Rope of Gdp in Happiness

1024 Words5 Pages
“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony” said Indian political and spiritual leader M.K. Gandhi (Michelli, 1998, p. 88). The given quote clearly underline the argument that happiness is subjective than something measurable. Happiness is a state of mind, a feeling of contentment, and a pleasurable and satisfactory experience each individual go through in their life. Measuring happiness with a general scale is meaningless as it is highly personal and difficult to identify the distinctive factors. Therefore it is immature to state that the Governments are responsible for happiness of its citizen, but they have to ensure the well-being of their citizen which has direct impacts on ones’ happiness. A gorgeous GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of a country doesn’t ensure happiness to each and every citizen. “Wealth has very little to do with happiness” says Spearin (Pett, p. 1). Another disastrous factor with GDP is “GDP doesn’t distinguish between activities that are good and those that are bad for our society” (Pett, p. 1). Pett elaborate it as: In other words, GDP doesn’t care how happy we are. Misery-bringers like hurricanes are GDP boosters; survivors buy things to replace all that they’ve lost. Cleaning up the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill added $4.5 billion us to the economy. Another GDP winner? The crushing cost of treating preventable diseases—those caused by avoidable human behaviours like smoking. Why? Because money spent on cigarettes and health care grows the economy. To get really macabre, Canada’s high lung cancer death rate (nearly nineteen thousand men and women per year) could also be considered a gain for the marketplace: casket, funeral, cemetery workers. A healthy GDP, in other words, can be lethal. Even the term’s inventor, economist Simon Kuznets, has doubts: “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a
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