I’d also add, I definitely think that GDP is often misused by the uninitiated and even a large group of the initiated. The point I was making is that happiness metrics, I think, would be appropriate substitutes in many of the situations where GDP is misused.

Thank you for the opportunity to be heard. Good health.

A happiness metric would seem to be only tangentially related to GDP; in the sense that certain modern conveniences like air conditioning and heat in the winter would (presumably) increase one’s happiness by an amount. However, people obviously don’t need to be fully industrialized in order to be happy. I just think that it would be harder to infer from a happiness metric, the degree of dependence the happiness is on industrialized economies. In some places farmers may live a very simple, peaceful, and happy life. However, this depends at least in part on their ability to sell crop to more “developed” foreign lands who have the demand that pays for the farmers lifestyle– even if that land has a comparatively much lower happiness index (China, possibly?).

Overall, I don’t disagree with the idea/creation/maintenance of a “Happy Metric” for countries. I really think that such a scale would have a very useful purpose in the consumer markets, such as in picking a university to attend if you’re concerned about finding a place you can be happy in/around happy people in, and also perhaps in picking spots to live or maybe just vacation. It might be interesting to see if it could be incorporated with economic theory to create some perhaps dazzling models– I’m thinking of relevant applications to utility theory, here.

Again, however, I don’t think it is at all suitable as a replacement for GDP. I do not see it as comparable from the perspective of, say, a financial institution or the Bureau of Economic Analysis. It has it’s uses, it just would not really get those uses from economists and financiers who are concerned mostly about where the *economy* and *industry* is headed. Like I said before, I feel a happiness index would have only a tangential use to them, when GDP would be so much more effective for their everyday purposes.