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Vanuatu: Islands of Fire or Heaven on Earth?

I’ve got a big post up at Cato@Liberty on the New Economics Foundation’s silly study claiming Vanuatu to be the happiest place on Earth.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 9:48 am and is filed under Cato, Whatever. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

9 Responses to “Vanuatu: Islands of Fire or Heaven on Earth?”

  1. Blar
    July 14th, 2006 11:01
    1

    Will, I think that most of your beef is with the news write-ups of the study rather than with the study itself. The study (which is available here) never claims to be measuring happiness, in fact, they explicitly say “It is important to recognise from the outset that the HPI is not an indicator of the happiest country on the planet, or the best place to live” (p. 8). Instead, they describe it as a measure of “the efficiency with which countries convert the earth’s finite resources into well-being experienced by their citizens” (p. 8). In other words, they probably aren’t pleased by the headlines either.

    They do have an ideological agenda, but they’re open about it (they even describe themselves as “seeking to inform and influence policy” on p. 10). And I doubt that they’re trying to circumvent serious debate, since they spend much of their study, well, debating. They argue that existing indices (like GDP and the Human Development Index) are flawed, and criticize the practice of using them prescriptively as indicators of development. So they tried to come up with an index that does a better job of measuring what countries should be aiming to get out of development, and they think that they succeeded. Compared to previous indices, they write that

    [t]he HPI takes a radically different approach to defining progress. With well-being as the ultimate end, and planetary resource consumption as the fundamental input, we can restate the goal of development as delivering high levels of well-being within the constraints of equitable and responsible resource consumption. The HPI reflects the extent to which countries succeed in achieving this goal.

    You’re perfectly free to disagree with them about the goal of development, and to argue that some other measure is a better indicator of what’s important. That is a debate, not a circumvention of debate.

    You’re worried that the HPI is anti-development, so that countries can get near the top just from a low resource usage, but that’s not exactly true. The four countries with the worst HPI all have a small ecological footprint (1.1 or lower), and no country with a Life Satisfaction below 6 (on a 10 point scale) cracks the top 30. Vanuatu has Life Satisfaction of 7.4, the same as New Zealand, Norway, and the USA. So, based on GDP, they are an outlier among the rest of the world (but not so much among island nations). Is that a bad sign for the NEF, or for people who focus on GDP? In addition to looking at overall HPI for each country, which is (Life Satisfaction x Life Expectancy) / (Ecological Footprint), the NEF also sets targets for each of the three components. They claim that no country is doing very well on all three components, and recommend that every country try to improve on the components where it does poorly.

    I think that there are flaws to the HPI, including some that you bring up (like the similar to some of what you discuss, but such scorn is unnecessary.

  2. Blar
    July 14th, 2006 11:02
    2

    Those incredibly annoying 8)s should be 8[close parenthesis]s.

  3. lauro
    July 16th, 2006 20:42
    3

    Nice to meet you.
    My name is Lauro, i´m from brazil.
    I´m 27, married, and i have two children, nowsdays i´m studying business and agribusiness administration.
    My native language is portuguese it´s similar to spanish, i was living in south korea for few years that´s why i know some korean too, i´m writing to you because at first i like to make friends, and because i wish to learn another languages and improve my English, and if possible work abroad, that´s why if you can help me in this matter i will be very happy, you can help me by the way that you are able to do.
    It´s a pleasure to meet you.

    Take care…

    Lauro from brazil
    lbjmorais@hotmail.com
    http://www.laurobrazilian.blogspot.com

  4. PSD Blog - World Bank Group
    July 18th, 2006 20:47
    4

    What’s the unhappiest country?…

    Friends of the Earth have released The Happy Planet Index, an:Innovative new measure that shows the ecological efficiency with which human well-being is delivered around the world. It is the first ever index to combine environmental impact with well-be…

  5. djw
    July 21st, 2006 11:02
    5

    Agreed, what a stupid writeup that is, and a bizarre and arbitrary formula. The line about Zimbabweans being “the biggest malcontents” is particularly galling. Maybe they should burn less oil…

  6. Rocio Miranda
    July 26th, 2006 09:52
    6

    Whatever this Happy Planet Index is, here in my country (Perú), we haven´t mesuure it, cause I think, happiness can´t be messured. You feel it or not. It´s not like development index, it´s personal and of course, about a comunity, and it depends on a moment. And I have a question: Are poor people happy? I think they are, but not when they worried about living, but when they share life with friends.

  7. Rocio Miranda
    July 26th, 2006 09:54
    7

    And who relates happiness with progress??? Why? Isn´t simple life the best way to live?

  8. uwfwfos
    October 3rd, 2006 17:23
    8

    ejtbvde…

    rlltolqg zxgiyiui fhshgcopery npkffueocmk …

  9. George Winslett
    June 3rd, 2008 22:09
    9

    It is interesting and somewhat useful however to have an economic marker that is not profit driven like GDP. Maybe it is better described as an ecological marker. Either way I live here in Vanuatu and of all the places I have lived I must say that the people here are amongst the most content I have encountered.

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