“Don’t worry, be happy.” This admonition, put to song by Bobby McFerrin, is easier said than done, especially for people living in a country with many deprivations like Jamaica. But Jamaicans living in Jamaica are reputed to be among the world’s happiest people. If this is true, it represents a serious challenge to the belief in some quarters that without money jingling in ones pocket one cannot achieve real happiness.

Can money buy happiness? Are rich people happier than poor people? Are people living in rich countries happier than people living in poor countries? How does the happiness of a people relate to the economics of a country? Governments pride themselves on making their societies better off economically, but should they be trying to make them happy as well?

These are serious questions to which there is no ready answer, but at last happiness is an area that is receiving a lot of attention supported by research. For the third year running, the United Nations declared March 20 the International Day of Happiness to recognise the relevance of happiness and well-being as universal goals.

Never to be left far behind, Jamaica held its first and historic happiness conference at the Jamaica Conference Centre on March 23, 2017. Organised by Dr Donovan Thomas and his organisation, Choose Life International, the conference featured speakers who explored the psychological, social and material aspects of happiness and how these are impacted by economics.

In a January 2008 opinion poll, respected pollster Bill Johnson explored the issue of happiness among Jamaicans. He asked the question: Are you happy or unhappy with your life in Jamaica? Fifty-nine per cent of the people in the poll said they were happy. Thirty-five percent said they were not happy. And six per cent said they were not sure.

According to the United Nations’ World Happiness Report for 2017, Jamaica ranks 76 out of 155 countries in the survey. The country’s ranking is three places down from 73 achieved over the 2013-2015 period.

The happiness index is, at this time, of academic interest only. Another measure, gross domestic product (GDP), enjoys universal application and respect as an indicator of how well a country is doing in providing for its populace. GDP was developed in the 1930s to measure economic output, ie the value of a country’s total output of goods and services.

GDP, however, has many limitations. It does not take into consideration environmental factors, the quality of health care and life expectancy, education standards and literacy, equity and equality in income distribution or crime rate. Nobel economists Joseph E Siglitz of Columbia University and Amartya Sen of Harvard University dismissed its validity as a measure of a country’s economic well-being and not just output. “GDP is insufficient. Measures of sustainability and well-being should be included in a measure of national economic well-being.”

There is another measure, enjoying increasing global application and respect, which avoids some of the GDP’s limitations as a verifiable measure of national economic well-being. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Index (HDI) ranks countries into four tiers of human development by using a measure which combines statistics relating to per capita income with education and life expectancy. In its most recently published report, the UNDP gave Jamaica an HDI ranking of 94 out of 188 countries. With a score of 0.730, on a scale from zero to one — with one being a high level of economic development — this is enough to move Jamaica from the medium into the high development tier.

The search is still on for a verifiable measure of national economic well-being, which equates to the happiness of people. In 1972, at an international conference, Bhutan’s former king, Jime Wangchuck, introduced the Gross National Happiness (GNH) philosophy, which looks at 72 factors to determine overall economic well-being. In 2005, Med Jones of the International Institute of Management went a step further by introducing the first GNH Index survey. David Cameron, former prime minister and leader of Britain’s materialistic conservative party, put forward a proposal that in addition to measuring GDP as an indicator of a country’s wealth, one should also measure what he called General Well Being as an indicator of the happiness of the populace.

Certainly, in Jamaica’s case, an argument could be made that the economic state of a country does not correlate strongly with the happiness of the populace. At least, people do not seem to become happy at the same rate at which the economy improves, or unhappy at the same rate at which the economy declines.

In studying satisfaction at the workplace, social scientist Frederick Herzbeg made a distinction between what he called satisfiers and dissatisfiers. His thesis is that satisfaction and dissatisfaction do not belong to the same continuum. In other words, one can be satisfied (happy) at the same time one is experiencing a measure of dissatisfaction. Could the same principle apply to happiness and economics?

What is the lesson in this for Jamaica?

In pursuing the noble and necessary objectives of economic growth and a balanced budget, the Government must ensure that we do not get jobless growth; that the crime rate comes down; that people have access to better health care, justice and equity; and that the high levels of corruption are reduced. In other words, Government must place emphasis on improving the quality of life. Quantity of life is important, but it is quality of life that makes people happy.

hmorgan@cwjamaica.com