(Sept. 14) - French President Nicolas Sarkozy pushed Monday for a "revolutionary" change in how the world measures economic progress, one that would give more weight to the well-being of citizens and less to a country's raw economic output.
Sarkozy was speaking at the presentation of a study led by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who spent 18 months looking into whether the gross domestic product -- the most broadly used measure of a nation's economic strength -- should be supplanted by statistics that give a fuller picture of how satisfied a country's people are.
Skip over this content
: 
Michel Euler, Pool / AP
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday that measuring a nation's happiness is better than just registering its gross domestic product.
"For years, statistics have shown greater and greater economic growth to the point where it appears that this growth, which imperils the future of the planet, is destroying more than it creates," Sarkozy said. "The problem is that the world, the society, the economy have changed, and the way we measure it has not."
The report finds that "the time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people's well-being." It argues that policymakers put too much stress on how much a country produces, drawing attention away from important factors such as how much its citizens earn and consume.
The panel found that focusing on GDP can obscure the real economic health of households and the sustainability of growth over time.
"It is perhaps going too far to hope that had we had a better measurement system, ... governments might have taken early measures to avoid or at least to mitigate the present turmoil," the report says. "But perhaps had there been more awareness of the limitations of standard metrics, like GDP, there would have been less euphoria over economic performance in the years prior to the crisis."
Speaking at the Sorbonne in Paris, Sarkozy endorsed the commission's findings and vowed that "France will push all international organizations to change their statistical systems and follow the recommendations" of Stiglitz's panel.
Sarkozy suggested a new approach could help improve what he sees as low public confidence in economic data. "Around the world, citizens think that they’'e being lied to, that the numbers are wrong or, worse, that they've been manipulated," he said. Sarkozy did not say how new statistics -– or specifically which ones -- would change that perception.
Other gauges of economic success do exist. Armatya Sen, another Nobel Prize winner on Stiglitz's commission, has developed the Human Development Index, which factors in such measures as average life expectancy, literacy rate and standard of living. The 2008 listing, compiled by the United Nations Development Program, ranks Iceland in first place, France in 11th, and the United States in 15th.
The World Bank's 2008 measure of GDP, adjusted for differences in cost of living, tells a different story. It puts the U.S. in fourth place and ranks France 19th. The French have a higher life expectancy, lower infant mortality and a shorter working week than Americans, but Americans have a higher average income and greater wealth than the French.
Crafting an objective gauge of well-being is no simple matter. The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has long advocated a measure of "Gross National Happiness" over the more traditional GDP, but many of the policies the isolated Buddhist monarchy has introduced to promote happiness -- including the sport of archery and strict limits on tourism and logging -- won't do much for the morose urbanites of the world.
Even if GDP is a far from perfect measure of well-being, most researchers agree that all in all, people with relatively more money are relatively happier. A 2008 study by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found that there is "a very strong relationship between subjective well-being and income."
Nile Gardiner, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, sees Sarkozy's push for a new metric as "a smokescreen for France’s consistently low level of economic growth," which he says has driven thousands of French entrepreneurs to Britain and elsewhere to start business they couldn't get off the ground in France.
In that context, Gallagher said, "There is a huge whiff of hypocrisy if Sarkozy is suggesting that the French are happier than the people of Britain or the United States."
Right now no single number can show whether they really are or not. And since happiness is an even more complex idea than economic output, there may never be.
Skip over this content
