David Dodwell

Inside Out | Hong Kong can lift its misery by making happiness serious business

Focusing on economic growth has left Hong Kong sadly at 76th in the World Happiness Report. The city must get serious about tracking happiness to have a stab at a meaningful future

To start, try the OECD’s Better Life Index, which tracks 11 qualities such as housing, secure jobs and civic engagement

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Having a laugh at the Kowloon City wet market last December. Hong Kong’s rankings in the World Happiness Report have fallen from 46th when the report was first published in 2012. Photo: May Tse

David Dodwell

Published: 9:00pm, 19 Jan 2020Updated: 10:27pm, 19 Jan 2020

On Saturday, my Outside In column examined the shortcomings of gross domestic product, and how it mismeasured the progress we are making in our lives. And if our economists are right that we should not just be measuring our progress in terms of the stuff we produce and the stuff we consume, the next logical step is to ask what instead we should be measuring.

The consensus answer starts with Aristotle’s eudaemonia, roughly translated as happiness with a bundle of virtue mixed in. In the 1700s, Jeremy Bentham took things further with his utilitarianism – “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measurement of right and wrong”.

We can then segue forwards to University of Southern California professor Richard Easterlin, and his controversial 1974 paper “Does economic growth improve the human lot? Some empirical evidence”. His firm answer was no: wealth had tripled in the United States since 1960, but measures of happiness had stagnated.

Since Easterlin’s “discovery”, thousands of academic papers have been published trying first to identify what makes us happy, and then to distil that into an index to use instead of GDP.

As “unhappiness” in various extreme forms has broken out across the world over the past year – not just in Hong Kong, but also in France, Chile, Catalonia, India, Lebanon – the need has never been greater to identify the sources of our malaise, and what we need to do to treat it.