of the factors that make a difference in people’s lives and contribute to their happiness, such as security, leisure,income distribution and a clean environment–including the kinds of factors which growth itself needs to be sustainable. … We have known for years that human economic activity exhausts our natural resources and damages our fragile environment, yet economists and governments have been slow to incorporate them into their measurements. …What we measure affects what we do. We will never have perfect measures—and we need different measures for different purposes. But our work so far has shown that there is considerable room for improvement in our measures. There are reforms that can be instituted immediately; others will require more research. … Producing better, truer, ways of measuring economic, environmental and social performance, is a critical step in making progress towards building a better world.”
Joseph Stiglitz, renowned professor, author and the 2001 Nobel laureate in economics, from his article “Progress, What Progress?” in the March 2009 Observer. Stiglitz also chairs the “Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress” launched in 2008 by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The commission includes four other Nobel laureates, with Kenneth Arrow, James Heckman and Daniel Kahneman as members and Amartya Sen as advisor.

“We should take seriously the idea of measuring our gross national happiness, because it brings us back to our founding ideals. It makes us ask: Are we improving as a nation in protecting and exercising our right to pursue happiness? What can we – what should we do differently? If we’re serious about pursuing happiness, what should we as citizens demand of our leaders, present and future?”
Arthur C. Brooks, Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America and How We Can Get More of It

“I believe that the pursuit of happiness is a deeply moral obligation, on both the personal and the national level. … Happy people treat others better than unhappy people do. They are more charitable than unhappy people, have better marriages, are better parents, act with greater integrity, and are better citizens. Happy people not only work harder than unhappy people, but volunteer more, too — meaning they increase our nation’s prosperity and strengthen our communities. … In short, we have the right to pursue happiness. But we also have an ethical responsibility to exercise that right, and to guide our values, policies, and politics as a nation in a way that makes it possible for our fellow citizens and those around the world to pursue happiness as well.”
Arthur C. Brooks, Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America and How We Can Get More of It

“We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.”
Paul Hawken, environmentalist and head of the Natural Capital Institute, from his Commencement Address to the University of Portland, May 3, 2009.

“If I have a dollar, and you have a dollar and you give me your dollar and I give you my dollar, we each have one dollar. If I have an idea and you have an idea and you give me your idea and I give you my idea, we each have two ideas.”
Buckminster Fuller, Comprehensive Design Scientist

“A sound economy is not an end to itself, but should serve a purpose, to improve society.”
Hans Messinger, director of industry measures and analysis for Statistics Canada, who has been working with other economists and social scientists to develop Canada’s national index of well being.

“If we measured personal happiness with dollar signs, then North Americans would be the cheeriest souls on Earth. Not so. Despite more than 50 years of constant economic growth and material consumption, our rates of happiness and many indicators are beginning to decline. How can we redefine economic progress in accordance with what matters most to our quality of life: supportive relationships, meaningful work, a healthy environment and spiritual well-being? Economist Mark Anielski has developed a new and practical model called Genuine Wealth, to measure those real determinants of well-being and help redefine progress.”
From The Economics of Happiness: Building Genuine Wealth © 2007 by Mark Anielski

“The Happy Planet Index “suggests that the path we have been following is, without exception, unable to deliver all three goals: high life satisfaction, high life expectancy and ‘one-planet living’. … we need a new development model that delivers good lives that don’t cost the Earth at all.”
Saamah Abdallah, New Economics Foundation researcher and lead author of a 2009 HPI ranking

“Recent research into happiness or subjective well-being reveals that money does indeed buy happiness. Up to a point. That point, though, is surprisingly low: about $15,000 a year. After that, the link between economic growth and happiness evaporates. Americans are on average three times wealthier than we were half a century ago, yet we are no happier.”
Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss

“The economic “downturn offers an excellent opportunity to get rid of one that has long outlived its usefulness: gross domestic product. G.D.P. is one measure of national income, of how much wealth Americans make, and it’s a deeply foolish indicator of how the economy is doing. It ought to join buggy whips and VCRs on the dust-heap of history…. it is a miserable failure at representing our economic reality….To begin with, gross domestic product excludes a great deal of production that has economic value. Neither volunteer work nor unpaid domestic services (housework, child rearing, do-it-yourself home improvement) make it into the accounts, and our standard of living, our general level of economic well-being, benefits mightily from both. Nor does it include the huge economic benefit that we get directly, outside of any market, from nature. A mundane example: If you let the sun dry your clothes, the service is free and doesn’t show up in our domestic product; if you throw your laundry in the dryer, you burn fossil fuel, increase your carbon footprint, make the economy more unsustainable — and give G.D.P. a bit of a bump.

In 1934, the economist Simon Kuznets, in his very first report of national income to Congress, warned that “the welfare of a nation can … scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.” Just as this crisis gives us the opportunity to end the nature-be-damned, more-is-always-better economy that flourished when oil was cheap and plentiful, we can finally act on Kuznets’s wise warning. We’re in an economic hole, and as we climb out, what we need is not simply a measurement of how much money passes through our hands each quarter, but an indicator that will tell us if we are really and truly gaining ground in the perennial struggle to improve the material conditions of our lives.”

“In summing all economic activity in the economy, gross domestic product makes no distinction between items that are costs and items that are benefits. if you get into a fender-bender and have your car fixed, GDP goes up.”

“Wise decisions depend on accurate assessments of the costs and benefits of different courses of action. If we don’t count ecosystem services as a benefit in our basic measure of well-being, their loss can’t be counted as a cost – and then economic decision-making can’t help but lead us to undesirable and perversely un-economic outcomes.”

“Several alternatives to gross domestic product have been proposed, and each tackles the central problem of placing a value on goods and services that never had a dollar price. The alternatives are controversial, because that kind of valuation creates room for subjectivity – for the expression of personal values, of ideology and political belief….It’s admittedly difficult to set a dollar price on such things – but this is no reason to set that price at zero, as gross domestic product currently does. (one recent estimate puts the minimum market value of all such natural-capital services at $33 trillion per year)”

“Informed opinion in the US is far behind that of some other countries in thinking about these things…In the US our measure of economic progress has been GDP, and so it’s no accident that Americans have a reputation for being interested in the bottom line, in reducing everything to economic value…I look for other nations to lead the way – nations in which market values haven’t so thoroughly become the definition of all human values.”

Excerpts from “G.D.P. R.I.P.”by historian Eric Zencey in the August 10, 2009 edition of The New York Times.

“An interviewer asked why I put so much store in young people. Because young people don’t know what’s impossible. They are less burdened by the past so will try something new without bothering to ask if it has been tried before. That is always how big changes occur. When people set out to imagine a different future, there are no authorities.”
William Greider blog, 4/20/09

“What we should have learned by now is that creating a new ‘index that works’ needs more than jigsaw puzzling of technocrats and social marketing campaigns launched by agencies. Social engineering is not the response to the present global crisis that will match with the incumbent challenges, though temporary effects may be achieved. What we need is fundamental change, transformation.”
Excerpt from opinion paper, “A framework for a new global financial architecture” by Hans van Willenswaard in the August 15, 2009 edition of The Nation

“Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” Robert F. Kennedy