As some people have been warning for over half a century, Gross Domestic Product is unfit as a measure of progress. GDP growth only tells about how much economic activity is going on, and nothing about whether it’s useful or not, or who is benefiting from it. And yet every politician with a chance of senior leadership in the UK is passionately committed to the idea.
One reason GDP persists is that it’s a nice simple number, and so anyone looking to critique it is expected to present their alternatives. I’m not convinced that all the dimensions of human wellbeing can be reduced to a single number, so I’m sceptical of the various metrics that aim to be a straight swap for GDP. But I do appreciate them as thought experiments, reminders that an endless and abstract ‘more’ is a deeply futile ambition.
Among those alternative metrics is the Happy Planet Index, or HPI. I first reported on it 15 years ago (because this website is practically prehistoric in internet terms), and it’s just been re-calculated. They’ve combined life expectancy data, reported life satisfaction and per capita carbon footprints, to give us a measure of good lives within environmental limits. With the HPI, delivering high welfare at the expense of the environment is recognised as a failure – as it is in the real world. Equally, a minuscule carbon footprint isn’t much to celebrate in a country where people are miserable and tend to die young.
The places that do well in the HPI are the countries that we should look to learn from. People are living long and happy lives and aren’t trashing the earth’s systems to do it. So who comes out on top this time?
Perhaps unexpectedly, it’s Vanuatu. Life expectancy isn’t as high as it could be, but it scores well on reported wellbeing and carbon footprints are low. In second place is recurring success story Sweden, keeping those carbon footprints down with nuclear power. El Salvador, Costa Rica and Nicaragua round out the top five with a fine showing from Central America.
The UK scores 19th in the global rankings. The United States, with its carbon profligacy, comes all the way down in 102nd.
While this is all quite interesting, in the past it’s been easy to dismiss projects like the Happy Planet Index as a little gimmicky. They fulfil their purpose in telling off the rich countries for their carbon footprints, but we kind of know about that anyway. Over time however, alternative metrics become more useful because they allow us to track progress, and so I’m glad someone has compiled the HPI again. After a five year gap, I was wondering if it had gone.
In the interval, some countries have gone backwards – Madagascar drops five points in the HPI as its carbon footprint rises but development stalls. Croatia is among those making progress, with big steps forwards in reported happiness in the last decade, while emissions gently decline. Algeria’s advance is due to advances in life expectancy. And it’s good to see China up 22 places since the last set of rankings. Life expectancy and life satisfaction have improved dramatically, and with carbon emissions (probably) close to a peak, it is likely to climb higher in future.
Plenty more to explore on the Happy Planet Index website, and take a couple of minutes for their rather good video below.
The Earthbound Report 