HAPPINESS INDEX: DON’T MOVE TO VANUATU

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The bogus logic of ‘sustainability’

Andrew Orlowski
8th July 2009 11:21 GMT

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Did you know people in Haiti, Burma and Armenia are all better off
than in Britain? And the Congo is happier than the USA? That’s what
the London think-tank New Economic Foundation reckons in its second
"Happy Planet" rankings. But even NEF admits that its "happiness"
rating or HPI doesn’t really measure human happiness, and that it’s
sacrificing truthiness for the publicity its reports can generate.

Like the notorious Carbon Calculator, the Happy Planet Index is an
advocacy tool for limiting, rather than promoting, human health
and happiness, and it too is based on the idea of an ecological
"footprint". This Neo-Malthusian concept was developed by
population-control advocate William Rees, a professor at British
Columbia University, and his splendidly-named pupil Mathis
Wackernagel. The latter has since turned it into a successful
consultancy business.

NEF uses older surveys where people expressed happiness, multiplies
it by life expectancy, and divides it by the "footprint". Factors
such as crime, freedom, or infant mortality rates are not considered.

So not surprisingly, given this skew, the "Happiness Index" produces
some very odd results. The last survey was topped by the Republic of
Vanautu. The south sea nation has a population of just over 200,000 and
an infant mortality rate of one in 20 – about 10 times that of the UK.

The authors urge industrialised economies urgently need to become
more like the underdeveloped. In human terms, that would mean over
300,000 unnecessary child deaths in the UK each year. Such is the
price of happiness, NEF argues.

NEF co-author Saamah Abadallah NEF also frowns on India and China
for improving the material welfare of their people. Accompanying the
report is a spreadsheet which hindcasts the NEF "happiness" figure
retrospectively. It tells us that since 1990, China and India’s
"HPI rating" has fallen.

In the latest survey Costa Rica tops the poll, and Vanautu has dropped
out completely. Jamaica ranks third, Columbia is at six, Bhutan (with
74 deaths per 1,000 live births) and Laos (89 per 1,000) is in the
Top 20 – far higher than any OECD country.

It’s too bizarre even for some anti-capitalist environmentalists.

"Colombia comes in at number six on the index out of 143
countries… yet death squads commonly clear peasants from the land for
biofuels. Doesn’t sound that good a place to me," writes activist Derek
Wall, author of Babylon and Beyond: The Economics of Anti-capitalist,
Anti-globalist and Radical Green Movements on his blog.

"But maybe I am just one of those old fashioned left greens who
worries about little things like human rights and the environment?"