Question
How would a society that focuses on growing Gross National Happiness look different from modern day American society?
Answer
Not very different. Reconstructing a feedback control loop requires that you change both what you measure and what you do with the feedback signal (actuation). Our big macroeconomic actuators: monetary policy, tax policy and corporate governance policy etc., seem to have remained unchanged.
There are a couple of somewhat promising new actuators on the horizon (eg. slow money, non-cash currencies, a move to change how Wall Street/shareholders can reward/punish corporations, some attempts at patent reform). But on the whole, these are both very limited in impact so far, hold little promise for large-scale change, and fundamentally react to problems with the current model instead of imaginatively constructing mechanisms for a new model, based on different premises.
So GNH is only half of the equation. I see no proposals anywhere for what to do differently once you start measuring different numbers.
Which isn't to say that the measurement model itself is any good. Most proposals look similar to the Gallup Healthways Well-Being Index for instance:
http://www.well-beingindex.com/
It's a start, but this notion of well-being is deeply rooted in problematic ideas from positive psychology, a poor philosophy of what "happiness" actually means. It has come to mean a narrow psychological measure of the well-being associated with social belonging. It is not clear that people who choose to pursue happiness of this particular form are actually living lives worth living. Nietzsche, for instance, would likely sneer at and dismiss the entire country of Bhutan as full of weak half-humans because they don't seek to transform from Man to Superman in his philsophical sense.
Actually, we kinda know in a limited way what attempting to maximize well-being in this sense looks like: the 50s/early 60s. It is exactly what Whyte described as the "social ethic" that governed the suburban lives of American middle class Organization Men. Movies like Revolutionary Road and shows like Mad Men.
In other words, GNH type ideas rely on measures of well-being and happiness that try to make the complex notion of "happiness" (in the philosophical sense of "worthy antithesis to Nietzschean thinking") legible to economic governance. In doing so, they force a Procrustean simplification onto people. You end up foisting narratives like the "American Dream" on people. Even back when it was actually an achievable script for a significant proportion of the population, it was somewhere between vaguely unsatisfying to tyrannically oppressive for those who lived it.
When you do this sort of thing, the result is humans somewhat drained of humanity. They are happiness robots playing out scripts. The environment makes it much harder to pursue anything other than a codified notion of happiness.
Imagine the 50s amplified with the full power of the state, a much bigger vocabulary/cultural force and an updated positive psychology and social media vocabulary, and a New American Dream script. You'd have one half of a GNH society. Throw in some actuators designed to actually increase that (maybe "happiness" coaching in schools? Zappo's style governance applied across corporate America? Movies based on the New American Dream script?) and you have the raw material for your imagination project.
Every imaginary simulation I can make up from these initial conditions, dynamics and constraints sounds like a nightmare to me.
But then, I am Nietzchean, distrust the notion of happiness, and fundamentally like my pessimistic, dark outlook on reality. I am, err..., "happy" with it.
It may be useful to attempt this imagination exercise alongside another one: what would an ideal Nietzsche society look like? (and no, the answer is NOT The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, shoo! Objectivists).
I may be somewhat more sympathetic to a laissez-faire notion of GNH: as some sort of sum of whatever people choose to define for themselves as their scripts. Instead of a single New American Dream (which is likely what would result via an explicit focus on a GNH construct), you'd have 300,000,000 little American Dreams. Or more likely, a few hundred long-tail scripts that people converge upon via imitation.
The latter is roughly the idea I've been calling "Coasean growth" lately, but I haven't yet figured out a solid conceptualization.
There are a couple of somewhat promising new actuators on the horizon (eg. slow money, non-cash currencies, a move to change how Wall Street/shareholders can reward/punish corporations, some attempts at patent reform). But on the whole, these are both very limited in impact so far, hold little promise for large-scale change, and fundamentally react to problems with the current model instead of imaginatively constructing mechanisms for a new model, based on different premises.
So GNH is only half of the equation. I see no proposals anywhere for what to do differently once you start measuring different numbers.
Which isn't to say that the measurement model itself is any good. Most proposals look similar to the Gallup Healthways Well-Being Index for instance:
http://www.well-beingindex.com/
It's a start, but this notion of well-being is deeply rooted in problematic ideas from positive psychology, a poor philosophy of what "happiness" actually means. It has come to mean a narrow psychological measure of the well-being associated with social belonging. It is not clear that people who choose to pursue happiness of this particular form are actually living lives worth living. Nietzsche, for instance, would likely sneer at and dismiss the entire country of Bhutan as full of weak half-humans because they don't seek to transform from Man to Superman in his philsophical sense.
Actually, we kinda know in a limited way what attempting to maximize well-being in this sense looks like: the 50s/early 60s. It is exactly what Whyte described as the "social ethic" that governed the suburban lives of American middle class Organization Men. Movies like Revolutionary Road and shows like Mad Men.
In other words, GNH type ideas rely on measures of well-being and happiness that try to make the complex notion of "happiness" (in the philosophical sense of "worthy antithesis to Nietzschean thinking") legible to economic governance. In doing so, they force a Procrustean simplification onto people. You end up foisting narratives like the "American Dream" on people. Even back when it was actually an achievable script for a significant proportion of the population, it was somewhere between vaguely unsatisfying to tyrannically oppressive for those who lived it.
When you do this sort of thing, the result is humans somewhat drained of humanity. They are happiness robots playing out scripts. The environment makes it much harder to pursue anything other than a codified notion of happiness.
Imagine the 50s amplified with the full power of the state, a much bigger vocabulary/cultural force and an updated positive psychology and social media vocabulary, and a New American Dream script. You'd have one half of a GNH society. Throw in some actuators designed to actually increase that (maybe "happiness" coaching in schools? Zappo's style governance applied across corporate America? Movies based on the New American Dream script?) and you have the raw material for your imagination project.
Every imaginary simulation I can make up from these initial conditions, dynamics and constraints sounds like a nightmare to me.
But then, I am Nietzchean, distrust the notion of happiness, and fundamentally like my pessimistic, dark outlook on reality. I am, err..., "happy" with it.
It may be useful to attempt this imagination exercise alongside another one: what would an ideal Nietzsche society look like? (and no, the answer is NOT The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, shoo! Objectivists).
I may be somewhat more sympathetic to a laissez-faire notion of GNH: as some sort of sum of whatever people choose to define for themselves as their scripts. Instead of a single New American Dream (which is likely what would result via an explicit focus on a GNH construct), you'd have 300,000,000 little American Dreams. Or more likely, a few hundred long-tail scripts that people converge upon via imitation.
The latter is roughly the idea I've been calling "Coasean growth" lately, but I haven't yet figured out a solid conceptualization.