GNH – Gross National Happiness – Changing what we Measure from Wealth to Well-Being

        Vermont Town Meeting Survey results for April 26, 2011 -  Preliminary

Domains of Happiness All responses (5984) Seattle Area (2305) Vermont
(196) 		Decorah, IA
(56)		 Victoria, BC
(2500)
Material Well Being 73 73 73 77 73
Governance  58 58 58 61 67
Environment  46 46 50 54 63
Psychological Wellbeing  78 78 82 82  
Health  67 67 67 72 70
Time Balance  43 43 47 50 46
Cultural Vitality  64 64 67 59 71
Community Vitality 65 65 75 77 77
Education 55 55 58 59  
Overall Wellbeing 67 66 70 72  
               

    Our thanks to Sustainable Seattle for their collaboration on the GNH Survey

“For 60 years gross domestic product, or GDP for short, has been the yardstick by which the world has measured and understood economic and social progress. However, it has failed to capture some of the factors that make a difference in people’s lives and contribute to their happiness, such as security, leisure, income distribution and a clean environment–including the kinds of factors which growth itself needs to be sustainable. … We have known for years that human economic activity exhausts our natural resources and damages our fragile environment, yet economists and governments have been slow to incorporate them into their measurements. …What we measure affects what we do. We will never have perfect measures—and we need different measures for different purposes. But our work so far has shown that there is considerable room for improvement in our measures. There are reforms that can be instituted immediately; others will require more research. … Producing better, truer, ways of measuring economic, environmental and social performance, is a critical step in making progress towards building a better world.”  Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics,

Find out more and Contact GNHUSA
Tom Barefoot 802-496-5500,                            Linda Wheatley 802-535-8383
tom@gnhusa.org                                                 linda@gnhusa.org
PO Box510, Waitsfield, VT 05673                      PO Box 888, Montpelier, VT 05602
www.gnhusa.org and                                       Facebook Group GNHUSAAP