Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

You can’t judge happiness by GDP

Rory Sutherland says that it is wrong to equate the cost of something with how valuable we find it. New technology, for instance, is cheap but transforms our lives

issue 19 December 2009

One of David Cameron’s ideas which may have fallen victim to the recession is the proposal to measure Britain’s success by some means other than GDP. When first proposed, the idea was linked to the famous remark of the king of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who had observed in the 1980s that ‘Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product’.

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