Texto Comparativo

Social Responsibility Class

HAPPY PLANET INDEX

Material compiled from
http://www.happyplanetindex.org/
http://www.nationalaccountsofwellbeing.org/

Happy Planet Index (or Economics as if People and the Planet Mattered) 3
Why we need the HPI 5
Calculating the HPI 6
Components of the HPI 7
Components of the HPI 8
What the HPI tells us 9
What the HPI doesn’t tell us 9
HPI overtime 9
European HPI 10
What is well-being? 11
Why we need National Accounts of Well-being 12
The narrow view from classical economics 12
The benefits of National Accounts of Well-being 12
The limits to measuring growth 13
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Happy Planet Index (or Economics as if People and the Planet Mattered)
Last week, I finally got to meet thepeople at the New Economics Foundation, whose motto is “economics as if people and the planet mattered.” These are the guys in London who create the fascinating Happy Planet Index, or HPI, which evaluates countries based on 3 components: their level of health, level of well-being and rate of resource consumption. Basically, the HPI is a measure of how effectively a country converts resources intohuman well being. As you can see from the HPI map, some countries do this very efficiently and some countries – like mine – less so.

The cool thing about the Happy Planet Index is that is demonstrates that good lives don’t have to cost the earth; it’s not inevitable that we trash the planet and each other in order to have good, happy, long lives. There are some countries in which people achievehigh levels of happiness and health while using a fraction of the resources as do other countries with similar levels of well being.
The Happy Planet Index, like Gross National Happiness and the Genuine Progress Indicator, are ways to measure how a society is doing beyond just its rate of economic activity. Today, the primary measure of how a city, country or the whole planet is doing is the GrossDomestic Product, or GDP. The problem with limiting our measuring to economic activity is that we miss a lot of crucial information on what life is actually like for real people. The quality of education, environmental health, stress levels, income inequity, trust in government, social fabric, vibrancy of the culture are all things missed by measuring economic indicators alone.
Gross NationalProduct 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 ourcountry; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” — Robert F. Kennedy
Unlike the GDP, the Happy Planet Index identifies health and a positive experience of life as universal goals. You know, that really shouldn’t seem so radical, yet it is. Can you imagine how very different our economic policies would be if their overriding goal was to promote health and wellbeing, rather than increased economic activity?
Crunching data from all over the world, the latest Happy Planet Index concludes that: It is possible to live long, happy lives with a much smaller ecological footprint than found in the highest-consuming nations. For example, people in the Netherlands live on average over a year longer than people in the U.S. and have similar levels of lifesatisfaction – and yet their per capita ecological footprint is less than half the size. Even more dramatic is the difference between Costa Rica and the U.S. People in Costa Rica also live slightly longer than those in the U.S., and report much higher levels of life satisfaction, and yet have a consumption footprint which is less a quarter than those in the U.S.
Clearly, my country – the U.S. – does not...