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I like Bhutan's constitutional adoption of "Gross National Happiness" as an alternative: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness
The Human Development Index is another good alternative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
"Don't worry your happiness was only an idea and didn't really exist anyway"
"... and replace it with a metric which explicitly optimizes for all the policies I personally like."
It's been a while since a very specific ideology gained a hegemony in economic thinking. As hegemony often does, it pretends to be a natural law, inevitable and unchangeable.
It's not.
Nobody makes any policy decisions based on GDP. It's just a proxy of economic activity. Nobody ever said, We (won't) need policy X because we are at Y GDP. Companies make decision based on supply/demand. So, this whole research is kinda pointless. In fact the worst thing anyone could do is have a metric and make the entire nation focus on that.
> Nobody makes any policy decisions based on GDP Voters respond to GDP prints. See the hand wringing and pearl clutching around whether or not we're in a recession. If voters care about it, politicians do too.
GDP might be the ultimate example of Goodhart's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
In fairness though, if a politician stands at a stump and says, "see, I'm doing great with GDP", but it's because they've been serving the metric rather than the underlying principles, they're likely not going to be well received.
I like Bhutan's constitutional adoption of "Gross National Happiness" as an alternative: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness
Having visited Bhutan and spent a considerable amount of time there, I've noticed the locals aren't that much happier than most other places in the world. It's difficult to be happy when you have to constantly worry about how to put food on the table. I've gotten swindled enough times in Bhutan, however not as much as in certain "shit-hole" cities that I shall not name. The whole "GNH" concept was created by McKinsey…
source? I searched around couldn't find anything resembling that. The closest I found was one source[1] which stated the king of Bhutan used the phrase "Gross National Happiness" in a 1971 speech, and that the country paid McKinsey $9M for a report in 2009[2].
[1] https://publicism.info/economics/invention/10.html
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bhutan/modernizing-bhutan...
I like Bhutan's constitutional adoption of "Gross National Happiness" as an alternative: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness
Having visited Bhutan and spent a considerable amount of time there, I've noticed the locals aren't that much happier than most other places in the world. It's difficult to be happy when you have to constantly worry about how to put food on the table. I've gotten swindled enough times in Bhutan, however not as much as in certain "shit-hole" cities that I shall not name. The whole "GNH" concept was created by McKinsey…
But back to the topic, I think you're right about GNH and it's implications, especially when compared to Aotearoa and their efforts in establishing a more genuine level (rather than measure) of a literal 'national happiness'.
As a last touch, your comment (both words used, and in what it discusses) is comically ironic in that McKinsey is currently under investigation in my country for advising in a project that ended up landing us a few million dollars poorer and without a functioning public transport system that we could genuinely really benefit from right at the moment.
GDP might be the ultimate example of Goodhart's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Yup. There is simply no way we can replace GDP with another metric. There's always a thousand smartasses who say the unemployment rate is fake. It's not fake, it's an indicator and can never tell a complete story. Employment, economic activity, inflation, trade are all drowning in data points that inform some specific minutiae. The solution is to not base policy on indicators but politics needs to keep things simple.