As countries try to outdo others in terms of development numbers, a congregation of renowned economists are devising a benchmark to measure happiness.
LONDON: As countries try to outdo others in terms of development numbers, a congregation of world's renowned economists, including India-born Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and representatives of World Bank and United Nations, are devising a benchmark to measure happiness.
British think-tank Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) on Wednesday kicked off a three-day event at the University of Oxford to decide on a revolutionary well-being or 'happiness' index.
Following completion, the study will allow people to compare their happiness with not only their fellow countrymen, but also with those across the world.
During the conference, Sen and other economists including World Bank's Chief Economist Francois Bourguignon would delve upon topics like meaning of life, autonomy, competence, desire to feel connected with others, overall life satisfaction, domain-specific life satisfaction and happiness.
OPHI had first proposed a happiness-index at a workshop conducted in May 2006 and the current series is being considered as the world's first major attempt to quantify individual happiness and well-being across all the continents by trying to limit proposals for a shortlist of indicators.
"Data on people's freedom is needed to guide and evaluate development actions... Still, one of the critical bottlenecks is a dearth of high-quality internationally comparable indicator of key freedom, for which sufficient cross-country coverage is available," OPHI said in a report on human development.
While the objective of human development is to expand freedom that people value, huge amount of data is required to enable them to live a more fulfilling life, OPHI said.
OPHI researcher Emma Samman wrote in one of the working papers, "Recent years have witnessed an outpouring of research on subjective well-being and growing calls for some variant of happiness to be adopted as a policy goal of both developed and developing countries."
"While this emphasis on happiness has also been critiqued on many fronts, it is hard to dispute that psychological and subjective states of well-being have intrinsic and instrumental value," she said.
These research are key components of other dimensions -employment, safety, empowerment, and respect - and an end result of their attainment, Samman said, adding that these stand to contribute to a better understanding of human experience and values.
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