Hacking Happiness (30 page)

Karkanias provides an example of this model where you’re in your car and take a route that passes a McDonald’s. As your coach knows your health issues regarding cholesterol, it adjusts the route of your self-driving car to the nearest Whole Foods to map to your GNH/well-being metric regarding health. Likewise, cameras in a subway car utilizing facial recognition technology might scan the face of a woman who is four months pregnant and send you a text to give her your seat to map to her GNH/well-being metric of psychological well-being. Emerging services like Sickweather will provide health-related predictive data that will affect whole communities regarding metrics of time, balance, and well-being.

Inspiration versus Ignorance

Some pundits say that privacy is disappearing, but that doesn’t mean we should let our identities be dictated by outside forces. Unfortunately, people are largely unaware of the repercussions of giving away personal information as we enter a virtual era where information can be accessed by so many parties so easily.

“People are not fully aware of the data they generate and how that’s coupled with artificial intelligence learning algorithms. It’s creating a different social and economic order, and we’re in the midst of that happening now,” states John Clippinger, founder and executive director of idcubed.org and a scientist at the MIT Media Lab Human Dynamics Group, where he is conducting research on trust frameworks for protecting and sharing personal information. He feels the inevitable onset of ubiquitous data meshing with synthetic biology and people’s social graphs can be a positive evolution if the whole process takes place in the open.

This transparency is the key. Fostering a culture based on GNH and mapped by existing technology provides a positive path toward the future. We should emulate chocolatier Anthon Berg and let generosity be our currency. Our lives will be sweeter for the choice.
³

  18  

BEYOND GDP

Too much and for too long, we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.
¹

ROBERT F. KENNEDY

L
OOKING INWARD IS
HARD
.

Helping other people is
hard
.

That’s why we don’t do these things too often. We have the perfect excuse: We don’t have the time, because we need to earn more money. Yet there’s no set number for the perfect amount of money to earn, no set definition of well-being that comes from a certain amount of wealth. We’ve just been told it’s essential to build the economy by producing and consuming as much as possible.

Gross domestic product as a
measurement
is a useful tool; it’s a standardized way of looking at the world everyone has agreed on for more than a half century. Gross domestic product as a
philosophy
is killing us. A focus on quantity over quality means you aren’t ever asked to look inward, unless it’s to dig deeper to create more wealth. A focus on quantity over quality means you aren’t ever
asked to help others, unless it provides a tax break or a reputation increase.

We have been forced to surrender our personal excellence. We don’t have time to fully reflect on how we could uniquely contribute value to the world. We have been forced to surrender community values. We don’t have time to help others if it will diminish our opportunities to produce more wealth.

Surrender. Yield. Consume for the sake of consuming. All you are worth is what you are worth.

No.

Screw you and the horse you rode in on. I’m done surrendering. It’s time to reimagine how the world sees wealth.

Beyond GDP is a movement that’s not actually based on measures of happiness. Well-being or metrics around quality of life are often involved, but Beyond GDP refers to work done in the past thirty years around the world by countries and organizations looking to find a new measure of economic wealth versus gross domestic product.

Robert Kennedy

In a famous speech delivered at the University of Kansas in 1968, Robert Kennedy outlined why gross domestic product was such a harmful measure of value. Credited as the beginning of the Beyond GDP movement, he outlined in his speech how the GDP prioritizes negative measures while ignoring other essential areas altogether:

Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task. It is to confront the poverty of satisfaction—purpose and dignity—that afflicts us all . . . Our gross national product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that gross national product—if we judge the United States of America by that—that Gross National Product counts air
pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl . . . Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play . . . It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in the world.
²

Confronting the “poverty of satisfaction” is a difficult challenge. It means we’re forced to look beyond money to see what’s truly worth measuring in our lives. As Kennedy points out, the GDP credits things like “the destruction of the redwood.” While measuring the erosion of the environment is necessary, a dangerous precedent has been set with the creation of “offsets” regarding negative issues like pollution. Rather than work to eradicate the spread of dangerous environmental practices, countries are permitted to continue what they’re doing if incentivized to replace what they’ve destroyed. But these offsets are simply a delaying tactic for the inevitable when dealing with finite resources. It’s a justification of destructive and irreversible economic practices that embodies the poverty of satisfaction.

The landscape is changing, however. Sensor technologies and quantified self tools are helping people measure the quality of their health on a wide-scale basis. Positive psychology measures how our compassion can increase our happiness while putting others above our constant quest to consume. We are at a crossroads of
time where we can measure the things that make life worthwhile if we supplant our reliance on money as a primary means of value.

Gross National Happiness

It was four years after Kennedy’s speech that Bhutan’s fourth Dragon King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, coined the term Gross National Happiness (GNH). Spoken as a casual remark, Wangchuck felt the GDP did not serve as an accurate measure of value for his country based on Buddhist spiritual values. The term resonated with Wangchuck’s colleague, Karma Ura, who created the Centre for Bhutan Studies along with a survey tool that measured Bhutan’s well-being via a methodology quite different from the GDP.

While the name may imply a focus only on increase in mood, Gross National Happiness actually comprises measure of the four following pillars. And, as Wikipedia points out, “although the GNH framework reflects its Buddhist origins, it is solidly based upon the empirical research literature of happiness, positive psychology, and well-being.”
³

• Promotion of sustainable development
  
• Preservation of cultural values
  
• Conservation of the natural environment
  
• Establishment of good governance
  

These pillars were later refined to include the following eight contributors to happiness:

• Physical, spiritual, and mental health
  
• Time-balance
  
• Social and community vitality
  
• Cultural vitality
  
• Education
  
• Living standards
  
• Good governance
  
• Ecological vitality
  

You’ll note that living standards are a contributor to happiness—money always plays a role in determining someone’s well-being, but isn’t the only contributor to happiness. The Bhutan model stresses that these contributing factors need to be in balance before a person can be in a place to pursue happiness.

If your time balance is out of whack and all you do is work, it won’t make a difference how much money you have regarding your well-being. If you are in good physical shape but don’t have access to educational resources, your happiness will also be affected. The number and types of indicators in GNH have been challenged since it first came into being. But the idea that they provide a better overall reflection of a country’s value than just monetary measures is a primary reason GNH has driven awareness for the Beyond GDP movement overall.

The What and the How

Three quick points about measuring well-being that are important to note while studying the evolution of the GDP Movement.

First is a concept known as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Proposed by psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943 in his paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,”
⁴
the concept posits that humans have basic needs they need met before they can focus on deeper levels of intrinsic fulfillment. This is why postulating on theories of happiness to a person without potable drinking water doesn’t make much sense. If someone is primarily focused on attaining basic needs to survive, achieving happiness for its own sake can be very difficult.

Second, it’s important to note
how
metrics like Gross National
Happiness are measured. Along with census reports or other common public data, statisticians or social scientists utilize surveys to ask citizens to self-report their own levels of life satisfaction. Along with survey bias, the issue of participants answering questions based on knowing how their responses will be measured, surveys also are created with intent. This doesn’t infer they are nefarious in nature, only that how questions are posed and arranged in a survey can directly affect responses.

Finally, most of us tend to think that large-scale survey results are a form of quantified data when technically they’re actually the aggregation of multiple subjective answers. This is an important nuance to note: It means that policy or other decisions are being made on the collective and potentially biased responses of participants for any survey.

This is not to disparage data taken from surveys, but to note how the science of behavior will evolve in the near future. As mobile sensors become an accepted way to provide “answers” to surveys via passive data, the nature of subjectivity in responses will change. The Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kah-neman created a methodology called the Day Reconstruction Method
⁵
as a measurement in social science where participants record their memories from the previous day in response to a survey or experiment. By definition people’s responses are subjective (their own truths) and also suffer from human error—we don’t always remember even recent facts about our lives with accuracy.

In a future incorporating mobile sensors, our activities will operate like our credit card bills: We’ll receive reports based on what we’ve actually done versus what we’ve remembered. For surveys based on happiness and well-being metrics, these reports may also take some getting used to.

For instance, my friend Neal Lathia, a senior research associate in the Networks and Operating Systems Group of Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory, has created an app, called
Emotion Sense, that collects data from all the passive sensors that a phone provides, including ambient noise. The app utilizes surveys about emotions and satisfaction with life that have been defined by psychologists to seek new insights previously unavailable, as mobile phones couldn’t collect this data before passive sensors existed. While a person may remember their previous day as being positive, Emotion Sense might have logged multiple times where a person’s voice registered frustration. While any app, like a survey, is influenced by the intention of the people who created it (and Neal has coauthored a paper on this issue, “Contextual Dissonance: Design Bias in Sensor-Based Experience Sampling Methods”),
⁶
these types of sampling methods will be a complementary objective measure in the survey world. For example:

•
If you’re asked to recall physical activity for a survey, you might only register your exercise, where a pedometer could measure actual steps you took, even if they were to and from your refrigerator. The accelerometer sensor in a smartphone can also tell the difference between motions related to sitting, standing, or active movement.

•
You may rate a previous day as being negative largely based on the last thing that happened during the day. Daniel Kahneman, founder of behavioral economics, calls this phenomenon the riddle of experience versus memory, as our “experiencing selves” and our “remembering selves” perceive events in different ways.
⁷
For instance, if you have a root canal for two hours and experience steady pain for the first ninety minutes but the last thirty is comfortable in comparison, Kahneman’s research shows many of us will report that session as not being painful. However, the reverse is also true: If the majority of the two hours is comfortable but you experience a great deal of pain in the final minutes of the session, you’ll recall the entire event as painful. These types of relationships will be revealed more often in the future as sensors become prevalent for data collection in surveys.