On April 5, 2012, I was part of a discussion on Russian Television’s (RT) CrossTalk, hosted by Peter Lavalle, with two other British economists Saamah Abdallah and Chris Snowdon, on the subject of ‘Indexing Happiness’, measuring happiness and wellbeing and the role of governments in the happiness of people’s lives. How legitimate is the Gross National Happiness Index proposed by Bhutan? Is it possible to measure wellbeing? How serious is this index compared to GDP? What’s the use of it? Will a new way of defining progress help find new solutions to the current crises? Or is there no other way of measuring happiness other than the size of one’s pockets?
This interview came just after my April 2, 2012 trip to New York and the United Nations for a high-level meeting with the Prime Minister of Bhutan, the UN Secretary General, the President of Costa Rica, economists Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stiglitz and John Helliwell and 700 other delegates to develop a new economic paradigm based on wellbeing and happiness, modelled after Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness system.